Road Trip! Part 2/?

After Custer State Park, our next stop was Devil's Tower in Wyoming. Called Bear's Lodge or Bear's Tipi by local indigenous people groups this was I think the most interesting and one-of-a-kind geological feature of our trip. The rain stopped and the lowest clouds departed right as we arrived at Devil's Tower, so we were able to see it clearly,which we appreciated.


Next came Yellowstone, perhaps the best stop on our whole trip. Just outside the park's east entrance we saw a picture-perfect moose feeding in a pond, and for a brief moment that I managed to capture on camera, it was joined by its calf. The next few days in the park brought us up close to more bison and elk than we could count. The elk--which were still riled up for the fall rut--were especially neat, bugling often and in general being more active than the bison. We did get to drive in the midst of a couple different bison herds as they ran along the road, so it's not like they were boring or anything, but we just enjoyed the elk more, for whatever reason.

The geysers, mud pots, and hot springs are cool too of course. We were more interested in wildlife so we only did a couple short hikes at the various geyser basins, though we did get to visit all the main highlights. I enjoyed seeing all the geothermal features in much colder weather, with far more steam than you get in the summertime. Grand Prismatic Springs was all but invisible, shrouded in its own steam. At times it washed over us in pleasant, warm waves, a stark contrast to the rest of our time there, which scarcely creeped above freezing temperatures. The forest of Fellwood in Rythka is set in a caldera, and while we were in Yellowstone I figured out a couple scenes that will take place later in the Legacy of Rythka series that will incorporate geothermal features.

Two main highlights stand out from Yellowstone--eagles and wolves. Our first evening in the park I spotted two eagles swooping low over the Yellowstone River, and then noticed they were harassing a duck in the middle of the water. After several unsuccessful attempts to catch the duck, which dove under the surface with every low pass from the eagles, the pair of predators eventually caught the duck and carried it off to eat elsewhere. Having never personally seen a bald eagle catch anything before, and given that they largely eat fish, this was a pretty spectacular sequence of events, especially for a raptor enthusiast like myself.

The wolves were a little less impressive, being perhaps a mile off on a snowbank of blinding white with a heat shimmer distorting the view through the binoculars, but two different people confirmed that the specs in the distance were in fact wolves. Like, real live wild wolves.

More later...