Wildlife

So for the past few days, as well as today and tomorrow, I've been in the the backcountry office. This mostly consists of issuing backcountry permits, recommending hiking trails, and answering visitors questions. It is small, confining, lonely, and at times frustrating. However, I am getting much better at conversations with visitors, and I admit that I know the trails well because of the topo-maps that I stare at all day.

But yesterday after I got off work, myself and Sara got a well deserved break and went out to the Lamar valley in search of wolves. Well first, we actually went to the Tower General store and got ice cream. We went west and as we were passing the junction of the Soda Butte Creek and the Lamar River, Sara spotted a beaver on the side of the road in a small runoff of the river. We immediately pulled off and started looking at it. It was so adorable! It made little chewing sounds as it was eating.....well, whatever it was eating. I have pictures of us near it, but I'm still trying to figure out how to post pictures on this.

Next we came across a group of people, and their scopes, looking upon a carcass with 3 grizzly bears and a wolf on it. We found our wolf! Unfortunately we were so far away that we could only see it through other people's scopes. Not even our binoculars were strong enough to get a good look at it. But the visitors here were really nice and let us look through some of their strong scopes. We got pretty good views of the three bears and the wolf.

Next we continued on to trout lake. We went up a steep hill about a half mile until we reached the lake. Since it was so late, and no one was there, we saw the female otter and her pups playing in the water. We sat quietly and watched for about 5-10 min and it was about nine o' clock. So we turned around and hiked back to the car, talking loudly as to scare away any bears.

On our way back as we were passing little America, we saw a black bear not 30 yards off the road. So our whole hour and a half adventure had great wildlife sightings.

I think I just figured out how to post a picture, with a post, so I'm going to post a map of the Lamar valley to show the areas we were at. Click on the picture to make it bigger.