Today we visited the Mammoth Site! This is an archaeological site where many many Mammoths have been uncovered. It appears that a pit of sorts was present here and became a trap where many Mammoths died and their remains were preserved.
The Mammoth site is impressive and well designed for educating visitors. Various points of interest are marked with numbered flags etc and along the walking path there are numerous auto guide stops where you can listen to a description of what you are viewing.
Depending on time and day, you can also watch scientists at work examining samples.
At the end of the visit is an area with two hands-on displays. Below is a photo and linked a video of the Stream Table. We ended up spending quite a while experimenting with the water and sediment movement.
For our first full day in Yellowstone we began at Artists Point along the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone before sunrise. It was cold and dark! Our selfies turned out less than optimal ... however look! Proof we were there:
The next part of the day was spent driving around, watching for wildlife. As it turns out, Bison are everywhere within Yellowstone! (actually they're largely concentrated in two different valleys, however it felt like they were everywhere!)
As we continued our drive around the park towards the Grand Prysmatic Spring (listening to our GyPSy guide the whole way and stopping as recommended) we came to Firehold Falls. The End.
Continuing south, we arrived and suited up for our hike on the Fairy Falls Trail to overlook the spring! This trail was overpopulated and not at all challenging. But the view was worth the annoyance!
To make our trip to Grand Prismatic complete, after hiking to the overlook, we walked back to our can and drove down to the Midway Geyser Basin. Parking was insane, but Hubby's skills overcame and we walked the boardwalk over/next to the spring and some of its neighbors. This was a cool experience, but I would not recommend it in lieu of the hike. The spring is just so massive you cannot truly appreciate the view from up close.
Another proof of existence selfie:
A neighboring Geyser:
Close up of Grand Prismatic Spring:
One of Wifey's favorite therman features in Yellowstone seems to be a bit anticlimactic, but are really awesome .... mud pots as seen below. These are literally pools of boiling mud!
These posts are colored blue due to mineral deposits from the steam coming off the nearby hot spring!
Leaving the Midway Geyser Basin, we continued south along the southern loop. We hoped that Norris Geyser Basin might be open again. It wasn't; but we did enjoy driving by lake yellowstone and generally checking out the amazing scenery and wildlife.
We visited the Wright Brothers National Memorial during our time in the Outer Banks! We enjoyed learning all about their many attempts, failures, and eventual success at controlled, manned flight! And we took a few selfies while we were there! This was Hubby & Wifey's second trip to the Memorial and Ms. Karen's first!
You can walk the path and distance of the first 4 flights. We didn't this trip :)
Monday morning we loaded up our rental car and drove south to the heart of the Outer Banks and visited the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site on Roanoke Island. We began our visit to the site with a tour of the visitors center. Wifey spent most of that visit chatting it up with the Park Ranger after noticing her name tag which included the "I" handshape and the word "sign".
We hiked two trails at the historic site, visiting an archaeological wall which served an unknown purpose as well as the site of the Freedman's colony.
The first trail we hiked was the Thomas Hariot Trail. It is about .3 miles and is a loop. Of particular enjoyment are several off-shoots from the main loop which allow access to the beach areas and the bay.
The dirt path slowly narrows and changes to sand ....
And the next thing you know, you're looking at the water :)
After the Thomas Hariot Trail, we decided to tackle the Freedom Trail. It is a 1.25 mile each way out and back trail which leads to the opposite side of Roanoke Island and the site of the Freedman's Colony. For slaves escaping north on the Underground Railroad, making it across the water to this island meant freedom.
The Freedman's Trail again ended with a beautiful view of the water!
On our way back to the starting point, we had a little fun with my ever present selfie-stick!
The main goal of our trip this October was to visit the Ocean!
We got lucky and the rain backed off for a while Sunday afternoon so we took a quick walk on the beach! I don't have much narritation for this post, but here is a photomontage and quick video! If you're reading on mobile, you'll want to click the link.
Thanks to Wifey's mom we obtained shuttle tickets for Zion National Park for 11:00 am today! These tickets went on sale (at $1 each) well before we planned our trip out west, and again the day before at 9 am Mountain time. Sadly for us, at 9 am Mountain, we were on Bert and Pumpkin! Anyway, due to the time of our tickets we slept in a bit and began getting ready around 8 or 8:30 am. Wifey did a double check on the requirements for using the tickets and noticed a limitation that the named purchaser of the tickets had to be there for check-in. Our tickets were under Wifey's dad's name!
Do we risk it? We found an old ID with Wifey's maiden name that maybe we could use to talk our way on. It'd sure be a shame to drive to the park, and not be able to get in! Maybe we could just switch our Zion and Bryce days and buy new shuttle tickets under our names .... in 30 minutes when they went on sale! Cue ... more debate! Risks v. Rewards!
We decided to give it a try and were refreshing the Recreation.gov website at 9:00 mountain sharp. Between 300 and 400 tickets were available per hour. Wifey added 7:00 am tickets to our basket. She second guessed and went back to the home page ... now around 40 were available per hour (it was about 9:02). She added 8:00 am tickets instead. And we checked out. Now we were good to go for tomorrow and would head instead to Bryce today!
The drive to Bryce Canyon is about 2 hours from our AirBNB. We had lunch already packed for the day and ended up eating in enroute due to the late start. (We arrived at Bryce between 12 and 1 pm).
We looked for coffee along the way without much success, eventually stopping at a Subway with Espresso on its sign just outside the Bryce Park entrance. We received a sugary mess, but with 2 shots so we decided it was a success!
We began our experience at Bryce at the visitors center, gaining an understanding of the park layout and suggested hiking trails.
Our first stop would be at the far end of the Canyon where we listened to a ranger discuss the Grand Staircase and the geology of this area.
LOVE the Social Distancing Stickers on the ground!
From here we slowly made the drive back to the front portion of the canyon for an additional ranger discussion of the formation of Hoodoos, taking pictures of the scenery along the way.
We saw some fantastic scenery ... along with some evidence of #COVIDTRAVEL
Hubby decided to share with the world HIS view for most of the trip :)
After arriving in time, we 'enjoyed' the second ranger talk. Honestly, it was in the sun and pretty duplicative of the displays inside the visitors center.
Upon its conclusion, however, we embarked on a 3 mile hike of the Hoodoos! We took the Queens Garden Trail down to where it intersected with the Navajo trail and then followed the Wall Street portion of the Navajo trail back up the canyon. See below 2 videos of our hikes - one in real time and the other in 8X speed.
The view from within the canyon is stunning and worth the effort to hike down. The bottom of the canyon is full of trees which provide a pleasant shade for the middle section of the hike!
We were even able to pull out the selfie stick and capture us together :) Aweee!
As a reward for our hike (a reward we're pretty sure is actually meant for kids, but who cares!!) we received these stickers!
Back on top of the canyon, we spent some time taking pictures of each other instead of the scenery. You may have noticed these pop up on our FB profiles :)
