OFF LINE ENTRY

Fishing Bridge RV Campground
Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming
August 8, 2008, 6:20 pm Mountain Time
No cellphone or internet service, but we have 30 amps of electricity, potable water, and sewer at our campsite.

Altitude: 7700 feet
Mostly overcast; a rain shower has just stopped and the sun is trying to peek through.
Temperature: a cool 57F, although most of the day has been in the 70’s and partly sunny.

We’ve been tourists for the past two days, gawking at the wildlife and the wonderful scenery (that's us in front of Yellowstone Falls; more pictures later). Yesterday (August 7th), we watched a lone wolf stalking a swimming deer--the wolf loping along the opposite river bank, while the deer, possibly injured from the wolf’s earlier attack or something else, swan nearly out of control down the middle of the swift-flowing Yellowstone River. We suspect the deer didn’t swim to the near bank because of all the tourists (including us) who had stopped their cars to watch the “drama.” Then again, the current was strong and the deer may really have just been “going with the flow.” Past a bend in the river, we lost track of them. We’ll never know if the wolf got a meal or the deer got away.

We’ve seen lots of bison, a few pronghorns, one lonely bear, a number of deer, a few moose, and no elk (big surprise). We’ve watched the boiling cauldrons of mud and water, smelled the sulphurous steam rising from vents in the earth, and we’ve seen lots of evidence of the 1988 fires (pictures later). And we had a nice lunch at the historic Old Faithful Inn, next to Old Faithful geyser (which erupted as we were finishing eating--and we didn’t even see it!).

Today, we drove down to Grand Teton National Park to see the spectacular Teton Range. With Jenny Lake in the foreground, the mountains are just beautiful, and strikingly so after mostly forested and harsh Yellowstone with its boiling waters and smelly steam. The Tetons are simply prettier. We came back through the National Elk Refuge, but no elk! Where are all the elk? They must all be back at our friends place in Grand Lake, Colorado. We arrived back at our campground in time for supper, just as a summer shower was ending.

We’ll try to post as many pictures of all this as possible, but some of the WiFi’s we’ve hooked up with are pretty slow.

Entry written August 8th; Posted to Blog August 9th.