Our final planned tour in Yellowstone was a 5+ mile snowshoe (or cross country ski) to Lonestar Geyser. Turns out...we hiked out to this same geyser when we hiked to with the kids back 2 summers ago when we visited Yellowstone in the summer for the Ritterbusch family reunion. The good news is that we fondly remembered this hike as one of our favorite places in the park because it wasn't crawling with people! That wasn't a concern in January! There were about 10 of us on our tour and maybe another 10 or so people that skied there on their own that day. We missed the eruption by about 20 minutes and were hoping to catch some minor eruptions but after hanging out for about 30 minutes we gave up and started our trek back to the snow coach.
Our group all decided that we pretty much hate snow shoeing - lol! Ryan and I and tried it twice in our back yard earlier this year when we got a big dump of snow but 5 miles was too many miles for us with snow shoes. They make you walk with a strange gait...and my hips were killing me by the end of the hike. We do a fair bit of hiking and I'm always up for going longer distances...but by the end I was complaining like the kids and wishing Ryan and a snack to nudge me forward. I was totally over it by the time we made it to the snow coach. If we'd have has skis on at least we'd have gotten to glide for parts of the trail!
Being in the park in the winter time was really crazy. We heard some stats on one of our tours that during the summer months they park sees around 7,000 cars per day and the annual visitor numbers top 5 million per year. On one of our nights at Old Faithful I asked the front desk what the occupancy was for that day and she told me it was 125 guests total. There were another 200 or so staff members so in total we're talking less than 400 people. It was crazy to watch Old Faithful erupt alongside only a handful of other people. Most of the places we went it was just our group. And, over and over again we ran into the same couples and groups during our trip. It was a little like college or a fraternity.
This year was also very strange because there was so little snow around. When we arrived at Mammoth there was bare ground everywhere. Typically there is 2-3 feet of snow in most areas of the park and you could tell that the staff was a little worried about the lack of snow. They are worried about it being a very dry summer and the potential for fires if there is a drought. It was over 40 our last two days in the park and our tour guide for Lonestar told us that the staff was starting to carry around bear spray again because they were worried that the bears might come out of hibernation. We didn't see any bear but on our way out of the park we stopped in Mammoth to pick up our luggage from the snow coach and one of the hotel staff said they found bear tracks outside the general store earlier that morning.
The above picture looks like a photo of nothing, but I wanted to capture a snow flea or springtail. We learned that these tiny little guys are able to "jump" further than anything else relative to their size. If we could jump the same distance as them we'd be able to fling ourselves over the Empire State Building in one bound. Pretty crazy!
If you look right in the center of the above picture you can see a little trail in the snow. This was a slide made by the otters into the river. We saw quite a few animals on during our trip but sadly we didn't get to see the otters or a moose. But, I think other than those two animals we got to see pretty much everything we named on our list before arriving.
Needle Ice! Another cool winter phenomenon we learned about on our trip. It forms when the ground is over 32 degrees, but the air is below freezing. Once someone pointed it out to us and taught us about it we found it everywhere. I'm glad one of our friends grabbed the photo so I didn't forget to write about it.
Bobby Socks Trees - these are petrified lodgepole pine trees that sucked up the mineral water from the hot springs and eventually died where they stood. You can see the characteristic white bottoms best on the left hand side of this photo. Again, I'm bummed I didn't grab a better photo of them to share, but one of our friends took this and you can see them pretty well here. They give the area the look of a bomb site.
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