Yellowstone Day 3

Day 3 - On Tuesday, we decided to head up to Yellowstone Lake. It had snowed again that night but not as much as the night before. We were going again to a higher elevation so we weren't sure what we would encounter. The road again had been salted and wasn't too bad.

We drove through Hayden Valley which looked so amazing all covered with snow. The snow was good and bad. There weren't as many animals out but it did make the ones that were out easier to see. We stopped at a few viewing points along the way to scan the tree line for animals with our binoculars. At one stop we did see a big bear running out from the tree line. It was at full stride which was pretty awesome to see. We were sort of on a small cliff with the river below and then a big hill on the other side, so it was too far away to get a picture. Then another bear on the right side of the hill came out. A couple stopped next to us and they had a nice monoscope and focused in on the bear and let us have a look. It was a bit better then our binoculars but I was pretty impressed with how much we could see from our binoculars. It felt pretty good to be the first to spot the two bears and seeing on at full stride was great.

This is a picture of Yellowstone Lake. Last time I came to Yellowstone we stayed at the lodge here but the lake didn't look like this. In fact, the lake was suppose to open a week before we got there for boating and kayaking! The lake is at around 7,700 ft so it is pretty high, I think it is the largest lake in the U.S. above 7,000 ft.

Here is a picture of Yellowstone Hotel. The oldest of the lodges and hotels in the park. We stopped and had a tea and coffee to warm up. It was below 32F or 0C and with the windchill it was really cold. After seeing the lake we decided to go down to the "Grand Canyon of Yellowstone." On the way we saw a bunch of cars on the side of the road. We had seen a few on the way up there but couldn't see anything around. But as we were slowly driving past a bald eagle came swooping down near the river. It's a big eagle and so majestic. We finally figured out what everyone was looking at.

This is the upper falls in the canyon, just like the Grand Canyon the water is continuously cutting out the rock and making the canyon deeper and deeper.

The snow was starting to melt at this point but it looked beautiful with hints of white all around.

Another picture of us, I'm extremely cold at this point, lol.

After seeing all the viewpoints and short hikes of the Canyon we heading back to our hotel to do a longer hike. It was mid-afternoon at this point but it didn't get dark out until after 10 pm so we figured we had enough daylight to do it and after spending most of the morning in the car it felt good to stretch our legs out. So we did the Beaver Ponds hike which was about 5.5 miles. We saw some beautiful ponds but we were also very careful. A Grizzly had been spotted a couple days ago and frequented the area. So we kept talking the whole way so we wouldn't startle any bears...I think we may have scarred off most of the animals because we didn't see much.

Just to the right of the water you can see a damn that was built by the resident beaver. There were also a few trees that had obviously been gnawed away at. Along the hike we also saw several tracks and animal bones that had been immaculately cleaned. It made us both a bit uneasy but we finished the hike and all we saw were elk and deer.

This is the last bit of the hike which gave a great view of our hotel.