Yellowstone in Winter: part 2

Flushed with our success of day one, we happily attended the pre-briefing for the rest of our stay, a 3 day wildlife viewing tour led by a former Park Ranger, Anastasia.  We saw an incredible amount throughout our 3 days, here are some of the highlights (not really in reverse order, but definitely ending with #1)...

- Bison up close and personal, blocking the roads a few times, banging heads and generally looking massive.  The guys have much bigger horns than the girls and giant woolly afro hair-dos, although its the ladeez that rule the roost.  Seeing them in the falling snow was not just a bit like being in a David Attenborough doc.  


- Beaver casually swimming down a tributary of the Yellowstone River.  Our first sighting outside of Vancouver and apparently a first for our guide in the park.


- Lots of lovely fluffy coyotes, on the hills, in the long grass and, best of all, watching them listen intently for mice under the deep snow and then leaping through to catch them.


- Huge amounts of elk, every wolf's favourite fast food on hooves, all around the park... which means you also get to see elks after the chase.  Not quite so pretty, but good to see not much goes to waste.

Before

After

- Pronghorn 'antelope' venturing outside the park (pretty brave considering you can buy guns on pretty much every main street and there ain't much else to do 'cept hunt)

Basically an African Savannah

- Wolves, wolves and more wolves:  After our initial success we thought it would be pretty easy to spot them, but the next couple of times they were about half a mile away, only really visible through telescopes.  But on our last afternoon, news of a kill near the roadside reached us.  Despite it being New Year's Eve, we headed to bed early (after a hot tub in the falling snow) and met the another couple from the group (who were both super nice and happen to live in North Vancouver) at 6.30am the following morning.  We headed to the river and gazed at the hillside in the pitch dark straining to catch a glimpse of a furry canine.  After an hour we were losing hope, but then we saw them, wolves on the ridge.  We watched them lounge around after their late night dinner of elk for over 30 minutes only a couple of hundred metres away. So entrancing that we all forgot to take photos!

-  But even that wasn't the #1 highlight.  On our second day, as we stopped at a regular wolf watching haunt we noticed everyone was even more silent than usual.  As soon as we got outside we realised why; the magical sound of a pack of wolves just off the road in the woods, howling in unison.  Much more mournful than we imagined it might be (partly as they may have been trying to cross the road!) and you could clearly hear the different wolves 'voices' at different pitches.  Magic. 


All in all, an immensely good trip.  We're returning in the summer on our road trip round the Western States so let us know if you want to come along for the second look!  

The Park: Yellowstone in winter part 1

Okay, enough about getting there.  What about Yellowstone, made famous by Yogi Bear (remember Jellystone Park?) and an awesome BBC 3 part documentary (basically the reason we went).  


A few quick facts:
- Created in 1872 it was the first national park in the US, and the world.
- At 3,500 square miles it is about 4 times the size of the Lake District
- It sits on what was once the biggest volcano in North America and acts like a giant deep freeze in winter
And...
- Its northern mountain ranges and valleys are (pretty much accurately as it turns out) described as the 'Serengeti of North America'


(WARNING: Look away now if you aren't interested in detailed nerdy wildlife spotting descriptions, read on if you love knowing how to tell bison boys from bison girls...)


The first afternoon

What are they eating up there?

The huge stone gate welcomed us to the Park and within about 4 minutes we spotted our first wildlife; a small group of Bighorn Sheep grazing (though I'm not sure on what) on the steep rockfaces right by the road.  Much more powerful looking than domestic sheep, they didn't seem phased by us, but lucky we stopped for as long as we did as the other times we saw them they were specks in the distance. 

He followed in our footsteps

Feeling pretty pleased with ourselves, we took a short walk from the car in the snow to check out a nearby valley.  We disturbed a large herd of elk (basically red deer but also a bit stockier and with thicker coats) grazing and, as we turned back to the car, a coyote was sneaking over our tracks to a nearby viewpoint.  Our first carnivore!  No photo (don't worry, you'll see them later) but the first of many animal prints in snow of the trip.

