A Four and a Half Bear Weekend

How do you like my weekend rating system? Actually, four and a half bears has nothing to do with how good my weekend was. Four and a half bears are what I saw this weekend.

Started out as one of those days...you know the ones. You wake up somewhat early on your day off, and you know you want to do something, you just don't know what it is. Well, that was me yesterday. I seriously just loaded my camera stuff into the car, picked a direction and drove.

I ended up heading up the east side of the park, through Hayden Valley and over Dunraven Pass to the Lamar Valley and then Cooke City for lunch. Pretty productive trip. I saw three black bears: two of them between Tower Falls and Roosevelt Lodge and one in Lamar Valley across from the Pebble Creek campground. Bear four was a grizzly bear, the half a bear was one of her cubs. Okay, maybe I should have said it was a four and a third bear day, because the griz did have three cubs; I only got to see one of them. I had to look through a kind man's spotting scope to see them.

There are two fires burning in or near the park now. I was in the smoke of one of them when I got up into the northeastern part of Lamar Valley. The smoke, and the resulting poor visibility, kept me from driving up the Chief Joseph Highway and on down to Cody yesterday. Besides, it was getting to be mid-day with really lousy light for photography. Some other time, I guess.

The tiny little town of Cooke City is not without its own drama. I stopped for lunch at a little place called (get this) Buns N Beds. They have a really good hamburger and homemade potato chips. While I was waiting for my burger, a woman came in to call 911. I didn't hear the first part of her conversation to know where she had been hiking. All I heard was her saying something about a collapsed tent with a body inside; that she had poked at it with her walking stick and got no response, she had shouted at it and still received no response, and she didn't have the nerve to actually lift the tent and look inside. Creepy.

This morning was another of those unplanned days, so I headed over to West Yellowstone, and ended up right in the middle of the smoke from fire number two. It was awful. I don't have breathing problems, but the smoke was so thick that I had trouble breathing. I can't imagine how bad it was for people who do have respiratory problems. I asked the ranger at the entrance station where the fire was, and she said it was outside the park and heading north. It's only the end of June. This is, unfortunately, only the beginning...