Bears and bears and bears, oh my.

Some day, someone is going to drag Yellowstone (kicking and screaming all the way, no doubt) into the 21st century.

Specifically, there’s no public wi-fi anywhere in the park.

Before we left, I found a website that tells you what animals have been spotted where. Pretty useless if you don’t have web access.

Anywayz, so we drove up through Grand Teton from Jackson. First animal we saw was a large bear, identified by us amateurs as a grizzly.

Of course the place is infested by bison, can’t turn around and there’s one blocking the road looking at you (as Robert Ruark remarked about African buffalo) as if you owe it money.

Also saw elk does and calves and a coyote who was completely oblivious to people getting in our opinion waytooclose taking pictures.

(As mentioned before, pictures are a PITA, go look at Tanya’s blog for eye candy).

This morning we got up two or three hours before sparrow’s fart, piled into the car, and headed off to the Lamar Valley (where they supposedly keep the wolves). Got there and there was a chain across the road with a sign saying “closed 8 miles”, so we headed north with sleep in our eyes looking for wolves.

Didn’t find any.

Did however find a swamp donkey (they’re more scarce thanĀ  thought they would be). And of course the inevitable bison. Decided to head back, but to investigate the 8 miles of Lamar valley before the road closure, found more bison and a nice herd of pronghorn. By now the kids were mostly asleep, so we had to show them pictures to prove that we ran into a second coyote right in the middle of the road.

Got to camp, had a shower, stuck washing in the machine, which Tanya watched while I crashed, hard, for 40 minutes. Headed off again, saw the waterfall and the canyon, drove all the way around to Mammoth via a huge traffic jam because there were… bears. Two of them, as far as we can tell a brown and a grizzly. Strange.

Mammoth had the mother of all pileups and a large herd of elk in the middle of town, with tourists being silly and the park ranger lady shouting at them. Got ice cream and fuel and headed of.

Found another brown bear. Then found another brown bear. Ho hum.

Back to camp, where there was a power failure. So we decided to head to the lake to shop there, maybe get some meat. No luck. There was a coyote off in the distance on our way there though. And we spotted a grizzly on the way back.

So tomorrow we’re off to Cody.

(This post brought to you by the extremely slow but free hotspot at Salt Lake City airport).

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