Mark was only allowed about 5 minutes to drink coffee when we checked into the hotel in case we missed any other wildlife action.  But as we'd be leaving straight after our wildlife tour we thought we should check out one of the parks 'thermal features' (it has half of all the world's geysers, hot springs, mud pools etc).  The terrace of springs right by the hotel was awesome, huge clouds of steam in the cold air and funky thermophile bacteria coating everything in pyschadelic colours...


Then it was back on the wildlife tour.  Our next encounter was with a group of bison, photos later.  If you've seen buffalo in Africa, think of something bigger, shaggier and with a huge shoulder hump comprised not of muscle but bony fins extending up from the spine.  The hump helps them sway their huge heads through the snow to clear patches to get at the grass underneath.  Seeing them in the falling snow was magic. 

Look hard and you'll see him centre left

But let's be honest, you all know the real reason we were there; to catch a glimpse, just a glimpse, of a wolf as it is supposed to be the best place in the world to see them.  And that's exactly what we did next.  Turns out that there are group of wolf watching devotees in Yellowstone, and if you see their vehicles you are pretty much guaranteed a sighting.  

A much better, but not mine, piccie

Not knowing this, we casually stopped at a roadside pullout and quietly asked the people with huge telephoto lenses if there was much around.  'Have you seen the wolves yet' they replied, pointing at a black and a grey wolf lounging in the snow just two or three hundred metres away... Awesome.  Okay, my photo is rubbish, but you could seem super well through binos!    


to be continued....
  

The Journey: A Tale of two "Cities"

Up close it's even cheesier

900 miles, 3 mountain passes over 3000 feet and sub zero temperatures; would our 18 year old Jeep make it to Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming...?


Well, she did a magnificent job (aided by good weather) and so, slightly to our disappointment (but not my mum's) no hair-raising tales of nights spent on the road surviving only with the warmth of tea lights.  Instead, I thought I'd tell you the tale of two "cities" (anything in Canada or the States with at least one store, one diner and one bar seems to qualify as a city, see population figures below...) we passed through on our journey which neatly demonstrate the Old and New West...


Butte, Montana  Population: 34,000 and shrinking (but still Montana's 5th largest 'city')

Yes Mark, it really is closed now

A boom town in the 19th century for gold, silver and then copper in huge quantities, Butte was one of the largest cities in the American West for decades.  Our hotel was 40GBP and was an art deco masterpiece of chandeliers and original tiling and built by a 'Copper King' who made mints of money from the local mines (one of which is located just off downtown and is now the 'largest toxic lake in North America'.)


With none of the high-tech industries of further East, and not quite close enough to the mountains to be an outdoors centre, the future for Butte on a sleety December night certainly didn't seem pretty.  That said, they are trying to clean it up and as the whole of downtown could be instantly transformed into a Western shoot-em-up stage set, complete with original designed-for-purpose brothel (the longest in continuous operation in the States), saloons and intact mining machinery, couldn't someone just buy it and turn it into a giant theme park?  And the old vault turned restaurant did do great burgers. 


Moses Lake, Washington  Population 20,000 and growing

The roads are veeerrryyy straight

We weren't looking forward to our stay in Moses Lake, our Lonely Planet-esque guidebook only cited it as it was straight off the interstate highway.  Surrounded, unexpectedly for us in our ignorance of American geography, by miles of flat desert, the Lake part was only created when the huge Columbia River was damned to create a series of irrigation reservoirs in the mid 20th century.  


And, actually, it was quite nice; flocks of over wintering geese and resident herons on the lake and a brilliant 'pizza parlour' (okay, the book was right about the 'dense and unusual toppings' part but Mark didn't seem to mind the 4 types of meat on his).  The town doesn't have much of a history, but with investment from tech companies for data storage and a new factory producing solar panels, the future seemed pretty bright (tee hee) and the local paper was full of the new job opportunities and improving health and education facilities.  

The real Roslyn from Northern Exposure

With almost every town we drove through full of buildings with historic preservation orders slapped on them, the US is trying to preserve its (short, some might say) history and I really hope it succeeds.  Although the new West with its techy stuff and boxy malls looks more prosperous it definitely does not look as fun as frontier saloons.