Two Big Parks and We're on Our Way Again - Part Two

We took a down day to recover from the Teton drive, but did do some kayaking on the Henry Fork of the Snake River. It was our first time on a western river with the foldable kayaks, and we did OK. It was a pretty windy day so we didn't kayak for long.

The next day we got an early start and headed up to West Yellowstone. Like the Tetons, we'd both spent time in Yellowstone before, so we didn't feel like we needed to push ourselves to see a lot. We chose to take the southern loop and just stop and get out to look around some when we felt like it. We ended up stopping at several places we hadn't seen before, which was a nice surprise. We didn't see much wildlife (local hunters blame the wolves). In fact the biggest wildlife watching crowd we joined was in the Hayden Valley; everyone had there spotting scopes out looking at nothing. So we moved on.  We did see a herd of bison that had taken over the Bridger campground, which was closed.

Some of the nice places that were new to use were:

The Madison River

The Firehole River

Firehole Falls

And the Black Sand Geyser Basin:

We revisited the West Thumb Geyser Basin:

Looking down into a deep hot spring hole. 

The shore of Yellowstone Lake

Long drive home, and spent the next day getting ready to head south to Montpelier Creek, our last stop in Idaho.