Yellowstone

Recently I have been coming to terms with the fact that I am a fabulous blog reader and a horrible blog poster. As the months passed by since my last post, I kept telling myself that I would go back and catch-up when I had more time. I had plans for chronicling things like Christmas, Easter, Spring Break, my brother Colin's wedding in California, the end of the school year, etc. At this point I think it's best if we just say that all those events happened and forget about trying to blog them because the thought of writing all those posts is making me want to vacuum or do the dishes or maybe even clean the bathtub (my least favorite job), in a desperate attempt to continue evading my blog. We will just fast-forward to the month of June and continue on like nothing happened between Thanksgiving and now.

Curtis has been wanting to go on a Yellowstone trip for a couple of years now and for a variety of probably lame excuses we haven't gotten around to it. This year we actually had the time to go so we decided we better go ahead and do it. Curtis will be starting a PhD program at BYU this fall (another thing I didn't blog about) so we will once again be short on money and time for the next 4 years. I am so glad we decided to go because we had an awesome time! We decided to stay at a camp site in the park and it worked out great! There were clean bathrooms (with running water!) right by us and there were even showers at the campground that were just a short walk away. The weather was beautiful. It only rained one night but it was after we had already gone out and seen everything we wanted to see for the day so we just stayed in our tent and played cards games which was fun too. We were there for 3 days and saw just about everything we wanted to see. Yellowstone was unlike any other national park that I have been to so far. The colors were amazing and there were so many animals there. Curtis and I both had cameras with us, and we are both in to photography right now, so it was fun to try out the cameras and learn new things. Here are a few of our favorite pictures (sorry there are so many!):

From The Lower Falls:


This was the trail down into the canyon. It lead to a view of the Lower Falls from below. There were 328 stairs to climb each way and my thighs were burning!



Beautiful view!


These next pictures were taken from the different Geyser Basins throughout the park, Norris, Upper Geyser Basin, Midway Geyser Basin and Lower Geyser Basin. The colors were amazing!



Old Faithful. It was about to rain so the sky was really dark which made the geyser really stand out.



Mammoth Hot Springs had some really cool stuff that was a bit different from the other things we had seen. It was a pretty small area though.



We saw a ton of animals while we were there. A lot of them were really close to us too. On our very first night there we saw a bear not to far from our campground which made us a little nervous. In total we saw 3 bears, a coyote, wolf, badger, pronghorn (like antelope), bighorn sheep, a golden eagle, deer, elk and hundreds of buffalo. It was really cool.