Yellowstone Day Two

I can't remember right now why we didn't stay in West Yellowstone for the night.  Not sure if I looked for hotels and didn't find any or if I'd read something negative so I decided to stay away or if I just really wanted to go to Big Sky, MT.  This is not a real town so isn't even in my brand new atlas but Google knows where it is!  So, that's what we did.  The drive was beautiful but it was late and dark.  The hotel was beautiful too but it was pretty far away.  We should have stayed in West Yellowstone (it looked perfectly lovely) but we didn't so be it. Big Sky is now on my list of places to return to, our stay there was very brief.  So, we had to travel a bit in the morning to get back to Yellowstone.  My big mistake this day was to book a rafting trip out of Cody, WY at 3pm.  My bit of advice to anyone who may go to Yellowstone: Don't have a set time that you have to leave.  There was road construction that slowed us way down.  A couple places where you have to sit and wait while the traffic coming the other way had their turn and then we have ours.  We had two place like this that ate up about 30 minutes.  There are also these things called buffalo jams.  This is when buffalo cause a huge traffic jam because all the cars are going very slowly past to take pictures or people are taking selfies/getting gored.  There was an ambulance on the other side but we didn't really see why.  There's also just too much to see and there's already no way you can see it all so don't rush this!  Btw, after a brief period of panic as there was no data connection to tell me how long it would take us to get to Cody from where we were in the park and no phone service to call them, I did manage to get a call through to Karen in Washington to have her googlemap it and then managed to call the tour place in Cody and get things all nicely rearranged!  Thank goodness, because without this we would have had to skip the best place; the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone!

                 Gosh I love da waterfalls.  The geysers are cool but I'm definitely a waterfall girl!

                                Ohhhhhhhhhh so THIS is why they call it Yellowstone!

              This beautiful place is the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone and it was breathtaking.
                        There was actually a couple that got engaged while we were there!

 My camera's zoom is outstanding.

But sometimes I can't hold still enough to get a perfectly crisp picture from so far away.

This rough and tumble character was making his way up the giant hill back toward the park as we were heading out.  Where we saw him there was nothing but guard rail on one side and mountain on the other.  He had a long way to go.