Riding Mountain

Last month, we went to Churchill, Manitoba to find polar bears. We succeeded, seeing six in our four days in town. And it was really finding five in our last day in the Churchill Wildlife Management Area, which was exactly the place we were supposed to find white bears.

Our trip to Churchill was a group tour. We've taken these from time to time over the last 13 or so years when it really seems there are advantages to have someone else take care of the logistics of getting from Point A to Point B. This tour was a nine day tour, with the Churchill part of the tour occupying all or parts of days five through eight. Before we went to Churchill, we met our group in Winnipeg. After that, we spent two nights in a place called Riding Mountain National Park, a Parks Canada property about two or so hours north of Winnipeg by bus.

The theme of the tour that we took was Canada's Big Five, a play on Africa's Big Five wildlife designation, which we've searched for a number of times since we started traveling to sub-Saharan Africa in 2015. There of course is no universally acknowledged Canadian Big Five; it's something our tour operator made up and assigned as the polar bear, the beluga whale, the moose, the black bear and the bison. Churchill was supposed to cover the first two of those animals. Riding Mountain was supposed to cover the last three. Although in reverse, so to speak.

Time to report on our time in Riding Mountain.

How gorgeous is the picture above, by the way? There was lots of this in Riding Mountain. Early morning with mist coming off the water. It's absolutely spectacular. If you've ever seen a moose in the wild, it looks like a perfect place to find moose, right? 

We'll come back to that.

Welcome to Riding Mountain National Park.

Our time in Riding Mountain got off to an historic start, and by that I mean we entered through the historic, 1930s East Gate. At one time, most gates at Parks Canada National Parks looked something like the picture above. They are now all gone. Except for the East Gate at Riding Mountain. It's the last one in existence and it looks terrific. This was a special way to enter this Park.

Our two nights in Riding Mountain were completely immersive. And by that, I mean that once we got into the Park, we remained in the Park. Our hotel (in the town of Wasagaming) was in the Park. We ate in the Park. And we did everything else for about 36 hours that we could have done in the Park. We entered and we didn't leave. We even had lunch served to us in the bandstand in the main park by the lake in Wasagaming and we ate a catered, three-course meal by the side of a (different) lake in the Park proper.

So about that wildlife...

Our wildlife watching in the Park began with our initial drive from the East Gate to the town of Wasagaming (pronouced WA-sa-GA-ming in Hopwood phonetics) followed by four hours-long evening and morning drives (that's two evening drive and two morning drives) to specific locations within the Park. The sun comes up early in central Manitoba in early August and it goes down late, so drives starting at 6 a.m. and ending at 9 p.m. are still daylight drives.

Our safari vehicle for our two days is shown in the picture above. Small and nimble I guess but photographing wildlife from the vehicle is done by opening the tiny windows at the top of the glazing on each side. Inconvenient? Sure! Until I figured out how to position my body, I got a bunch of shaky photographs. But small windows admit fewer mosquitoes. And I don't think I have seen as many mosquitoes in any one spot in recent memory as I saw in Riding Mountain. Thank God we didn't encounter blackflies, which our guides swore were around in profusion as recently as the prior week (deet repels mosquitos but not blackflies). Suffice it to say there was much mosquito swatting going on in that van or bus or whatever it is really classified as.

So we are about 20 minutes in to our first wildlife drive on the first evening we are in the Park and lo and behold by the side of the road is a black bear eating some berries. Like right by the side of the road and 20 minutes might be actually further into our actual drive than when we found this bear. It might have been 10 minutes. How great is this? And legitmately, like our entire busful of tourists is making a ton of excited noises when we pull over for a better look.

Bus stops, everyone stands up, tiny windows get opened and some shaky picture taking ensues. And it's not just one black bear. It's a mother and cub. How amazing is this? We are on a Canada's Big Five (made up, I realize still) tour and like 10 minutes (yes, I'm officially revising the number...) into our first search for the black bear / moose / bison portion of the Big Five and we see two black bears. Damn! How great is this?

And yes, I realize the pictures above just show one bear. Blame it on the rushed, shaky picture taking.

Of course...they took off. I'm not saying it was all the noise coming from the bus loaded with 18-20 or so wildlife tourists, but it might have been. I mean, it's difficult to really assess how loud you are being outside of the bus when you are inside of the bus, especially when you are super excited and actually one of the sources of the noise. But it might have been the noise coming from the bus.

Still, we are between 10 and 15 minutes into the first of four wildlife drives and we spot two bears. Go us!!!

We didn't see another black bear the entire tour.

One of our guides demonstrating how a bear might have made the claw marks on the Stop sign pole; this does not count as a bear sighting.

Before we get to some things that we DID see in Riding Mountain, what is the deal with Canada and black bears and our vacations? This is the second summer in a row that we've explored some Parks Canada National Parks where bears allegedly live in at least reasonable numbers and we have seen fewer bears combined than we can count on one hand. Last summer...one black bear. This summer...two. And it's not like we spent an hour or two total or something roaming around looking for wildlife. We spent at least (and I'm guessing here) 25 hours each summer looking for bears. At least.

