catching up...part I. The cowboy dinner and trail ride

Time is growing short. This is Tuesday morning and we leave Monday morning for home. It doesn’t seem possible that we are in the portion of this trip where we have to start making lists of the things we haven’t done and plan out our final days here to see as much as we can. Once again, we will not do everything we wanted to but then do you ever?

Today we go up to Roosevelt Corral and take a horseback ride ending up at the cowboy dinner. That was a real ball last time and we couldn’t get the horses. We are taking a kind of slow day but have some things that we need to do on the way. We didn’t check on the buffalo carcass yesterday so we will today. It is on the way. We also need to find some computer connection so we can make arrangements for Stan’s flight home so we may stop at Mt. Washburn (where we saw the coyote 2 days ago) as we had pretty good cell connections there and should have computer connection. We didn’t think of it yesterday when we were at Old Faithful actually doing some computer and phone connections.

We had a nice day yesterday. We got up leisurely since we had the early morning banzai run looking for the early morning animals. We spent the day walking amongst the geysers of the Old Faithful Geyser Basin. It was quite crowded. I talked to one person who had been here 8 years ago and was bemoaning the crowds as being way bigger. It was hard to walk around in some areas. We started out with a closeup of Old Faithful. We got there early and got seats in the front row (where else?). A lot of people got there early to get good seats. At the last minute, just before the eruption, hundreds of people showed up and jammed their way into the front area standing between the rows and in front of the people who had been there for half an hour.

We spent the rest of the day walking around the geyser basin and checking out all the different pools, geysers, vents and streams. It was a nice day. If you were taking pictures (which I always am) people would walk right through your picture or even stop in front of you and take pictures of their own. Occasionally, someone would realize that they had done that and apologize and some people would even stop until you had finished but the large majority ignored everything but their own interests and just stood in front of you.

One tragedy in the making concerned Morning Glory Pool. This pool has been a beautiful pool that showed up in all of the pictures of the park and had a post card of its own. According to the ranger, people have been throwing things into the pool and have blocked some of the passages causing the water to not flow correctly thereby killing the beautiful blue color of the inner pool and leaving it a murky green. It is still pretty but the park doesn’t know what to do to fix the problem and they are afraid that they are going to lose one of Yellowstone’s premier attractions.

I had hoped to take in more than one basin but when the dust cleared, we only got one basin in. The ranger talk last night was named Hook Line and Sinker and was about the history of the park and its fishing attraction primarily the cutthroat trout. It was interesting and they had a lot of old pictures of the park. In the early days of the park, the fishing was the premier attraction and drew sportsmen from all over the country. Of course, they abused it and caught hundreds of fish just to catch a lot of fish in a single day.

The park tried to bring in sport fish from around the country to attract even more fisherman. This didn’t work so well and led to some disasters. In some of the smaller lakes, the introduction of other types of trout let to cross breeding and some hybrid fish. The Lake Hotel hired professional fishermen to keep the hotel’s dining room in cutthroat trout. All of this led to the establishment of fish hatcheries. 20,000 cutthroat trout were caught and their eggs forcefully removed. These fish were raised and sold around the world and the country. None of these fish found their way back into the parks waters.

As you would expect, the catch began to deteriorate. The fishing arm of the park service blamed it on the predatory animals and the osprey, bears and pelicans became the park’s enemy. One year, they organized an egg stomp out on the island where the pelicans nested and raised their young. Half of the parks birds and their young were destroyed. It wasn’t long after that that scientists with no axe to grind proved to the park management that this was not in the least bit true and the animals were off the hook. As we all know, the real problem with the fish was over fishing and more care about the fishermen than the fish or their future.

I don’t want to give you the whole story, you need to come here and see this place for yourselves. It is magnificent. Eventually, the park got the fishing under control (they discovered that Fishing Bridge (a popular place to fish because the fishing was always good) was actually the spawning grounds for the cutthroat trout). Now Fishing Bridge is known affectionately as the No Fishing Bridge and the cutthroat trout have their spawning grounds back.

