Wildlife in Yellowstone

We spent last week in Yellowstone National Park. This wasn't our typical trip. There was some minimal hiking, but otherwise, it was mostly riding in vans, looking for wildlife, and watching said wildlife in scopes. It was an amazing trip. When we visited Yellowstone in 2015, we did a one-day guided wildlife watching trip with a company called The Wild Side Wolf Tours (we paid for our trip). We had a great time and learned a lot from our guide, but it was August, which is not the best time to see wolves or grizzly bears. We saw other animals, but our guide said we really needed to come back in winter for a week-long tour. So, last week, we did and he was completely right.

We had ten people plus our guides, which was a good number (and it was a good group!). We spent our days in the park and there were fascinating talks in the evenings after dinner. The tour itself was three days, but another guest asked if Michael and I wanted to go in with her on an additional day. We decided that spending more time in the park was preferable to spending that time in Bozeman. Don't get me wrong, Bozeman is a lovely town, but I am always going to choose to spend time in the great outdoors vs. spending time in town.

All said and done, we saw about a dozen individual wolves from three different packs (Junction Butte, Lamar Valley, and the 8 Mile Subgroup) on three out of four days. On two of the days, we saw wolf tracks and spots where they had marked their territory on the side of the road. On our last day, we were able to follow their tracks up over ridges with the scopes, but we never actually spotted any of the animals. We also saw, over the course of the week: bighorn sheep, lots of bison, moose, elk, pronghorn antelope, mule, deer, bald eagles, golden eagles, mountain goats, coyotes, pine martens, and foxes.

Michael and I spent couple of days in Bozeman before meeting our group and going to Yellowstone. The first afternoon in the park, the group took a quick trip to Mammoth Hot Springs. It was really neat to see it in the snow and without millions of our closest friends.

One of the terraces above Canary Spring.

Looking north towards Mammoth.

Green terraces on one of the lower springs. That really is the color!

The next three days, we started our morning at 5:45 at a little restaurant near our hotel. By 6:30 a.m., we were all in the vans, headed for the Lamar Valley to see if we could find wolves.

The temperatures never made it much above 20 degrees all week. On our first day in Lamar Valley, they struggled to get out of negative numbers. The picture above is the temperature at 8:15 a.m.

What follows is wildlife and scenery pictures from four days in Lamar Valley.

 Sunrise from the Lamar Valley.

 A bison cow near where we were watching wolves.

Setting up scopes to watch the Junction Butte Pack of wolves feeding on a carcass.

On our first day in the valley, we did a short hike from Yellowstone Picnic Area up onto a ridge above the Lamar River Narrows. We had a great view from the top of the ridge and there were animal tracks everywhere.

 Looking out over the Lamar River.

 Mountain Lion tracks. I should have put something in the photo for scale. The track itself is about the size of my palm.

 A thermal area on the Lamar River.

 A collared bison cow.

One night we walked around the town of Gardiner, which is where we were staying. We came across two young elk sparring and pushing each other around. They didn't pay much attention to us, but every now and then, they would stop and watch traffic on the main road.

There really are wolves in this picture! Four of them! Our third day, we got to see the Junction Butte Pack again. This was the closest we ever got to them. The view through the scopes was pretty good, though. They were a lot closer than our earlier sighting and they were playing in the snow.  We were able to observe them for close to an hour (maybe? It seemed like a long time). One nice thing about The Wild Side: They had enough scopes for everyone, so we all got to spend as much time as we wanted watching the wolves without worrying that others weren't getting an opportunity to watch the animals. Not every company does that.

 Bighorn Sheep working it for the camera. We had a theory

 Another view of a very photogenic Bighorn Sheep.

 The Lamar River on a gray morning.

 On our last official day with the whole group, we got to do a short walk up Pebble Creek Canyon. So pretty!

 Another view of the canyon.

 Pebble Creek under a lot of snow.

Pine Martens! These guys are members of the weasel family and they move fast (which is why it isn't the sharpest picture)

We saw a number of coyotes on the trip. There is actually one in this photo. It blends into the sagebrush really well. See if you can find it.

On our last day in Montana, we drove around the valley around Bozeman as much as our little two-wheel drive rental car would allow. This farm was in the hills near Bridger Bowl Ski Area.

Dolly Sods 2018: Braving the Cold

We spent the weekend on our annual trip to the Canaan Valley. We rent a cabin very large house near one of the ski areas with a number of friends. We spend the days hiking and playing outside and the evenings eating too much, playing board games, and working on puzzles. I always look forward to the trip and the time spent with friends. This year, it was 65 degrees and raining when we arrived in Davis. Two days earlier, there was over a foot of snow up on the plateau, but two days of rain washed it all away. By Saturday morning, the temperature had dropped more than 50 degrees and a couple of inches of snow fell in the last few hours of the storm.

