Day 2 in Yellowstone

As everyone knows, Yellowstone was the first national park. It's the second largest national park in the country. It is also a major international destination, and as Jane discovered, a great place to play license plate bingo.

But even with the mobs of people and tour buses in the park, only about a dozen folks showed up for the guided ranger hike today. A very amiable Ranger, Ranger Shane, led the hike along the rim of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone and then across a bit of the north end of Hayden Valley, a large treeless meadow. Along the way he remarked on a lot of the flora and a little bit of the fauna (it was in short supply). On the way to the hike we saw a grey wolf cross the highway. I have never seen a wolf in the wild. Later Ranger Shane said there were only about 130 wolves in the Park, so we felt lucky to have seen one.

Yesterday we saw elk several times, but no bison or bears. I was anxious to see bison and hoped we would do so on our hike, but no luck. The hike was 2 ½ hours -- a very pleasant way to spend the morning and learn more about the park. After lunch and a quick look at a new museum in Canyon Village it was back in the car to take in the sights at the south end of the park. As we were heading across Hayden Valley we hit the jackpot on bison. Small herds and some solitary bulls were all over, including one conveniently grazing near the road.

We made it to Old Faithful by about 4 pm, just in time to see Old Faithful erupt at around 4:40. Jane made a video on her camera. One fun fact we learned about the geysers is that the water that erupts from a geyser at Yellowstone is what Ranger Chris called “old water.” It was last above ground about 500 years ago.

After watching Old Faithful blow, it was on to our one blow-out dinner of the trip at the Old Faithful Inn, the fanciful log-built lodge that is 103 years old this year. You have to make dinner reservations well in advance. Before our reservation time there was one more opportunity to see Old Faithful blow, this time from a seat on the balcony at the Inn. When it was time to eat, there was Bison on the menu, so we tried that, along with a good bottle of Oregon pinot. The food wasn’t that great, but eating at the Inn was worth the expense.

After dinner we drove back to Canyon Village just in time for another ranger show. Ranger Laurie, speaking on the history of the park, was pretty lame. We knew it was going to be a bad show when Ranger Laurie used an obscure John Denver song as her preface. At least she had some good photos of the goofy way tourists used to interact with the bears in the park until the 1970’s.

We had heard about this earlier on our hike. Ranger Shane, had pointed out evidence of the remains of what had been a trash dump for the old Canyon lodge that burned down in 1960. There were still shards of broken pottery on the ground. Decades ago, bears would hang out at the dump, so the Park Service built bleachers so park visitors could watch the bears rummage through the trash, looking for food.

Things ended badly for these bears. The entire population that had become habituated, over generations, to human food was “taken out,” as Ranger Shane politely put it, and the Park Service started over with a new population that thankfully has remained wild. And that’s probably why we didn’t see a bear on our stay at Yellowstone.