Day 16 & 17

Day 16 Yellowstone National Park
As Yellowstone is enormous we decided to break its enormity down into two days; the first day we would do the touristy bits, i.e. the geysers, Old Faithful etc, and the second day would would go into the less busy north of the park in search of wildlife.
We began the day by driving to a new campsite; hoping to escape the cold temperatures of the previous night. We arrived, set up our tent promptly and then began our trip down the geyser filled western side of the park. We started off at the Steam Boat geyser, the largest in the park when it erupts however it has not gone off since 2005. We continued along stopping periodically to gaze at the various blue pools and multicolour muds of the numerous areas of thermal activity. By around 3pm we arrived at the Old Faithful geyser, the most famous in the park and probably the world. Old Faithful goes off around every 72 minutes and with this predictability it attracts large crowds. In fact the geyser is surrounded by several rows of benches for spectators. We waited and the geyser went off as predicted, spewing water 20 meters into the air and the crowd went wild!
After the Old Faithful experience we drove around the rest of the loop stopping off at Yellowstone canyon to view the spectacular waterfalls. We arrived back at our campsite prepared for what was to be an incredibly cold nights sleep.

Day 17 Yellowstone's north and Bozeman Montana
And it was. The temperature at night got down to near 0C and neither of us had brought clothes that could insulate us against these fierce June temperatures. After we had packed up the frost tinged tent we headed off into the north. By around 11am the temperature was back up into the high 20s, how does one prepare for that kind of temperature variation? Anyhow we drove into the north in search of bears. We instead found hundreds and hundreds of bison grazing on the wide planes. We also encountered dear, chipmunks, mountain sheep, and elk. As we thought all hope was lost we did see a black bear walking over a distant hill. In Yellowstone one can normally tell what type of animal it is by the size of the crowd of cars that have pulled of the road. Small crowds = gophers or goats, whilst large crowds = bears or wolves.
By around 2 we left the park through the northern exit headed for Bozeman two hours to the north. Bozeman is a small college town, home of Montana State University. It seems to be rather cool, well at least by Montana terms. We checked into a cheep motel ready for some non-freezing sleep.

Tomorrow we drive north to Glacier National Park, Canada and then Seattle, this does however mean it will be a while before the next update so our apologies but we will try to keep people posted.

We have already driven over 4000 miles, through 14 states and three time zones but there is yet more to go.