Yellowstone in a Day

One of the beautiful things about living in Montana is the proximity to amazing public lands. Yellowstone, the worlds first national park, is so close to us that we can reasonably make it a day trip. So we did. We left home at 6:51am and arrived back home at 10:10pm. We saw 35+ species of birds including a new species for us- the Harlequin Duck. I had read somewhere that there is a almost always a Harlequin duck population living in Le Hardy’s Rapids in YNP, just south of the Hayden Valley, so I thought, “why not take the kids out of the smoke filled valley and run down to see if they really live there”. They do. We saw them. We also watched a Perregrine go into a stoop and hit something. We saw a Golden Eagle taking a bath in the Yellowstone. And we did the entire Grand Loop. We had lunch at Canyon and dinner at the bar in Gardner that makes the second best pizza in Montana. Then we came home rested up for Saturday. But that’s another post! Not a lot of hiking- only about 12,000 steps at the end of the day, but nature aplenty!