Day 3: We're Done with the Freakin' Car

Today we decided to return to Yellowstone and see most of the rest of the park. "Most" means probably 1/3rd. But we saw a lot of interesting stuff, even though Zach had several near meltdowns. By the way, I'm doing this in two posts so I don't put too many pictures in a single post...

Here we have myself and Peyton demonstrating the gravitational effects of the Continental Divide:

We ticked off a ton of wild game and birds today: bison, elk, grizzlies (yes, grizzlies... more on that in a minute), an osprey, beaver, a bald eagle... all in all, not a bad day. We did not see any wolves, but that part of the park is rather remote and we went south to north today, covering 70 miles within the park (not to mention the 80 between Teton Village and Yellowstone's south entrance).

Nice rack (and Jeana told me to write that):

Jeana had her telephoto lens on for this shot of these grizzlies. They were at about 250 yards off the road, mulling around in the meadow. This is a straight crop of the full image, no downsizing, so that's why it is slightly blurry. Alas, she needs one of those $5000 lens to really nail this photo. But this still isn't awful... not to mention, it's about as close to a grizzly as I ever want to be in the wild.

OK, what do people think of when they think Yellowstone? No, not a super volcano overdue to erupt and and all human civilization. Well, at least not yet. Old Faithful! That's right we joined the masses of about 1000 people to sit around for 20 minutes and watch water shoot out of the ground. Like the Bellagio but without music.

I just want to point out that 3 out of 4 people had a video camera or phone ready to record the geyser. Which is #$&%ing stupid, because if I want to see a video of Old Faithful erupting, I'll just go on YouTube and watch one of the 16,000 videos that people have added of the same stupid thing. But you'll note Zach was recording it with the Flip recorder, so I guess shortly there will be 16,001 videos of it on YouTube. &%#!.

At the very least, if you're going to take some image of Old Faithful, then put yourself in the photo so it has some reasonable sentimental value. I mean really.