Yellowstone

Alison and I returned last Sunday from our canoe adventure in Yellowstone with the family. It turned out to be a bit of a whirlwind tour because our planned camp site on Yellowstone Lake was threatened by a forest fire. The kind forest rangers offered to find us a new site on Yellowstone Lake, but it was so smoky there that we opted for a site on Shoshone Lake. You could really see the smoke coming up from our camp there:


The trip to Shoshone Lake was a little intense and involved a motorized canoe ride across Lewis Lake, a couple miles of walking up the Lewis River (below) and a few miles of paddling to our site on Shoshone. It was a great trip, but we only spent one night on Shoshone Lake instead of three because heavy rain was making things unenjoyable.


Because we left Shoshone Lake earlier than planned, our schedule was open for a quick tour of the park. We saw the falls on the Yellowstone river:


We went to Mammoth Hot Springs also. I'm glad there weren't very many young boys there because the hot springs don't seem to take too kindly to them:



We also were able to see lots of wildlife. We saw buffalo, deer, elk, bald eagles, and a coyote. We watched two buffalo get into a little brawl which was highly entertaining.


And of course, the scenery was breathtaking:

We ended the day with a stop at Old Faithful (below) and a nine hour drive back to Denver.