Saturday, we hiked up to the top of the plateau and in to Dolly Sods. It was ten degrees and the winds were blowing at 40 mph. It was also still snowing lightly. 

 Dolly Sods in a rare moment of sun on Saturday. It was not remotely warm. Any time we were exposed on the ridge, we were getting blown around pretty badly. Given the combination of wind speed and temperature, we were pretty cold.

 Rocks on the west side of Dolly Sods.

 Michael and our friends hiking in the snow and wind.

The ice-covered trail. Because of the rain the day before, a lot of the trail was covered in water. Even though it was well below freezing, it hadn't had time to freeze yet.

Sunday, we woke up to this:

That motivated no one to head outside right away. However, almost as important as the temperature number is the wind speed on the lower right: 0 mph. That is a rare, rare thing in the West Virginia Highlands.

While we were eating breakfast, we noticed that, because it was so cold, moisture was crystallizing out of the air and floating around in the sun like glitter. You can just see it in the top center of the photo above. It was magical and fascinating to watch.

Another view of the "glitter" and the hoar frost on the ridge behind the house.

Michael and I drove up to a parking area near the top of the ridge and hiked from there to the Forks of Red Creek. We figured that, with all the rain a couple of days before, Red Creek would be running high and the waterfalls would be pretty impressive. Even though it was five degrees when we started, which was colder than the day before, it was so much more pleasant. There was no wind, which never happens in Dolly Sods and it was bright and sunny.

 Hiking south along the Valley View Trail.

 Ice feathers on the trail.

 Hoar frost on a tree.

 Looking back north towards where we started.

 A wild turkey track in the snow.

I mentioned that, the day before, water covered the trail in many places. By Sunday morning, it was almost all frozen. In this case, the trail was basically an ice rink. We had microspikes on, but the ice was hard enough that they wouldn't dig in very well, so it was still pretty slow going.

The hike over Breathed Mountain was really pleasant. There are a couple of ways to get to the Forks of Red Creek, but Breathed Mountain is the only one that doesn't involve a major stream crossing. We saw seven (!) backpackers in two separate groups hiking the other direction. They had all started on Friday night in all the rain. One of them said his tent poles froze together after the temperature dropped Saturday morning.

 Fresh bobcat tracks on Breathed Mountain.

 The Left Fork of Red Creek

 Icicles on Red Creek.

 A cairn marking the trail

 The waterfall at the Forks of Red Creek. This was as close as I could get. There was so much water in the creek and no way to cross the Left Fork, let alone the main stream. If you want to see a comparison, the photos on this post show what it looked like in the summer a few years ago.

After spending a few minutes at the falls, we turned around and headed back. We wanted to make sure we got to the car before dark and we definitely didn't want to worry anyone at the cabin. The temperature started dropping pretty quickly as the sun sank towards the horizon.

 The Valley View trail in the late afternoon sun.

Michael hiking towards the parking area.

All said and done, we hiked 8 miles and really enjoyed doing something a little different.

Little Devil's Staircase in a Cold Snap

Little Devils Staircase was the very first hike I did in Shenandoah National Park way back in 2005. It seemed like a pretty big, steep hike at the time, even though we only did the shorter loop that day. I've hiked it several times since then, but oddly, not since 2010. We snowshoed it that year after snowmaggedon. It is a great hike up a narrow canyon filled with little waterfalls. We figured that, since we haven't warmed up to even freezing in the last two weeks, that all of those waterfalls would have nice ice formations.

Today, it was 10 degrees when we arrived at the trailhead. Fortunately, there wasn't any wind. One nice thing about starting at the bottom of the mountain at those temperatures is you get warmed up fairly quickly from the work of hiking uphill immediately.

 Leaves trapped in the ice on the frozen creek.

 One of the first waterfalls

 Ice near one of many places where the trail crosses the creek. A couple of the crossings involved shuffling across very slippery ice (The creek is generally not very deep).

 Ribbons of ice across a rock. These look a bit like snakeskins to me.

 Ice at the bottom of a waterfall.

 Fungi on a tree.

 The Little Devils Staircase trail ends at the Keyser Run Fire Road. We decided to hike up the fire road to Skyline Drive.

 Once at the drive, we walked a short distance down to the Mount Marshall Overlook and had a great view to the east. That is The Peak on the left side of the photo.

Looking up at the trees near the Bolen Cemetery on Keyser Run Fire Road.

It was a lovely hike. After not doing much hiking beyond volunteering on Old Rag in 2017, it felt really good to be out. We saw a grand total of three people on the trails. By the time we reached the car, it was a balmy 25 degrees.