Revelation 12:11: Holy Buffalo!

Sorry I haven’t been able to write the past couple of days. Funny thing… there’s no wi-fi in the middle of Yellowstone! Actually, it was really nice to “unplug” for a couple days and just enjoy our time together in this beautiful place. Some emotions we’ve experienced the past few days have included joy, peace, loneliness (missing our friends!), fear (I’ll explain later), panic, and excitement.

Yellowstone was always one of those “things” I heard people talk about that you just “had” to do in your lifetime. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d be visiting YNP at 25. I thought for sure it wouldn’t be until I retired with Jordan and our kids were grown. I feel so blessed to have these opportunities now, so that we have room for more adventures in our future!

Here’s a recap a few of our favorite and not-so-favorite memories/moments here at the park:

1. The pure beauty of this park is breath-taking. To think there are so many amazing and different land structures, mountains, plateaus, lakes, rivers, waterfalls, geysers, sulfur caldrons, hot spots, cliffs, and wildlife all in a matter of about 75 sq. miles is hard to do. Until you see it. And you stop breathing for a moment and realize how great our God is to create such landscape. I can’t wait to see more in Alaska!

2. We spent the day on Thursday driving around the park. It really does take you a whole day, if you do it quickly and only stop to pee every two hours and not every hour. We drove for about 9 hours and still felt like there was so much more to see! One of our favorite moments yesterday was when we turned a corner going downhill and were faced head on with a herd of approaching buffalo! I think our hearts stopped! Here’s a little bit of what was said in those few moments of panic:

“Oh my gosh! Hooooooooooooly crap. Uh whatdowedowhatdowedo???!!!”

“I’m turning around, we’re getting out of here!”

“You can’t turn around, there’s no room!”

“Get the camera, take pictures of this!”

“Ohmygosh, please don’t head-butt the car! Please don’t wreck our car!”

“Woooof woof howwwwwwwwl!”

“Get her to stop barking! She’s going to scare them!”

“Why aren’t you taking pictures?!”

“Because you told me to stop Layla from barking!”

“Ok, they’re passing by, ok, it’s going to be ok.”

“Seriously, what are the chances of that happening again?”

3. Until later on that day, it actually DID happen again. This time the buffalo were coming out of the woods ahead of us and traveling in the same direction we were. And we were the second car in line behind them. It was cool for about 5 minutes until we got tired of following the grandpa buffalo that were falling way behind their herd. We probably followed them for about 20 minutes until a park ranger pulled ahead of us in her SUV and started to shoo them off the road. She actually used her microphone, too. Because you know, buffalo apparently understand English. “Get of the road!” she shouted several times. Now that made us laugh! But it worked! And off we continued on our journey down to Old Faithful.

4. One of the stops we made was at the Mammoth Hot Springs on the north side of the park. Since pets aren’t allowed near any of the geo-thermal areas, we had to leave Layla in the car. We didn’t want to leave her there too long, so we basically ran up about 150 stairs and along the boardwalks surrounding the springs to see the sights quickly. If we had a soundtrack for this trip, Rocky would have been playing in the background. Until I figured out how hard it is to breathe in such elevations and had to wheeze my way down the stairs! Nevertheless, it was worth the effort.

5. This will be categorized as one of our not-so-favorite-but-I-guess-still-kinda-cool moments of the day. Old Faithful is a geyser that got its name for going off about every 93 minutes. We took Layla out of the car for some stretch time and waited for about 45 minutes for this “Amazing Must-See” to go off. I think Layla had more fun than we did as so many people admired her, wanted to pet her, and tell us about their dogs at home. It really is nice traveling with her! Anyways, so we’re staring, and staring. And then it goes off. Poof. Yup, that’s about it. I don’t want to offend anybody that thinks Old Faithful is the most amazing thing they’d ever seen, but eh. We kept waiting for it to get bigger and make more sound, and it never did. And then we left. End of story.

6. Lastly, we do want to give praise to the beautiful campground we stayed in, Canyon Campground. It was so clean and the sites were really large and flat. We were in the middle of the forest, so it was great to wake up to the loud cackle of the crow (oh wait, that was one of our not-so-favorite things). The first night we put Layla in our tent with us, as we were scared of bears getting her in her crate and didn’t want to keep her in the car. We thought she could just sleep on the ground right next to our air mattress…. But somewhere in all this travel she has become confused because she climbed right on top of our air mattress and laid her head down on my stomach. And fell right asleep. Never have we let her sleep on our bed with us, so we couldn’t understand where she could get the idea that this was ok! So Jordan took her off the bed, and so the battle ensued for the entire night… on…off… on…off. Ugh. So last night we decided to lay a blanket down on the ground next to us, put her shock collar on, and see what happened. She tried the bed once, got zapped by Jordan, and slept on the ground the entire night. Ahhh. J

We really did enjoy this leg of our trip, as it was nice to camp for a couple nights, eat some great burgers and steaks (thanks Snyders!), and enjoy the scenery. On to the next: Grand Teton National Park in the morning and camping close to Boise, ID tonight! Enjoy just a few of the hundreds of pictures we took!

(Pictures will be posted when I get to an area with better internet!)