Today we got our first taste of what Yellowstone is all about. We got up at 7 this morning and got some breakfast at the hotel. It was fairly warm at Gardiner after breakfast. We then meet up with our tour guide Mike. We talked about our majors and what everyone plans to do with their future. We loaded up into the tour van and took off to our first stop, Mammoth Springs. Here, we meet up with Travis Wyman. His expertise is bear and elk biology. He gave us a talk about the bears and the elk management history in the park. It was very informative and important information to understand how and why the elk and bear populations are managed today. We then saw a few elk in the town of Mammoth. This is the closest I have ever been to elk that were not in a zoo. We also stopped at the hot springs in Mammoth and learned about the geology that created the terraces. I am in a Geology class so this was very related to what we are learning right in the classroom right now. From here, we went to Roaring Mountain and took the ph of the water. It was very acidic compared to the neutral water in Mammoth. We then had lunch at a picnic area off of the main road. After lunch, we found wolf tracks in a patch of snow behind the picnic area. That was very exciting to see. Later in the day, we went to Canyon. We went for a short hike here. The landscape on this hike was the reason I wanted to go to Yellowstone. There was a huge, steep canyon with the Yellowstone River running on the bottom. At the end of the night, we went to go talk to Mike and Ashia about climate change. They had very good data and great stories about their hike into the Trident. This hike sounds really fun, but it isn’t something I think I would ever do.