LOCATION: Yellowstone National Park
ATTRACTIONS: Hayden Valley, Tower Fall
DATE: August 5th, 2018

The KOA we stayed at had a complimentary pancake breakfast, so we feasted on cakes and sausage then got good and cleaned up before we left, knowing showers would be hard to come by the for the next few days. We headed off to Yellowstone and arrived into the park around noon. As soon as we got in, it started to rain and when we were in the higher areas of the park, it was sleeting so thick it looked like snow. At one point we saw an exercise ball sized boulder roll right between two vehicles. I can only imagine the damage it would have done if it would have connected with one of them.

We were lucky enough that the rain let up before we got to our campsite at Bridge Bay. We filled up with water and then set up camp. No electricity at the campsites, but their were flushing toilets not too far, so that was nice. I thought it was interesting that there were signs on the stall doors showing you how to use a toilet. I thought it was pretty self explanatory, but I suppose when you get people from all over the world coming to check out your park, you have to explain that standing on a toilet to poop isn’t how we do it here. Once we got settled in we had some BLT’s and went exploring up the hill to look for some fire wood. We found a bit and then Charlie tripped and ripped her hand open on a log. My heart stopped as I checked out the damage, thinking this could be a vacation ruiner. Once I realized it wasn’t that bad, I breathed a sigh of relief and took her back to camp. Once we got her calmed down, we decided to go for a drive through Hayden Valley on the way to Tower Fall. We just got out and started heading down to the falls overlook and it started to sprinkle. We wanted to go for a little hike, but we ended up just heading back to the gift shop while it poured down rain.

On the way home, we stopped in Hayden Valley again and watched a few buffalo/bison. One decided he wanted to cross the river where there was another large male on the other side. The anticipation mounted as we thought we were going to see a showdown, between these two buffalo, but they didn’t pay much attention to each other. You’ll see in the video that buffalo are not the world’s best swimmers. There wasn’t much of his head above water. It’s not much of a surprise that a bit further up stream, we saw what was left of buffalo carcass in the river.

Once we got back to camp, we grilled some steaks and ate them with a chopped salad. We got everything cleaned up 100% so to not entice any animals to come around and tear things apart looking for food and snuggled in for some much needed rest.

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