Got advice from Greg, the lovely hotel owner at the Yellowstone Basin Inn, and then headed off into Mammoth Hot Springs, which is a lovely town, and the centre of the Park Rangers organisation. Went around their tourist information centre, which had a bit of history about how they were founded, and to start with, there was just one of them! As the place is 65 miles on each side, that's a lot of ground to cover.... Luckily, there's quite a few more now.
They have elk just wandering around in the town, and a few skitted through, looking somewhat freaked by all the attention. Not helped by idiots going up to them to take pictures. Nicola found a story from a few weeks back of a woman and her daughter taking selfies in front of a bison, which then cheerfully tossed her into the air... We spoke to a park ranger later, and she said that the elk actually seem to prefer the town, as although they don't like cars, they like wolves even less, and they won't come into the town.
Drove on, stopping for a few short hikes and photo opportunities as we went. Ended up at a Wolf Den, where the wolf spotters were gathering. Apparently, a young family of them had been out at one point earlier, but they were normally more active later on, around 8pm. There was supposed to be a bison on its last legs down by the river too, and they were expecting the wolves to fall on it, like, er, wolves.
However, we couldn't wait that long, and I suspect Annie would have been quite freaked by it, not that any of us would have relished the sight. However, on the way back, there were herds of bison everywhere, with some of them just ambling about by the road quite cheerfully, and so we had a 10 minute wait while about 5 of them took turns just standing in the road, staring down the traffic. They seemed to be saying ' yeah, I weigh about a ton, and I can run at 45 mph, and I got these biiiiig horns... and what are you going to do about it? Oh, and I was here first. '
All of a sudden, the 2 guys in front of us on Harleys didn't look quite so badass.
Back to the hotel, where Greg the owner knocked on our door, and then called us outside to see a bald eagle, perched on the other side of the road. He then showed us his pictures of a wolf being seen off by some coyotes in the field opposite. The wolf had just eaten, and was the size of a house, and was basically slouching disconsolately off their territory, while they nipped his heels.
Annie cooked for us this time, some great pasta, tomatoes and mozz, and we'll finish with another game of Yahtzee - Annie's keeping a running total of all the games across all the holiday. Think I'm gonna lose....
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