july 16: yellowstone nat'l park

me and poke, and luke via shadow

luke decided that most critters are up early, so to see them, we should be up too.

we left jackson at 5 am (when you go to bed at 8pm you can do this with ease) and headed north to the road into yellowstone. (we saw some elk on the way, but not much else). we bought a national park pass before we left and were VERY excited to get to use it TWICE. (tetons and yellowstone) in ONE day. big stuff.

we were nervous about campgrounds filling up (considering casper was so ridiculous) so we scoped out a spot on the south side of the park, pitched a tent and headed out to see what we could.

let me preface most of this post with this: yellowstone was my least favorite part of the trip, so much so i wish we would have done the trip backwards. and people are assholes. (people would tailgate us and then speed past when they had the chance. they would pull off to the side of the road to see critters and then walk their children out to get a better close. ITS A FUCKING WILD BUFFALO, not a petting zoo goat! would you take your kid into a bull pen?! no! NOT SAFE, ASSHOLES. idiots.)

continuing on...

we saw old faithful! i had been through yellowstone once before but had never seen it erupt.







thar she blows- its the tail end of it, but its the best photo composition

we drove and saw critters.
























critters

and drove and saw pretty landscape.
and drove and smelled sulfur pots.
i think we drove for something close to 8 hours to see all of the park.




driving
(there are a lot of these pics)


anyway, then we headed back to camp and explored around there.














our campsite overlooked the lake so we hiked around to see it. we decided to eat dinner on the water until the mosquitos and weird water bugs realized we were there. we finished dinner in the car. then we zipped ourselves in our tent and read the park literature and watched the stars come out. ahhhhhhh....
















luke fending off bugs