Yellowstone National Park!

Photos from Wendee & Elissa's Most Excellent Adventure! We went to Chico Hot Springs in Pray, Montana and Yellowstone's north side. Highlights include soaking in the hot springs in 20 degree weather... closing the saloon down at 2am, and in the park seeing two wolf packs and hearing them howl!! Plus we saw bison, elk, bighorn sheep, a fox, and blacktail deer. Not bad! No bears or moose though! The only moose I saw was dead on top of someone's car driving through Bozeman. Oh and we saw some "homeo sapens"! :) (Inside joke! Well not anymore! LOL)

Emigrant Peak near Pray, Montana. This is where Elissa and Ben got married!

Another shot of Emigrant Peak. This is just around the corner from Chico Hot Springs Resort where we stayed last night. We soaked in the hot springs, had dinner, and then went out to the "saloon" and listened to the Clumsy Lovers play, and then we stayed until they closed at 2am!

The caboose we stayed in at Chico Hot Springs - it was so cool!!

Inside the caboose. It was a gorgeous room!

Hanging at the saloon at Chico Hot Springs.

We met some great people after dinner at the Chico Hot Springs dining roon.
Elissa and I on our most excellent adventure!
This arch gateway represents the original entrance to America's very first national park (Yellowstone, obviously)! Now most people use the east and west entrance and fewer visitors come to the northside but the Lamar Valley is a fantastic place to view wildlife. :)

Bighorn sheep alongside the road, just before entering Yellowstone National Park from the North entrance.

Icicles.

This is the walkway at Mammoth Hot Springs. There were several hot springs here which you can see by the rising steam!

A view along the Mammoth Hot Springs trail/walkway

A closeup of the terracing at Minerva terraces - "living sculptures" formed by the hydrothermal activity.

A bighorn sheep on the mountainside. Hard to see in the pic this size, click to see it larger!

Elissa and me with a moose hat on! This was the spot where we saw the Druid Wolf pack (near Slough Creek) but they were too far away to get a photo of. While here we met some folks who follow the wolves around and love to observe them using scopes. They're the ones who knew what wolf pack it was. One had a radio collar on. We even heard and saw them howl!! THAT was sooo amazing!!

A baby bison amidst a herd.

Bison saying hi!

An old timey bus at Mammoth Hot Springs. I think they use these for tours.

The Yellowstone River.

Devil's Slide and the Yellowstone River

Elissa spotted a second wolf pack on the roadside in the Lamar Valley near Blacktail Deer Plateau. There are 3 wolves here, two black ones in the foreground and a third grey one coming down the hill that I didn't even see until I upped the contrast in Photoshop!

There are two wolves here, a black one and one barely visible behind it that it's grey -you can barely see its ears and head just to the right of the other one.

Here's another shot of the three wolves walking across the valley. It's not as zoomed in as the other pic above but if you click on it you can see it larger!

A big daddy-o! We heard him make his bugle call. He was in the town of Mammoth Hot Springs just inside the park entrance.

A baby elk in Mammoth Hot Springs (a little community just inside the park). The elk often go there and hang out and eat grass!