Day 8

I’m the first one awake. As I get out of bed to clean up Mari gets up to. It is sleeting and raining this morning. Marissa and David are still asleep. I head off to the shower to clean up. Mari heads downstairs to start cooking breakfast. She has wanted to make biscuits and gravy since we have gotten here. I come downstairs and see dad asleep on the couch. I make way to the kitchen to find Mari slaving away over the stove working on the breakfast. Ah, a fresh cup of coffee. A little weak, so I dump some and add more coffee into the coffee maker and add some more water. Michelle is awake now. Talking about whether they are going fly fishing or not. She explains about the prices from the 2-day license all the way to rules of keeping specific trout. Who would have guessed that trout fishing is so involved? I’m not sure what I want to do today; there is a Grizzly & Wolf Discovery Center here in West Yellowstone. I would like to go to Artist Point, there you can find the upper and lower falls. This is described as the grand canyon of Yellowstone. Looking at the weather, it appears it will be in the high 30’s today with scattered thunderstorms.

Well I moved from the kitchen to the television room. Everyone is eating now. Mari keeps nagging me to come and eat. We will see what we do for the day since it is now 9am here.

Michelle, Breack, Phoenix and Ryan went to the Grizzly & Wolf Discovery Center. Mom and dad took off exploring the town. Mari and Marissa stayed at the cabin. I took off to the Grizzly & Wolf Discovery Center and paid for my ticket when David called. He was finally awake from sleeping. The ticket is a 2-day pass that allows the patronage to come and go over a two day period. So, I drove back to the cabin and picked him up and went back to the center. It has several displays about grizzly bears and black bears and wolfs. I enjoyed going out to the grounds and watched three grizzly bears come out of their quarters. Apparently, kids were out in the grounds hiding food for the bears to find. I took several pictures while I watched the bears. While watching the bears Mari called and wanted know if I was still planning on going into Yellowstone Park today. She decided to walk up to the discovery center so we could go to the park.

David and I met up with her in the gift shop and headed out. We decided to drive from the West Entrance to Madison Junction, north to Norris Junction, to Canyon Village, south along the Yellowstone Lake, to West Thumb Junction around past Old Faithful and back out to the West Entrance. The drive started nice. It was a little cloudy with the temperature running 40 – 50’s degrees. By the time we started working our way back to the entrance we encountered snow. The temperature was in the low 30’s by this time.

During our trip around Yellowstone I was able to get a few pictures. On the way back we got into a buffalo jam from the Madison Junction to the West Entrance. This portion of the trip is about 14 miles long. It should take about 20 – 30 minutes, it took us 2 hours. The reason was that there were two groups of buffalo walking down the middle of the road. The first group had four bulls and the second only had two bulls. People just had to stop and take pictures. This made the trip frustrating long, since we were ready to be back at the cabin. Once we got through the two jams we were back at the cabin within in 10 minutes.