Yellowstone in Early June

Randy's wife, Leona, is in Alaska for a few weeks, so Randy was looking for a road trip. He wanted to go to Billings, Montana, to a place that I thought he said makes caramel waffles.

I suggested that we drive to Alpine, Wyoming, Thursday after work, do a quick tour of Yellowstone on Friday, when we might see some spring baby animals, eat waffles all day Saturday, and come home Sunday.

So on Thursday we stayed in the 3 Rivers Motel in Alpine. On Friday we toured Yellowstone and drove over the Beartooth Highway from the Yellowstone Northeast Entrance to Billings.

On the way, we ate dinner at Foster and Logan's Bar & Grill in Red Lodge, where every other business is a bar, casino, or bar and bowling alley. There is one Subway, but it closed at 9 p.m. I had a ribeye sandwich with fries, but holy cow, Randy ordered a half-pound cheeseburger with two Texas toast grilled cheese sandwiches for buns and sweet potato fries. He had to sign a cardiac arrest waiver. Not really, but it did come with a personal defibrillator.

Friday night we stayed in Billings and ate breakfast Saturday at Artisan Stroopwafel and Cafe, where I discovered the waffle bakery treats are not really waffles but cookies, called caramel cookie waffles, or stroopwafels in Dutch.

I bought a bag of 10 stroopwafels for $4+ and Randy bought a pallet of them. Because there's nothing  really to do in Billings other than maybe visit some petroglyphs and the Little Big Horn, we drove back through Yellowstone and ended up in West Yellowstone about early evening.

By then the rain was coming down hard, and we started calling hotels. We finally ended up with the last room in all of Montana, Wyoming and Idaho for less than $170, maybe the last room at any price. Even Motel 6 in Idaho Falls was full. The motel was in Rigby, so we checked in and headed to the 10:05 showing of "The Cokeville Miracle" in Ammon. I highly recommend this movie.

We drove home Sunday morning.

Here are some pictures from the Grand Tetons, Yellowstone and Beartooth.

This is Jenny Lake with some fishermen. 

Looking north somewhere near Signal Mountain. 

The wildflowers are out everywhere. 

These are Yellowstone South Entrance Mosquitos. After every step of the transaction at the entrance (Randy bought a Senior Pass, so there was some back and forth), the ranger lady told us to shut our window. I think she was worried we'd not have enough blood left to complete the transaction. 

A lot of trees are dead but still standing from the 1988 Yellowstone Fire. 

And a lot of trees are no longer standing. 

Many new trees are packed into the areas the fire destroyed. 

And wildflowers bloom like crazy. 

This is looking down to the northeast (I think) from Washburn Mountain. 

The falls at Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. 

Tower Falls, which the ranger said are taller than Niagara but without the volume. These falls are below the highway. 

The ridge near the top of this canyon is columnar basalt. As the 25-foot-thick lava flow cooled, it formed these columns. This formation is similar to Devil's Tower in northeast Wyoming and Paul Bunyon's Woodpile in Juab County, Utah. 

I think half the tourists in Yellowstone are Chinese. 

At one spot we and a busload of tourists were trying to see a big horn sheep on a distant canyon wall. When I showed the tourists a photo of the sheep more close up, they grinned and patted me on the back and said, "Very good. Thank you." 

I am making a collection of people taking selfies. 

I took this in the rearview mirror of my car, and because the mirror frame is not in focus the picture ended up looking like these people are ghostlike figures floating nearby. I guess. 

Bison rule anyplace where they are. 

And they might charge if you don't keep your distance. 

The bull elk's bone antlers can grow at almost an inch per day in the spring and are covered with skin called velvet. 

This young bull wants to cross the road between all the cars and people. 

Now we move on to the babies of Yellowstone. These birds are nested high on a vertical canyon wall. 

This mother and her ducklings are on Jackson Lake. 

We were told this is a big horn sheep. She has two babies. If you look closely you can see one of the babies is nursing. 

This mama was feeding while the cubs wrestled in a bush and generally ran all over the place. 

Driving over the Beartooth Highway. The snow here below the tree line is just roof high. The summit is far above the tree line and the snow drifts there are probably eight feet deep in places. Even though the snow pack is light this year--the May-to-July ski run from the top won't open--someone told us the road department couldn't get this road open until after Memorial Day. 

The summit. 

This is at Foster and Logan's, where Randy should have had a heart attack and died from his 1/2-pound double-grilled-cheese-sandwich cheese burger, but I'm glad he didn't, because I would have had no one to split the cost of hotel and gas with.