After the late night last night we slept in a bit and luckily were able to switch our room to a cabin in the north part of the park, making for a more leisurely day. Highlights of the drive from Grant Village to Mammoth Hot Springs included another stop at Yellowstone Falls, many hundreds of additional bison, a coyote that everyone (including me) initially seemed to be mis-identifying as a wolf, and finally a group of five bighorn sheep wandering along the road. The sheep in particular were very cool, and by driving ahead of them a bit we got them to wander up to us, allowing for extreme close-ups of sheep nostrils the likes of which the photographic community will never condone.
The evening activity was a trip out to the Lemar Valley for wolf watching. As everyone knows, the way to find wolves is to look for people with big, expensive spotting scopes and stand next to them, and we were very successful at this. With winds whipping and temperatures in the forties a group of us stood on a hill and watched two black wolves more than a mile away. Seeing wolves is always very cool, but the crowd we were with added a bit of additional color – at one point after noting that the wolves had mange Audrey joked that she wanted to give them some medicine. A guy off to the side in a cowboy hat turned to us and in very serious and thick southern drawl intoned “Medicine? Lady, not in a national park you won’t.” We found out his name is Stacy, he is from Tennessee, and apparently one does not make any off-color remarks about wolves in his presence. We’re heading back in the morning for a bit more wolf-spotting, and based on conversations tonight it sounds like we’ll be seeing many of the same people again.
