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June 2003

Yellowstone Wilderness and Wildlife

David Aaronson
2005-09-29 12:08:02

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Mount Washburn rises in the back left portion of this picture and the highest point is a small weather/ranger station at the top.

At a certain altitude the trail ran under several feet of snow making it even more treacherous. This was in late June and in some years the snow never disappears completely. One week before our hike, Mt Washburn was hit with snow and hail in mid-June.

The little furry blur in this picture is a pika (9). Pikas are small rodents that look sort of like stunted rabbits. They're extremely fast and never seem to stop moving for more than half a second, which is why this has to be an action photo.

The view from near the top of Mount Washburn (10). The rift in the distance is the canyon of the Yellowstone River. On the far left a waterfall descends a side canyon into the Yellowstone River and is called Silver Cord Cascade. There are hiking trails which lead up to it from Canyon and from Mount Washburn. By the time we reached the top, the temperature had dropped substantially and we spent some time inside the ranger station (which also has restrooms) before heading back down.

The last section of the hike from the south approaches the top across a narrow ridge with huge dropoffs to either side. There are quite a few marmots on the rock piles at the higher altitudes as well.

Yellowstone Lake (11) dominates the southeast quadrant of the park and several developed areas can be found on its shores (Grant, Lake, and Fishing Bridge). Fishing Bridge is popular with spawning cutthroat trout and in the summer they can be seen lurking just beneath the surface. We came down to Lake village one evening partially to eat dinner there and partially as an excuse to drive through the wildlife-rich Hayden Valley. There are various types of boat cruises out into the lake as well.

After seeing many of the major sites accessible by road in Yellowstone we felt we ought to have at least one backcountry experience, even if it was a relatively short one. We chose the Virgina Meadows area between Canyon and Norris. There's a short hike to Ice Lake where a longer east-west trail runs across central Yellowstone. We hiked east along this for a couple miles. The Gibbon River here must be forded several times, or one can cross on a log like Melanie did. David attempted the log-crossing (difficulty rating: 3.1) but failed miserably and ended up inadvertently fording the river resulting in wet hiking boots (and a 1.5 from the East German judge). A small little-used trail connects back on a diagonal to the road near Virginia Cascades. This is Melanie on one of the more obvious section of trail. Other parts disappeared in the pine forest entirely (12).

Eventually though the trail comes to this waterfall (the river must be forded again just above the falls) which probably has a name but we don't know what it is. In fact, there's a large ongoing project at Yellowstone to visit and catalog all the waterfalls in the park. The trail then leads across a huge open (soggy) meadow along the river before ending unceremoniously on the road. After that we had to hike along the road back to the parking area. Despite the lovely big (soggy) meadow that would be a fine place to spend the afternoon if you happen to be a moose, we saw no wildlife there.

Bear jams they're called when traffic stops to watch a bear, which truth be told is very rarely all that interesting since they're mostly just foraging. We saw three black bears, all in the Tower area and none of them so much as ate one single tourist despite their best efforts to get eaten. We left the park through the spectacular Northeast entrance along the Lamar Valley that has amazing scenery and more bison than you could throw, well, anything at.