Yellowstone Day 1

I took about 800 photos on this trip to Yellowstone, and going through them all is proving to be a rather daunting task, so I've decided to take it one day at a time. We Left Saturday the 8th and it took us just about the whole day to get there. My parents suburban had water pump problems, and fixing that took a couple of hours in the middle of the day. Once we got that taken care of, the rest of the day was smooth sailin'. As soon as we entered the park, our "unofficial" park guide, a.k.a. my dad, showed us everything and anything worth looking at in the park. We drove in two separate cars, and we used walkie-talkies to communicate. The kids loved being able to talk to grammy and poppa over those radios..."On the road again!"....

That night we had hot dogs for dinner and made smores over a roaring fire in our Canyon campground spot. It was really cold-in the 50's when we go there-and we were pretty cold that first night.

On our first day, we went and saw the lower and the upper falls, the Yellowstone Canyon, and lots of hot pots and mud pots....and some "bolcanos," but I'll talk about that in a bit. My dad took this first photo of us by the upper falls.

This next photo is actually out of order...but Drew and Cam each had a pair of binoculars (or bigknockers, as Cam called them) and here Drew is trying to get Cam's 'noculars and you can see Cam getting upset. Funny kids...

A photo-op of the two hooligans ;)

I took this photo of the lower falls and the Yellowstone Grand canyon. Had I known how to shoot HDR with my camera, or had I actually remembered to bring my tripod on this trip, the following two photos could have been a lot better. But, for what I have, I really like how they turned out. I'm not sure which one I like better, the B&W or the color...

Here is another photo that could have been better HDR...oh well.

Drew HATED the hot pots and the mud pots because of the rotten egg smell. He got really upset a couple of times and refused to go on a trail because of the smell...but, like he got away with that. He had to do some serious bucking up!!

Cam called anything with steam coming out of it a "bolcano." It was really cute, until he got closer and started screaming and crying. Luckily, poppa was there to help protect him.

Poppa was a favorite on the trip for the boys. He provided rides on long trails when the boys got tired...or scared ;)

This was my first attempt at an artsy shot...I really needed to have been shooting on my tripod, and also, wish the mushroom wasn't broken. But, I love the colors, and the randomness of the grass, little weeds and the pine needles.

For lunch, we stopped at Nez Pierce and spent some time with old friends from my ward growing up. It was fun to see everybody and to spend time with them. Afterwards, we drove around looking around for wildlife and we found this guy...a buthalo (another Cam word) going to challenge another buffalo to win the female. They had a good row, and the challenging buffalo lost, and walked away in shame and embarrassment. I actually felt bad for him, there were quite a few people watching him get spanked, I'm not sure his ego will ever recover. My dad played out the whole story for us, knowing what the buffalo was going to do, but he never got out his camera. He was pretty mad, and we spent the rest of our time in Yellowstone hunting for a buffalo fight!

At the end of the day, we drove up toward Tower, over Washburn mountain looking for more wildlife-particularly bears or big-horn sheep. We found a grizzly, but he was sitting down by a bunch of dead, fallen down trees. I didn't get any good photos of him, but I did get a photo of the mayhem that his presence caused.