2012/07 Western USA trip - Lamar Valley |
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Thursday July 12th
The rain had stopped and we had a clear cold morning. The first job was to investigate a failing turn lamp on the trailer. The light was getting steadily dimmer and then went out. Then the corresponding lamp on the camper went out too! After a lot of crawling around we discovered that the trailer lamp, which has twelve LED lights, had cracked. Moisture had got in and had been killing the LEDs one by one until it finally shorted the unit out and blew the truck’s fuse, knocking out the camper light too. Before the days of LEDs, I could have fixed this by buying a $2 bulb at any auto store, but now I would have to order a replacement from the factory and hope that we could get back without the police noticing. A bad sign was that we only got about ten miles down the road before a well-wisher waved us down “You’ve got a light out.”
After shopping for propane, fuel, and food, we didn’t get away until noon. We were leaving Yellowstone, but going out through the Lamar Valley in the northeast corner of the park, far enough away that leaving would take the rest of the day.
We were getting glimpses of elk as we drove around the lake, but never got to see them clearly. We found a side road that took us along the shore and into Bridge Bay. We stopped for lunch at Gull Point, with a view across the lake.
On our way north we crossed the Hayden Valley for the last time. The bison were still there and the light was better. This picture shows the meadows backed by the Yellowstone River. Much of America’s prairies once looked like this.
Past Tower Falls we turned onto the road through the Lamar Valley. Although it has little in the way of hot springs and geysers, it also has little traffic. The valley is just beautiful and almost unique; most lush and fertile valleys elsewhere in the country have been covered by farms.
We soon came upon a female black bear leading a couple of cubs. She was marching quickly parallel to the road and ignoring the traffic, moving fast enough that the cubs had to scramble to keep up.
There were bison scattered around the landscape, rather like you might see wildebeest in the Serengeti. With the exception of us tourists the scene may have looked much the same 10000 years ago. The bison were rolling in the dust, crossing the river, and occasionally sparring with each other. They were also probably keeping an eye out for wolves as the Lamar Valley is home to the park’s reintroduced wolf packs.
Swallows were swooping around us picking off bugs; they had built their nests into cliffs and building eaves.
The foreground of this picture of the valley shows a small family group of pronghorn walking down to the river. As with many families the children were bickering and aggravating each other.
Our last stop was at Soda Butte, a rock tower that’s not a butte, but rather a dried up spring. Nor is it made of soda, but rather of calcium 
carbonate. The main attractions there were the dozens of swallows, nesting in the butte, and wheeling around us. Down in the shrubs were these colourful finches.
We left the park and the first place outside is Cooke City, a strange little place, cut off in the winter, except for snowmobiles, when the
highway is closed. We found a campground in the Gallatin national forest, just outside town on Soda Butte Creek. We had a meadow to ourselves if we ignored all the warnings about visits from grizzly bears. All we saw that evening though were a few mule deer.
Up in Okotoks it was Stewart’s birthday and they’d all gone to collect their new trailer, hard-sided but light enough to be pulled by their Durango. They celebrated both events with a birthday dinner.