Snowy Yellowstone Memorial Day

We had a choice last weekend. Stay home and watch it rain, or go somewhere and watch it rain. We decided to go somewhere. That somewhere was Yellowstone. We were going to go find wolves. And bears. Brian and Shannon went with us.  We stayed in Gardiner, Montana, north of the Park, in magic motel room that got hotter during the night until it was about 80 degrees by morning and we couldn't wait until to get outside into the 30 degree weather.

Brian's MIL has lots of experience finding wolves at Yellowstone, so we had a plan and knew just where to go. We weren't planning on the rock slide that closed the road to the best wolf-viewing spots in the Park. We also weren't planning on the weather being quite so....Winter-like. This what our drive into the Park looked like:

 They've had a big water year too, so the rivers and waterfalls were really flowing.

But we were hardy souls and ended up seeing lots of different animals and some even had cute babies! Bruce brought a spotter- we called him Magellan.

 Funny thing about going to Yellowstone early in the year. The animals aren't used to humans gawking at them, so they are much more skittish than they will be in August. The buffalo look at you funny and the elk want to run away.

We got a little excited when we spotted this, because we thought it was a wolf. There was lots of, um... freaking out and excited debate about just what this was- a coyote or a wolf. Finally we faced reality and decided it was a coyote. Sorry for the poor picture quality, but this guy was really far away and I might have been screaming while I was shooting.

Our quick trip wasn't quite like we thought it would be, but it was still fun to be together. And who can complain about being in such a beautiful place?