This park has a long history of saving species. At the end of the great buffalo extinction there were 23 buffalo remaining in Yellowstone. There had been a lot more but poaching in the park decimated the herds. The army was brought in to put an end to the poaching and the rebirth of the buffalo began. The army did some good things but they also abused other aspects of the park.

At one point, the wolf was totally exterminated in the park to “save” the other animals that the public liked to see. It wasn’t long before the imbalance in the park’s ecosystem began to show and the decision to return the wolf to the park began. Now with the wolf back, the ecosystem is in much better balance and the visitors have another predator to search for.

Well, that about covers that. I’ll see you again tomorrow. Top thing on my list when I get home is to get the heater in the camper fixed. I haven’t used it since the first trip to Alaska and it no longer works. We wake up each morning to temperatures in the 40s. Kind of reminds me of the ice storm power outages of last fall.

Today is the day I have been waiting for since arriving. We have our horseback ride and cowboy dinner this afternoon. We stayed in bed late and got a slow start saving our energy for tonight. We decided that it was time to do something about Stan’s airline ticket out of here. That gets a little difficult since we do not get any computer service or cell service here in our campground. We did get good cell service when we were on that parking lot up on the side of Mt. Washburn so we planned our trip up to Roosevelt Corral to stop at the site of the buffalo carcass and to stop on Mt. Washburn to get Stan a ticket online.

We drove over to the post office and I got my envelope full of bills (oh great!) from my mother and Stan mailed another package of souvenirs home. His glasses didn’t show up nor did my medicine. We headed up the road and soon arrived at the carcass site. We didn’t go there yesterday. The 2 days before that, there was little damage to it. We were all waiting for the big predators to discover it. Yesterday, we headed out to another section of the park so when we arrived today all that was left seemed to be the hide and some other unidentifiable scraps. A woman we met there said she had been there late yesterday and the carcass still seemed intact. Wellllll, today it was pretty much gone.

We did observe a coyote wandering the hillside and speculated that it was the same one we had seen other times we had been there. It hunted up and down a couple of the hills catching and eating several small animals. Then it circled around by the water and when it reached a certain point, it turned up the hill and went right for the carcass. There must have been something left as it nosed around the pelt and found enough to eat to keep it busy for several minutes. We left and headed up the road.

Just around the corner, we ran into yet another buffalo jam. There were several park rangers diligently working to keep the traffic moving but every time they began to succeed, buffalo would wander into the road and walk down the middle of it. We lost about 45 minutes there. People were taking pictures from their cars, from the sun roofs of their cars and from the road outside of their cars. One couple had pulled into a turnout and was sitting on a blanket on top of their pickup truck. The males were getting more serious about the females coming into heat and had paired up. They followed the females around showing off for them and growling and making sure other males didn’t intrude on their territory. The females did not seem to be impressed and pushed the males away whenever they got too close.

I’d like to say soon we were on our way but it wasn’t soon in fact it was way too long. Buffalo had ceased to be the prime interest of our trip after spending a lot of time in the middle of buffalo herds both here and in Custer. We eventually broke loose and headed up Dunraven Pass. We were moving along pretty well noting several instances of cars stopped to photograph buffalo along the road.

I came around one corner and noticed out of the corner of my eye a small herd of bighorn sheep lounging on a prominence of rock about a hundred feet above the road. We slowed and took some pictures and continued on towards Mt. Washburn.

Once we got to the mountain, we turned onto the dirt road and ascended. Once at the top, we set up the computer and had all kinds of trouble logging on. The wireless modem kept telling us that it was logged on but all attempts to gain websites came back with the message telling us that no connection was possible. Eventually, I just turned everything off and started over. This time it worked and we looked for several choices of flights. Cody was the closest airport but all of the flights out of Cody started at $600 and went up to $1100. We found a possible flight from Rapid City but could not get the program to let us in. We were running out of time so we packed up and headed to Roosevelt Stables. Everything work out well and we were there about 15 minutes early (you cannot predict how long it will take you to get anywhere since the traffic is such a dynamic problem).

