A visit to Yellowstone National Park – Album #1

We spent a week exploring Yellowstone National Park.  What an incredible place! I have lots of photos to edit.  Here is the first bunch.  We spent our first night in Bozeman, Montana, and then drove down Paradise Valley from Livingston, Montana, to Gardiner. We traveled along the Yellowstone River, as it flowed north to its eventual meeting with the Missouri River in North Dakota.

It had snowed in the higher elevations.  These mountains are part of the Absaroka Range on the east side of Paradise Valley.

We stayed at the Grizzly Den Cabin, an Airbnb about 5 miles north of Gardiner on the Old Yellowstone Road. (Click an image to see it larger.)

Upon our arrival, we were greeted by a beautiful double rainbow.

In the river just outside are cabin was an island. The owner told us that bears liked to bed down on the island. But, all we saw were these elk. Within a few hundred yards of our cabin were about 100 elk in what looked like three different harems.

A prominent landmark near our cabin was Cinnabar Mountain, with the unusual red formation that the sun nicely highlighted in this photo. The feature was named “the Devil’s Slide” by members of the Washburn-Langford-Doane Expedition in 1870 and captured in a drawing  byThomas Moran the following year when he was part of the Hayden Geological Survey.

The drive from the Grizzly Den Cabin to Gardiner was along the Old Yellowstone Road, a dirt road that traveled along the base of the Gallatin Mountain Range.

At 10,969 feet, Electric Peak is the tallest mountain in the Gallatin Range. Electric Peak was given its name by members of they Hayden Geological Survey in 1871.

I loved the texture of the landscape along the Old Yellowstone Road.

A pronghorn seen along the Old Yellowstone Road.

After traveling four miles or so along the Old Yellowstone Road, you come over a hill and get your first view of Gardiner. Montana. On the right in this photo you can see the Roosevelt Arch, the north entrance to the park. The large building in the foreground of the town is the Yellowstone research building.

A view of main street Gardiner.

I took several pictures of the iconic Roosevelt Arch. The arch was build by the U.S. Army in 1903. At the time, the Army supervised the park from Fort Yellowstone in Mammoth Springs. The National Park Service was not established until 1916.

President Teddy Roosevelt laid the cornerstone of the arch in 1903.

“For the benefit and enjoyment of the people,” words from the Organic Act of 1872, which established Yellowstone as the first national park in the world.

The light on the arch seemed to be different each morning.

This bull elk was keeping a watchful eye on his harem near the arch. The harem spent most of its time in and around Gardiner. We often saw them on the high school football field.

As soon as we entered the park the first day of our visit, we came across on confrontation between this bull elk and another that was showing a little too much interest in this bull’s harem.

The rut was on during our visit and the air frequently filled with the bugling of male elk.

The Gardner River (spelled differently than the town) as it flows out of the park to the town of Gardiner, where it flows into the Yellowstone River.

Looking back toward Gardiner from Mammoth Hot Springs, the headquarters of Yellowstone National Park.