The ranger from the day before had recommended the Canyon Visitor Center for its educational exhibits.  We stopped there first on our way to explore more of the southern side of the park.  It had some great exhibits about the historic eruptions of Yellowstone and how they compare to other eruptions. 

Afterwards, we continued driving seeing the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, some of the falls, and journeyed to the eastern entrance of the park. 

We were still looking for wildlife.  Alex especially wanted to see bears (and let us know that over, and over, and over, and…).  We thought we had a good chance on the road to the eastern entrance because it was very wooded with lots of spots close to streams where bears like to fish, but no luck.  At one of the spots where we pulled over looking for bears, we found this cute little fellow.  He even thought that Dominic might have food for him, so he stood on his hind legs begging a bit.  We found out later that he was a Yellow-bellied Marmot.

As we continued driving, we saw someone pulled over watching something high up in the rocky hills.  We pulled over too and discovered that they were watching two mountain goats, who were quite a distance away so we weren’t able to see them very well.  The other family had a sight-scope and happily let us view the goats through their scope.  I took a picture of the goats through their phone camera that was hooked up to their scope, so while it isn’t a great picture, you can definitely see the goats better.  Charlie decided he will need to get one of those things one day (when I priced them at a store later, we figured that day won’t happen anytime soon).

On our drive, we finally saw a large herd of elk (most of the elk that we have seen have been a few lying around in the grass around the town of Gardiner). 

Eventually we ended up on the western side of the park to see more of the thermal features.  We dropped by Old Faithful and discovered that we weren’t far from the estimated “eruption” time, so we stayed to watch.  It was a beautiful sight – and we were glad that we didn’t sit there for an hour plus waiting on it!

After Old Faithful we drove to Fountain Paint Pots to recreate one of Annette’s favorite pictures from 2015.  The original picture included a bison that had walked up toward us, but there were no bison in sight today.  We were amazed at how much the thermal area had changed in the past 10 years, but we managed to get a reasonable recreation of the picture.  She was happy with it, and that’s what counts!

I also wanted to recreate one of my favorite pictures of Dominic that happened at the same location.  Many of you readers will remember how friendly Dominic was as a young child.  Well, 10 years ago he made friends with an Asian woman that we met at Fountain Paint Pots and walked around the boardwalk with her holding her hand.  She was so sweet and all smiles about this little boy.  Anyway, we suggested today that he find an older woman to walk around holding hands with (winking emoji here that I can’t seem to find in Word 😊), but teenage Dominic wouldn’t have anything to do with it and was rather grumpy.  So we settled for just a picture of him walking on the boardwalk.

We continued to drive around looking for wildlife at dusk, but didn’t have any luck.  The end of a second very long day in Yellowstone.

Rebecca