Elk calves

Its gotten to the time of year that the Elk are coming down into Mammoth Hot Springs and having their calves.  They defend their calves very aggressively and have already knocked a 6 year old boy unconscious.  Its getting to be a very interesting time here.  The males have grown their antlers back at this point to so they are very impressive looking.

Beartooth Highway

The Beartooth Highway is the scenic route from Red Lodge, MT to the Northeast Entrance by Cooke City, MT.  It opened at noon on Memorial Day and by 1 pm, Clarise and I were on our way to driving up the craziest road either of us had ever been on. Before leaving the park however, we ran into an all too common traffic jam which sometimes results in just another bison or elk sighting but this time we got the much harder to find big horn sheep. A whole flock of them!



It is about 2 hours one way if you drive straight through but we did not get to Red  Lodge for 5 hours due to frequent stops and even an impromptu waterfall hike in Custer National Forest.  Clarise said it her favorite thing we have seen or done in our time here so far.





The first hour we were amazed by the rugged, snowy peaks before us and when we stopped at a scenic overlook we read that they were not even the Beartooth Mountains yet!  They were an eastern extension of the Absaroka Mountains that paralleled the highway into the North Entrance on our first day.



After climbing a ridiculously windy road with snow pack over twice the height of my car on either side, we came over a ridge and found ourselves in the Beartooth Mountains.  The Beartooth Mountains are really great and our crowned and named after a distinctive mountain peak that is shaped like a bear tooth.



We descended into Red Lodge where we shared some Chinese food but found we were still hungry and on our way out of town we saw a parked tour bus with an open sign in the window.  It was a Mexican restaurant on wheels and we just had to stop by and see what it was all about.



Of all places to have the most delicious, authentic Mexican tacos of my life, who would have thought it would be on a bus in Montana?  We drove back the way we came, passing a bicyclist halfway through with only half an hour of daylight left.  I wonder what happened to him?  We got back home in the dark and found out the next day from co workers that they closed it back up that night when a blizzard hit the area and erased the road crews hard work.  Talk about good timing.  Even though it is named the Beartooth Highway I was more impressed by the Absaroka Mountains than the Beartooth as the Beartooth Mountains did not encompass a very big area while the Absaroka Mountains seem to keep popping back up everywhere.

Pictures of the winding road and some snow graffiti

What Working in Yellowstone is Like for Me

50 hour weeks (on the lower side of my average)

Closing shifts followed by opening shifts three days of the week (3 or 4 hours of sleep)

• I f I work a dinner shift I usually won't get home until midnight or so. After work my body is so pumped up from moving around so constantly, that it usually takes me an hour to finally settle down. I don't actually get to sleep until around 1:30 or 2:30 am if Daniel wants to talk. I, then, have to wake up around 5:20 am in order to open in the morning. Sometimes I am lucky enough to ONLY work a breakfast shift (after closing) so I get off work at 10:30 or 11 am. This when Daniel is just waking up since he works the night shift. Unfortunately for me, when Mr. Daniel wakes up from his full 8 hours and sees me awake he thinks its time for food and then a brisk hike. I try to explain to him that we are not remotely close to equally well rested but he still seems to forget everyday. 

2 days off (one of which is used to catch up on much needed sleep)

• Our days off are scheduled together. Or rather my two days off are scheduled during the same time as Daniel's three days off. By the time my weekend comes around, I am so exhausted I can barely think straight, so when I get off at midnight I tend to sleep as long as possible. Sometimes, I am just drifting in and out of consciousness on the first day even if I am awake. My second day off I usually try to hike with Daniel. But when I do that, the room tends not to get cleaned. And the laundry gets neglected a bit as well.

15 minutes to eat before a shift

• The Employee Dining Room or the EDR doesn't open until 15 minutes before my shifts start so I don't get to eat much and am therefore starving by the end of my shift. If I am even running 5 minutes late, I can probably just forget eating at all. 

When I am not tired to the bone, I do enjoy the park very much. It is very beautiful and changing everyday. It seems like there is always something new to see and we have had a lot of good times so far. But I am feeling very frustrated that it feels like work even on my days off sometimes. I keep getting woken up before I want to be and begrudged any naps I feel I need. I miss my friends in Manhattan more and more everyday. They were the bees knees and the people here are too weird even for me. Or they are just weird enough and have crazy anger problems. Or drink every single night. The people I like the most are probably around 60 and have a group of their own. So I am also feeling kinda lonely. I feel like all I do is work, sleep, look for apartments in Washington, hike a little, and clean. By myself. It sucks. I kind of want to leave.

