This trip was a unique experience. While the weather wasn’t the best, we got to experience quite a lot. We saw many grizzlies, a few black bears, a fox, some coyotes, many elk and bison, and multiple wolves. I wish we would have had more time to get out of the vans and do more hiking and exploring of the park. We spent many many hours driving around, which was nice because we got to see a lot of the park, but it was very a very minimal touristy part of the park. Like most tourists that go to Yellowstone, we didn’t get off the beaten trail very much.
One thing I really enjoyed was talking to our wolf tracker guides. They both have done work for the Wolf Project. They gave some insight and advice to those of us who want to get into wildlife research. The major points they advised were, 1. Get any hands-on experience you can, even if its unpaid and 2. Make connections with people in the field you want to get into.
Our last day with the wolf trackers was probably my favorite day. I really enjoyed getting to watch the wolves cross the river and interact with each other. We also got to watch wolves with Rick McIntyre. He is a retired National Park ranger and author who has spent over 25 years watching the wolves of Yellowstone. He gets up and watches the wolves every morning religiously, to the point where if he is late people go to his house to check on him and make sure he’s alive. The little community that is created with the regular wolf watchers, guides, and park staff is pretty cool.
Yellowstone is a beautiful park with lots of cool history, however I will never recommend anyone go there in the summer. The amount of tourists there, even in the fall was too many in my opinion. Every time we stopped with the wolf trackers, there were multiple other people that would come over and ask what we were seeing, where we seeing it, and if they could look through our scopes.
I enjoyed getting to know the girls in the class a bit better and make some new memories with some new friends. Our last day exploring the thermals at Grand Prismatic and Fountain Paint Pots was pretty cool! I definitely recommend hiking to the overlook at Grand Prismatic. We were fortunate to get to experience 3 geysers (Fountain, Jet, and Clepsydra). The other group there only got to see Fountain geyser going off. When we were there the three were going off continuously or periodically ever few minutes for over 10 minutes. It felt like a pretty unique and special experience.