Yellowstone Part III - Lamar Valley, Wildlife, and Mammoth Hot Springs

June 17, 2021

We're in Glen's Ferry, Idaho for the night in Trail Break RV Park. It's nothing fancy, but they have WIFI! So here's the final installment of our Yellowstone experience last week.

From our campground in west Yellowstone, MT, it was 80 miles to Slough Creek in the Lamar Valley where the wolves were supposed to be. We set out early (for us) around 7:30. The west entrance to the park is in the town, just five minutes from our campground. Fortunately, the line at the entrance hadn't built up yet. Anything past 8:00 would create a line wrapping through the streets of the town. It gets unbelievably crowded. 

Even though the drive was a long one, the scenery is beautiful and you're always on alert to spot wildlife. Our first sighting was in the Mammoth area near the north entrance to the park. In the center of the small village is a small park, and wandering in this park were an elk with her calf. They seem to have made this their home. It's blocked off to tourists, so we had to sneak a peak from the road.

When we arrived at Slough Creek at around 8:45 AM, we didn't know what to expect. There were several people there already, all positioned atop a hill overlooking the valley. They had their spotting scopes and big lenses on tripods all set up. Needless to say, the wolves weren't going to be easy to see. Spotting them at a distance was all we could hope for. Even with a large zoom, they are little specks as you can see from the photos below. (click to enlarge) There were three wolves, two black and one gray. As we watched, they were working together to stalk an elk. We watched for a couple of hours.

The first wolf we spotted was a black one. It is right in the lower-center of this photo at the edge of the green. Below, there are now two at the lower section of the photo, walking in a line.

The two wolves are getting closer together now.

Here you can see the elk on the left running through the river to get away from the wolf on the far right.

The gray wolf showed up. It's to the right of the tree.

The wolves came in and out of sight, but never stopped their pursuit of the elk. During the course of our observation, a white-tailed deer and a sandhill crane appeared, but the wolves didn't seem interested in them. Although difficult to see, it was a fascinating interaction between the animals. We decided we had seen enough and continued down the unpaved road to look for the black bear and cubs that were hanging around near the Slough Creek campground.

There they were, one black and one cinnamon cub, climbing on the cabin wall. 

Not to miss out on the fun, the little black cub had to climb too, while mom tries to get them to follow her into the woods. (photo by Lee)

We left Slough Creek and continued down the Lamar Valley a little farther. There were large herds of bison resting in the grass.

 I found it amusing to see the calves lying down on their sides, looking completely exhausted.

We turned around for our return trip, stopping back at Slough Creek to see if there was anymore action with the wolves. Apparently, the wolves had not succeeded in catching the elk. All was quiet, so we headed for home.

Here are a couple of scenes along the beautiful Lamar Valley. It is not as heavily traveled as other areas of Yellowstone, but worth the effort to get there.

As we retraced our route, we were treated to several encounters with wildlife. 

First, these beautiful pronghorn.

Just when I got back in the car, Lee said he saw a coyote run across the road in front of us. We watched to see if it could be seen again. It turned out to be two!

We continued along our route, when we came to a spot where cars were pulled over. That's a sure indication that something cool has been spotted. So, of course, we stopped too. Not only was it another coyote, but it was very close to the side of the road. He was busy eating something, so wasn't bothered by his audience. I loved the tongue action. He was enjoying whatever it was.

We said to ourselves, wouldn't it be great if we could see a grizzly bear before we leave. Lo and behold, a little farther down the road, another bunch of cars pulled over. I jumped out of the car with my camera and asked what everyone was looking at. It was a grizzly with two cubs! They were pretty far away, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but tough to photograph. They weren't exactly posing for us.

After checking off all the wildlife boxes, we had one more stop to make. We had passed Mammoth Hot Springs on our way our to the valley, so we wanted to stop on our way home. There are Upper and Lower Terraces. We went to the Upper Terrace. The chalk-white travertine terraces are formed by the interaction of water and limestone. These are some of the fastest changing features in the park.

We left the springs and were in our last stretch of our drive, when traffic came to a standstill. We were tired and thought to ourselves, it better not be one person stopping to take a photo of a lone bison on the side of the road. When we finally got to the point where we could see what was happening, we were surprised by a herd of bison walking down the road right toward us. We soon realized that the herd had just crossed the river that paralleled the road on our right, crossed the road, and were now heading to the field where they would spend the night. They literally own the park.

These were taken from the car. We were right along side of them.

As that group went by us, we were able to move the car forward. That's when we spotted the rest of the bison herd fording the river. I got out of the car for this!

After shaking off the water, they headed up the path toward the road to follow the pack. I quickly jumped back in the car!

What an incredible sight for our last day in Yellowstone. After a few 12-hour days, we took a couple of days off to catch up on laundry and just rest until our next adventure at Bear Lake on the Idaho/Utah border.