Day 11 - Washburn Expedition

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We got up really early today to go on our last tour while in Yellowstone. It started at 8:15AM and was called The Washburn Expedition Tour. It covered the upper circle of the “figure eight” of the park road system and we traveled 102 miles. Our tour guide, Dave, was new to the job and was probably our least favorite tour guide of the trip. We started up the east side of the lower circle before getting the to the upper circle. We traveled counterclockwise around the upper circle. The theme of the day was bison, bison, and more bison! By the road, in the road, away from the road, they were everywhere! After winding our way through the bison, we made our first stop at Tower Falls. Although we’d stopped at Tower Falls before, this time we’d stopped on the other side and got a better view of the falls. While looking at the falls, we were able to get some good photos of cliff swallows and a ground squirrel. The squirrel was a little bigger than our squirrels back home, but their tails were a lot smaller!

Our next stop was at Undine Falls. An undine is a female fairy who’s sole goal is to marry a human male and become human herself. Someone saw the falls and thought this would be a place where they’d live. Why he thought this, I have no idea. From there, we stopped at Mammoth Hot Springs for lunch. It was a good time to stop. While we were eating, it was hailing outside. We were glad not to be caught outside at this time! During this stop, we saw a magpie. We knew it was a magpie because we had attended the talk on corvids the night before and we appeared to be very knowledgeable when we were able to tell other tourists what kind of bird it was!

After lunch, we headed to the Mammoth Hot Springs Terrace. These terraces are constantly changing shape, going extinct, and new springs are starting all the time. We were able to get some really good black and white photos at this stop.

Our final stop was at the Norris Geyser Basin. As you can guess, we saw more geysers at this location, as well as, bacterial mats, and hot springs. The geysers and springs at this location were also the smelliest we’d encountered on any of our tours.

On the way back to FBRP, the bison caused a 3-mile backup. Luckily, the backup was in the other direction and did not affect us as much. Some other animals we saw on this trip were a sandpiper, osprey, pelican, and bald eagle.

We have only one more day of being in a technology vacuum. We haven’t really missed the daily media circus, although we do miss being able to check our e-mail.

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