Outdoor Adventures with Gary Lee - Vol. 348
Here we are in Gardner, Montana just on the edge of Yellowstone National Park for a week of adventure watching wildlife and people with several good friends. Don Andrews organizer of the trip his wife Lori and her brother Mathew Luppino met Diane Bowes and I at the Airport. Started off from Syracuse Airport at 7am on the 31st stopover in Chicago and on to Boseman, Montana. There we met David Folts, a long-time friend of Don’s. We picked up rentals and traveled to a friend of Don Andew’s home there for a nice visit. Got some goodies there, cookies for our trips in the park. We went from there to Gardner to a rental home there where we would stay while traveling into the park for four days before going into the interior of the park to live in yurts for four days traveling around on unplowed in track vehicles where cars can’t go in winter. There is very little snow outside the park but driving in the last couple of days as we went up in elevation, we found some snow but nothing like they should have here.
It is nice to get used to the difference in elevation each day which I don’t have a problem with like some do. In some places we get to eight thousand feet while just traveling the roads in the park. We go each morning with two cars and three people in each making several stops along the way, listening for wolves howling and if we see any wildlife along the way we make a stop to watch and photograph what we see. This morning Monday we didn’t get in too far and found a moose close to the road which we got good photos of. The next stop was where we planned to watch the full Snow Moon go down over the mountains as the sun was coming up behind us. There were several others there that had the same idea, and I visited with many of them asking what they were expecting to see today in the park or what they had already seen.
From there we heard there were some wolves in Hayden Valley at one of the stops we made yesterday so we traveled there. We found five coyotes and a small herd of buffalo but no wolves. We moved further along and found two beautiful Bighorn Sheep with nice curls about two hundred feet off the highway high up on a ledge. Lots of shots taken there as these two rams browsed and then laid down with sight of all the cameras. From there we went to Silver Gate just outside the park where we got some pastries and drinks. We then traveled back through the park seeing more wildlife and at one stop made friends with a Raven that was banded and even had a tracking antenna on it’s back. That bird was friendly and gave us some nice photo opportunities. We even saw it at our next stop like it was following us. One stop while photographing some coyotes and a big buffalo a Bald Eagle circled over us several times giving us many photos.
On the way out we stopped at Mammoth Hot Springs looking at the lower level as we had looked at the upper-level yesterday afternoon. It had grown in size since I was there two years with my family. One in our group is David Folts who grown up friends with Don Andrews in Herkimer where they lived. Don organized this trip from the beginning, bringing friends and family together to see and photograph this beautiful place. David went back up to the top of Mammoth by himself tonight and just missed seeing a Pigmy Owl that some other had photographed just ahead of him, but he never did see it but saw the photos they had taken of it.
With another week to go and four days on the interior we should see many more beautiful things in nature but that’s another story. See ya.
Photo above: Big Horn Rams
