A
long, amazing day!! Got up early and
left the cabins by 8:15 and headed to the Bison National Range. Wow! What a place was that!! Animal heaven! We saw lots of mule deer including a bachelor
herd of mule deer. They were in the
final phases of losing their felt. So
fun to watch them. And then there was a bear family (Mom and 3 cubs) that we
became enchanted with. Cheri spotted the
mother from afar as a black dot on a mountain, near an evergreen tree. We stopped and zeroed in on her with Cheri's
zoom lens. We drove around a few loops of the road to get closer, and began
seeing her cubs tagging along behind. We finally got to a turn out in the road
where we could park the car. We grabbed our cameras and caught the family as
they were coming toward us. They were
behind the fence- in area, so we were able to get out of our car and start
capturing them in our cameras. The fun
was in watching the cubs playing with each other for a little bit, and then
running to catch up with mom. Dottie got some of their antics on a short
video-- so precious! We also saw a prong
horn sheep and his harem, a big Horn sheep so close to the road we could see
the whites of his eyes., osprey, a kestrel, bison ( little black dots) who were
already rounded up and corralled safely but too
far away from the road to be photographed as anything but dots or Black
blobs. The landscape within the park was stunning. In the course of the 3 hour
trip, we ascended 2000 feet from where we drove in by the welcome center. No shortage of animals to view and
photograph. As we were driving on
toward our destination in Bozeman, the rain began. Perfect timing.
We
arrived in Bozeman around 7 pm, and celebrated the long day with margaritas and
the last beer. We had traveled over 2,700
miles on this trip with John driving about 2,500 of those miles! One wonderful, fun, amazing trip of a
lifetime.
