Wednesday, September 14, 2011 Bozeman, Montana

7:00 am

The temperature is +8 C, with a high predicted of +22 C.

10:50 am Geocaching

I had 4 virtual Earthcaches loaded in my Montana 600 GPS unit for today's trip. All were in Yellowstone National Park and would be my first searches in the state of Wyoming. I found the first one without difficulty.

• GC23081 - That's not a rock!

My GPS unit led me directly to this petrified tree trunk in front of the information bureau at Mammoth.



This was my first find in the state of Wyoming, and my 45th in the USA.

10:00 PM Life

This was a full day. We left Bozeman, heading for Yellowstone National Park, at 8:00 in the morning and arrived back at 8:30 in the evening.

Our first stop was at Livingstone, noted for its coffee shops, where we had breakfast in a rustic cafe.

Once in Yellowstone National Park we stopped at Mammoth to find the answers to an Earth cache (see above).

At this point we changed our plans for the day. The weather looked fairly good and the forecast seemed to suggest that it might get worse over the next couple of days so we decided to drive the Beartooth highway. This is considered to be one of the most scenic trips in the US with the road reaching an elevation of over 10,000'. It was indeed well worth the drive. We saw a number of White-breasted Nuthatches and a Clark's Nutcracker near the top of the Beartooth road.

A few photos in Yellowstone on the way to the Beartooth road:

Photos along the Beartooth road:

After we arrived at Red Lodge we decided to drive south to Cody, Wyoming and then head west back into Yellowstone NP and then north through the park and back to Bozeman. We saw numerous bison, a few pronghorn antelope and a few elk while we were in the park. The overall scenery and wildlife were the main attractions as we had seen the geysers on a previous trip.

Entering Yellowstone at the East entrance:

It was dark by the time we arrived at Bozeman. The information sheet in our room indicated they stopped serving food at 9 PM so we rushed to the motel's bar. We made it with 1 minute to spare, only to find that they serve food until 10 PM.

It was a long day but very satisfying. Both Yellowstone and the Beartooth road were a delight.