We had paperwork to fill out and bathrooms to visit and soon the wrangler was calling us together to give us the mandatory safety talk (as well as how to handle the horses). There was nothing about seat belts and tray tables so I figured that we really were in the old west. One of the rules was NO CAMERAS ON THE HORSEBACK RIDE. That was the only disappointment of the trip but I understand the issue. You have a moderately large group of people (many of whom have never ridden) on horses; the last thing you want is these tenderfeet leaning over the side ignoring the horse to take pictures (I know I would do that). So they took our cameras away from us and loaded them into one of the wagons so we could have them at the dinner.

The ride out was a little tame. It was fairly flat out through the sagebrush and over into the valley. The horses tried very hard to dominate you to let them do whatever they wanted but most of us carefully kept them in line. One of the don’ts was “Don’t let them stop to eat. Whenever they try, pull their heads up and give them a good kick in the sides.” My horse (Dooley) was careful to follow my lead whenever he tried to eat. He would respond to my little coaxes with the reins. A couple of times, he would see a patch of grass that just looked too good to pass up and would make a fast hard move towards it forcing me to take the reins in both hands and pull straight up while kicking him in the side. I always forced his head up but most times, he came up with a mouth full of something. The first time he made the big move, he almost took me with him. That was the only time; later I was waiting for him.

Stan rode Winston and Cheryl rode Big Ed a huge palomino horse. Cheryl always seems to draw the biggest horse in the stable. She always is curious as to why she always gets a big horse and I always draw a smaller horse. The explanation usually is that they give her a gentle horse and I being bigger (and potentially stronger) am given the more spirited horse that is traditionally harder to ride. They obviously don’t know how much of a creampuff I am unless of course you cut in front of me on the road.

Dinner was just as good as I remembered it from 3 years ago. Rib eye steaks (or chicken) with potato salad, cole slaw, corn muffins, beans (a multi kind of beans), a corn dish, soda and apple crisp for desert was the fare of record. Oh, did I mention the cowboy coffee? They had these great pots of coffee over the wood fire. This coffee was really good with the appropriate amount of grounds in each cup. Near the end of the evening, the singer gave us the recipe: equal amounts of water and coffee boil over the fire for 2 hours and serve it when the spoon you put into it dissolves (nah, it was much better than that).

There was a western singer there (better than the guy 3 years ago) and a good time was had by all. 3 years ago, the horseback riders rode back in the wagons but this year we rode back on the horses. This part of the ride was the best. We climbed up a big hill and rode along a ridge. We descended and crossed the road to finish the ride. This was a much more challenging ride than the ride down. We got to use the things we had learned and practiced on the first half of the ride. The horses behaved much better and if you weren’t careful, you would think you had mastered horseback riding.

OF course that wasn’t true, you just felt that way. I have ridden 4 or 5 times now and I still feel that the horse could lead me whenever he wanted. It was really fun though.

We returned to the mountain top and finally got Stan’s airline ticket straightened out. He will ride with us to Rapid City and we will stay over night. We will drop him off early in the morning and make a serious effort to get home. My birthday party has returned to its original date. Sandra has swapped work days with someone who desperately needed another day off badly enough to take Sandra’s shift. Now the pressure is on to get home for the 30th.

Rapid City fits in pretty well with our “travel” schedule. When just driving, we try to get 500 miles per day. We usually come close and sometimes get as many as 600 miles. That should get us home on the day before my birthday. Hopefully there won’t be any problems.

Well, I am tired and smell something like a horse (I won’t say that of the people around me BUT!). Showers in the am then we will figure out what to do. We only have 5 days left!

Yellowstone out!

Grand Tetons back at ya!

