Yellowstone Day 2: Lamar Valley

We let the kids take a snooze in the car as we drove to and through the Lamar Valley.  Ben and I enjoyed the beautiful mountain vistas, hillsides covered in wildflowers, and then we found the huge buffalo herd.  The herd was positioned across the river, so we left the parking area and hiked down to the river’s edge.  We enjoyed seeing the buffalo closer up, and the kids loved skipping stones!

Burn out trees, and wildflowers

Henry enjoyed the rocks.  I pulled several out of his mouth!

Nursing calf

The kids had just watched the buffalo episode on Wild Kratts and they were excited to see a real buffalo taking a dust bath, just like in the show!

After leaving the buffalo herd we encountered a lot of cars pulled off the edge of the road…where there wasn’t really a pull-off location.  We couldn’t see anything so we asked another person what everyone was looking at.  “A grizzly cub.”  We were so excited because the kids had been wanting to see a bear!  I took the kids into the field for a closer look (through binoculars, and with my bear spray handy), and Ben watched from the vehicle since there wasn’t a parking spot.  We watched the cub walk over trees and jump around in the forest, all from a safe distance.

We saw all of the animals on our “bucket list” except wolves (rare sightings) and moose.  It was a great day in Yellowstone, but we had another surprise in store for the kids!