Gardiner, MT

We've never seen a creek run through the tall grass and on grass. During rainfalls, but never constantly when it's not raining, but this one did! Hunter and Christian hand caught a trout in this river and ate it for supper!! Below is a "before and after" photo of the fish!!
This looks so much like squash, but it must not be. It grows all around here whatever it is.




If you look closely you will see a small white speck which is our camper as we look down at it from the top of the mountain. We enjoyed this drive to the top. Six miles took us an hour to drive because it was a dirt road.
We leave Gardiner after staying here a week! The weather was usually sunny and in the upper 70s, lows in the 30-40s. Colder when we drove into Yellowstone going up in elevation.
Nice town. Reminded us of a college town though with it's bars and casinos.

We leave for Helena.

Gardiner, MT

This was our awesome campground in Gardiner, Eagle Creek. We were on top of a mountain and could see for miles. We could also see the north entrance to the park from here and it's Mammoth Hot Springs!

I smelled mint and I had to find it! I knew my nose wasn't fooling me. I was amazed when I looked down to find this wonderful smelling herb growing wild next to this creek. One afternoon Steve wanted to drive up a dirt road that ran next to the campground. He knew it led up the mountain, so off we went to discover what lay ahead! It was magnificent! Now we could see even more miles of Montana! There weren't many trees where our campground was nor were there many in the town, but up here there were plenty of beautiful evergreen trees!!

The North entrance to the park and Mammoth Hot Springs. One of the main highlights of Yellowstone! The rock around the springs is white, so it is easy to see from a great distance.There is a park sitting across from the entrance to the park where we found a family of elk lounging.

The town of Gardiner.

Wyoming

This is one of the tunnels you travel through to go from Wapiti to Cody. The tunnel past this one is about a quarter of a mile long. The Buffalo Bill Dam is to the left of the tunnel here. Yellowstone River meanders around this road all the way to the park entrance.

We move north to Gardiner, MT to enter Yellowstone on the north side. Since Yellowstone is 2.2 million acres it has 5 separate entrances and we wanted to see what this side had to offer especially since so many people were bragging about the scenery there.
On our way we saw this pink post office in Bear Creek, MT. Tiny! Some of the photos are views from the car on our trip.
We stopped for lunch at a city park called Hawkins Park. It was awesome that there was a tiny log cabin that had been moved from it's original place and put here at this park. The names of the students that the teacher taught are listed on the outside of the cabin.




We stopped halfway and stayed in Livingston. There are campgrounds all along the main road and so we just pulled over when we were ready to stop.