Wild West Trip II: Yellowstone Upper Loop

TUESDAY JUNE 25th

We drove the long drive from Rapid City to the entrance of Yellowstone, getting there around 3 pm on Tuesday. In Yellowstone we stayed at the following places: 2 nights in a cabin at Roosevelt, 1 night at Old Faithful Inn, and 2 nights at Canyon Lodge. It was a lot of moving around but worth it in our opinion. 

We stopped along the way at the Little Bighorn Battlefield which happened to be celebrating the 148th year. It was kinda neat and there was a lot going on but we mostly stopped so Josh could take a work call.

Then we made it to Yellowstone finally! I highly recommend getting the GuideAlong App. It was so incredibly helpful and told us cool places to stop and history about the park.  First stop was the visitor center to get the kids' passports stamped and buy a Yellowstone patch to make an ornament for Christmas. 

We stopped at Undine Falls for a quick picture.

We hiked the Forces of Nature boardwalk before driving the Blacktail Plateau Drive. We didn't see any animals but it was very pretty. 

We were able to get into our cabin at this point-we stayed in one of the three full bed cabins with no bathroom (unfortunately!). But we were right by the shower/bathrooms so it wasn't too bad. 

It was pretty early yet and the sun didn't set until late so we went to Lamar Valley to see if we could find any animals. We were pretty successful-we saw a bunch of bison and our first coyote!

Then we found a picnic area to cook up our dinner, it was freezing and raining by this point so that was not very pleasant!

But then the sun made another appearance and gave us another rainbow. 

After dinner we went to see Tower Falls and Calcite Springs Overlook super quick. Calcite Springs ended up being my favorite view of the whole park!

Then it was back to our cabin to clean up and get some rest, we were so tired!!

WEDNESDAY JUNE 26th

I woke up to a glorious sunrise the next morning. This was one of our best animal spotting days-we saw 13 bears, a bunch of coyotes, and a bald eagle. 

Once I got everyone awake we went back out to Lamar Valley.

On our way out of the valley we saw people stopped looking at a bear. He/She lumbered around for a while on this hill. 

We spotted two more bears on our drive back to Roosevelt.

More pictures of Lamar Valley. 

We went back to our cabin to regroup before heading counter clockwise on the upper loop. First stop was Mammoth Hot Springs and we walked along the lower boardwalk for a bit. 

We drove the Upper Terrace Drive because our guide fella told us to and that was a neat little side trip. 

We hit the Sheepeater Cliffs (a good stop but not super notable) then headed to the Norris Geyser Basin. We got there pretty early and it took us longer than I would've thought to park! But this was very worth it, we loved this area.

We did the Norris Geyser Basin Trail (the longer one) this time and saw the Steamboat (we were really hoping it would go while we were visiting but it's super unpredictable), and a bunch of other geysers and pits. It's a really cool spot. 

We stopped for a picnic lunch before checking out the canyon area. 

We did all the major outlooks but didn't do any hiking. It was pretty warm and we had a very long day today! On our way back to complete the loop we got stuck in a bear jam, but we didn't mind too much. We really loved seeing the cinnamon brown bears!

A coyote was prowling around in the same area. 

We drove up and over Dunraven Pass (where we had excellent internet so we stopped there for about 10 minutes to enjoy that!) then went back to our cabin at Roosevelt. For dinner we drove to Lava Creek picnic area to cook up some quesadillas. The kids talked us into going to get ice cream at Mammoth and we were glad we did because we saw lots of animals there and back!

This guy didn't have a care in the world!

Very long day but it was awesome!