Old Faithful Inn

One of the many perks of my job as a Floor Technician in Yellowstone is that I get paid to visit the entirety of the park rather than having to wait for the weekend to see anything other than Mammoth Hot Springs.  Last week I spent the night at the Old Faithful Snow Lodge hotel (an over $200 room for guests) while polishing up the floors for their big opening.  This week I'm back in Old Faithful and rather than just 2 days here we are spending all week prepping the Old Faithful Inn for opening.  The Old Faithful Inn is the largest wood structure on the planet and I get to clean every hardwood floor in the place.  I also get a room up on the 3rd floor and am a 10 foot walk down the hall to a balcony overlooking Old Faithful Geyser.  I saw Old Faithful erupt four times my first visit and it is certainly not something that gets old.  The first time I saw it was about 9 in the morning while it was 30 degrees and windy.  There were 6 other people.  The 2nd, 3rd, and 4th times that day were definitely more crowded and while it really didn't detract from the geyser much I'm still glad my first time was practically alone.  My current visit to Old Faithful involved a lot more exploring of additional geysers in the area.  There are quite a few more and though Old Faithful gets all the fame, other geysers are equally if not more impressive.  I sat on a log for 30 minutes waiting on Riverside Geyser which can be predicted accurately down to 90 to 120 minutes.  It shoots 70 feet high and is often accompanied by a rainbow (though not this time).  Its location definitely made it more beautiful than Old Faithful.  

As I walked back to Old Faithful Inn to work for the night I saw an unbelievably high cloud of steam shooting up about half a mile to my left.  I cannot be sure but based on my map and the short bursts of very high water coming from it I believe it was Grand Geyser, the tallest predictable geyser in the world, which erupts for 9-12 minutes and consists of 1-4 bursts reaching 200 feet high.  Morning Glory Pool was almost too pretty to be believed and there were many other lesser known thermal pools of stunning color such as Sapphire Pool and Chromatic Pool.  One nice thing about the Old Faithful area is you can walk the same boardwalk every day and have the chance to see something new and unique every time as only a few geysers erupt regularly or predictably. 

The snow is disappearing rapidly, other villages and roads are opening up, and some of the higher elevation trails are drying up and becoming accessible to hiking so there should be quite a bit more to see and post about shortly.

Beaver Ponds

Beaver Ponds is a 5 miles loop trail directly behind Mammoth Hot Springs.  It is the first hike we did when we arrived and I plan to make it the last hike we do when we leave to gauge how much better in shape we are after 5 months of hiking nearly every day at between 6200 and 11000 feet.  The first time we did it there was still significant patches of snow on it that if we were not able to follow previous hikers footsteps over we would have surely gotten lost.  Also the spots where the snow was melted were deep, wide patches of mud.  Sometimes we would be by a precarious cliff on snow, other times mud.  We never really could decide which was more frightening.  The ponds were partially melted but mostly still frozen when we got to them and they framed a very picturesque setting with tall, snow capped peaks in the background, and heavy forest that surrounded the ponds.  The trail was great and is very popular with employees due to its proximity, relative ease, and beauty but by the fourth mile, Clarise and I were both wanting it to end from exhaustion and being sick and tired of walking over either snow or mud.  

A couple of days after we did Beaver Ponds we heard that it was mostly dried out and that a couple of people had reported seeing a Cinnamon colored Black Bear around mile 3.  So we ventured back out on the trail with the goal being to find and take a picture of this adorable sounding bear.  Sure enough the trail was much easier to hike this time around as it was dry and we had 2 weeks to acclimate to being over 6000 feet up.  We saw an elk just off the trail by himself and when we got to the ponds they were completely thawed out and the pictures were even better than the first time.  We decided to turn around at the ponds because of needing to be back at work that night and on the way back we heard what we both believed to be a warning growl from the bear we were seeking.  We stopped in our tracks and looked around the forested area we were near for 10 minutes but never did see or hear anything else.  Before that time we saw an interesting bird that made a low, guttural sound we believe it adapted to sound like a bear so since we did not see anything move after hearing the growl we can't be sure what it was but I believe it was the bear running away as black bears are known to be skittish of humans.  I hope to return to find the bear when I get the time again but there is just so many things to see its hard to do too many repeats without missing out on other things in this huge park.