Another great day. Not as cool as it has been in the morning but still cool. Yesterday, we ran the heater in the truck as well as the griddle on the stove. This morning it was not cold enough for that. We got up late had breakfast and hit the road. The post office was a let down today; no packages for anyone. Stan called about his glasses and was told that they had been mailed so we should see them this afternoon or tomorrow morning (with our reputation for getting back late, tomorrow morning should be the best bet).

We headed for Jackson Hole and the Grand Teton National Park. This is one of the prettiest drives around. The mountains are very large and jagged. They are the youngest mountains on earth and have not had time to erode.

Our animal list is growing smaller. We only have a few separate animals although we would like to see more of some of the others. The biggies we have left to see are the moose and the grizzly bear. We would like also to see some more male elk. We did see one but it was in the trees and we didn’t get a clear look.

It is a fairly long drive to get out the southern entrance to the park. We left the park and were soon in the middle of a construction zone. It seems that there are a lot of construction projects around here this year. This was slow going as there were a lot of motorhomes and the road was quite rough. Eventually this ended and we set out on asphalt. We were getting along and got near to the place where we had seen a moose in the water 3 years ago. There was a moose in the same body of water. She was on the back side of the pond this time and was feeding on the bottom. She was feeding in water that seemed to be over her head. When she went down, she was completely under water and when she came up only her head showed. When she went down, her back would come to the surface and arch like someone surface diving.

A short distance down the road, we found traffic signs and a large crowd of people and several rangers. We couldn’t see what they were looking at so we stopped and asked the ranger directing traffic in the other direction. She told us there was a grizzly bear feeding on a carcass. We parked along the road and took the hike back to the action. There was a rail fence and behind it right next to some bushes was an elk carcass. The grizzly was in the bushes eating and standing guard over the elk.

The ranger there told us that some wolves had brought the elk down but the grizzly was in the neighborhood and immediately toook the carcass away from the wolves. The bear had been sitting on this carcass for 3 days and there seemed to still be quite a bit of it left. The bear was not a big one; the ranger estimated 200 lbs probably making it a yearling. Grizzlies can grow to 400 to 700 lbs. Every once in a while, the bear would make an appearance. Once it came completely out of the bushes, walked around for a while and returned. You could see its face over the elk and just before we left, it came out again to chase some birds off the carcass.

We continued down to Jackson Hole stopping periodically to take pictures and ooh and ahh over the Tetons. Jackson was a busy town. It had changed considerably over the 3 years we had been away. One business was closing after 62 years. They have been having a going out of business sales since May and would close at the end of the season.

We headed back to Yellowstone and upon arriving in the area of West Thumb; we found some elk out on the roadway with the usual elk jam of traffic. People were running through the woods trying to get pictures. I am amazed that there are not more accidents between the elk and the people. People run right up to them.

We drove into the West Thumb Geyser Basin. 3 years ago, Cheryl and I had a close encounter with a whole herd of elk so we thought we would try that again. Dusk was beginning to settle over the park as we turned into the parking lot. Over by the woods on the side we saw several elk working their way into the basin. One was the male that we had seen on the road. He had a moderately large rack. There were several females and youngsters and one other male, a yearling with a small velvet covered rack. We watched them for quite some time. Eventually people found them. The large male had walked over to a fenced in area and was grazing. People went right up to the fence barely 5 feet away and started snapping pictures. One man let his little daughter sit on the fence with nothing between her and the elk while he took pictures. A Japanese man tried to climb over the fence (the elk was still 5 feet away) but changed his mind halfway across. I do not understand people. They have no fear of these animals who could do them great bodily harm.

Dilemma of the day: If someone stupidly gets close enough to an animal to get attacked, is it required of those that stayed safely away to risk their own bodily injury to save them?? Fortunately that decision wasn’t necessary.

Well, back at camp after a long day’s drive. Supper is cooking, Cheryl is cooking it, I seem to have developed a sinus problem and am just going to take something for it and lay on the couch. See you tomorrow.

I slept a lot last evening and therefore did not sleep all that well. I was stuffy but not nearly as bad as I had last night. I have kept taking the medicine and hope tonight will be better yet.