Today’s weather is much better than yesterday’s was. Although it did rain for a little bit, it wasn’t intense and was certainly much shorter than yesterday’s. This mourning, we got up early and were able to beat the crowds on our hike to Uncle Tom’s point and Artist’s point. It was really nice to be away from the crowds, but the altitude did leave me somewhat short of breath while climbing back up the huge flight of steps that go down from the top of the canyon. The climb was more than worth it, however, because the view of the falls was spectacular.
In addition to the falls, we saw a Yellow-bellied Marmot on the hike, which we realized we had seen before but mistaken for a funny colored groundhog. I can see just as well as you can that he has a red belly, but I didn’t name it, so don’t blame me.
After our hike, we drove to a few more stops, one of which included the Dragon’s Mouth, which I thought was a pretty good name for that particular spot
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On our second hike, we walked to a natural bridge, which was kind of neat. On our way there we saw lots of cool wildflowers, one of which I stopped to photograph.
One stop after our hike included abyss pool, which is another aptly named landmark, even though it’s hard to see it’s depth in the picture. Interestingly, I unwittingly took a picture of the pine trees reflected in the pool when I was trying to get a picture that captured some of its depth (53 ft).
Finally, our last stop included many colorful pools, such as Grand Prismatic Spring. Although we’d seen a number of blue pools before this, I think that these were the best. Unfortunately, there was so much steam coming off of the pools made them difficult to photograph, so I had to wait until the wind picked up and blew away some of the steam to get pictures of the water.
In the new bird department, I had 2 volunteers, a Trumpeter Swan and an American Dipper.
On one last note, I caught a wild animal stealing one of my cucumbers, but I let it have it because I figured that the chipmunks in Yellowstone probably get fed to much junk food and need the healthy vegetables. And plus, he was really cute!
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