Admittedly, the one look we got last summer was spectacular.

So yes, we saw bison. And yes, that's exciting. It's not every day that we get to see bison. By the same token, we've seen bison in a number of places over the last decade or so, including Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota and North Dakota. We've seen way more bison in most of each of our days bison-watching than we've seen black bears in our lives.

Is it difficult to find bison in Riding Mountain National Park? The answer to that is yes and no. We went looking for bison twice on this trip. We found one and only one on our first drive and way too many to reflect any sort of accurate count the second time. I'd love to report that we got lucky the first time and super lucky the second time but the bison in RMNP are in an enclosure that's fenced and cattle-guarded to prevent the bison from leaving the enclosure.

Granted, it's a big enclosure but these are some large mammals. I'd say we got lucky on the second drive and somewhat unlucky on the first.

But these were also some particularly good looks. Rare are the times I've been super close to a bison. On this trip, there were a number of these animals right alongside the road next to our van. Like less than three feet away. We also saw some nursing going on and let me say that the force with which a baby bison slams his or head into their mother's udder is concerning in its viciousness. These are some powerful strikes to coax a little milk out of mom. I can't imagine that it's comfortable in any way for the mother. Still...when you have kids, sometimes it's not easy, I guess.

The calving was cool. I still feel bad for the moms, though.

We also managed to find a good number of active or abandoned beaver lodges in our time driving around the Park and we actually managed a look at an actual live beaver. My best picture is immediately above. The beaver is the small thing (it's just its head) in the water right above the grass at the bottom of the picture. The shiny ripple on the right side of the photograph is the beaver's wake as it's moving across the pond.

And yes, we also found birds. I mean why wouldn't we find birds? My best five bird pictures from the Park are below and feature the best photographs I've ever taken of a yellow-bellied sapsucker (first pic); some barn swallows (second pic); and a black and white warbler (third pic). The other two (spotted sandpiper and merlin) are new species for me. Cool stuff. But we did go out on drives four times for multiple hours.

I'm not complaining exactly about the birdlife and to be fair, we weren't just birdwatching, but I can find more birds up close in a park near our home in Northern Virginia in a couple of hours than we found in four multiple hours-long wildlife drives in Riding Mountain. Maybe it sounds like that's an actual complaint and maybe it is. I need to hold on to the "best picture ever" of three individual bird species. That admittedly, I didn't need to go all the way to Canada to see.

So lots of bison, two black bears, a beaver and a few (admittedly excellent) looks at birds. What about the moose? 

No moose. We got nothing. Zero. Nada. The squadoosh. Not a one. Unless you count the two at the bottom of this post.

Ultimately and because of the moose and two black bears, Riding Mountain will go down as a bit of a disappointment for me. Do I sound spoiled? I think I do. There are only so many people on this planet that get to go explore other countries (like EVERY year) looking for all sorts of amazing wildlife and I am for sure one of them. And I'm complaining because I only saw two bears and didn't find a moose in a couple of days in a Park? Yeah, I am. Just a bit.

We understand what the expectation is for wildlife sightings on a wildlife tour and that number starts and ends with none. Seeing animals in the wild is at their pleasure, not ours. But in so many ways, this side trip was supposed to be a warm up for the main event in Churchill where we (hopefully, please hopefully) would find polar bears in the wild. But it didn't really warm us up. If anything, it made us more nervous about seeing nothing in and around Churchill.

Overall, this trip was a success for us. We wanted to see polar bears and we saw them. We also got some other unique experiences out of this trip that were supremely valuable and special that will be extolled in blog posts not yet written. Sometimes, emotions get in the way. They did here because Riding Mountain I think was advertised to us as a wildlife experience and I forgot about the wildlife guarantee discussed in the prior paragraph in this post. I need to hold on to the bison calving, the amazing bird pictures and the beaver.

The two almost moose we saw in Riding Mountain are below. So I guess we saw three black bears after all.

Tatanka

What is it about even numbered years and bison lately? In 2018, we spent some time in North Dakota's Theodore Roosevelt National Park, saw a few bison and I wrote my first bison post on this blog. Two years later, we visited Yellowstone National Park, saw a ton of bison pretty much everywhere (including outside Yellowstone) and I wrote my second bison post on this blog. Now it's 2022 and we've just returned from a visit to the southwestern corner of South Dakota where there are (you know what's coming...) a whole lot of bison.

I called that first bison post in 2018 "Bison Bison" after the animals' genus and species and to emphasize that they are NOT buffalo. I added another "Bison" with my second post. I can't in all good conscience just add another "Bison" to the name of this blog post so I'm changing things up and going with "Tatanka", which is the Lakota (or Sioux, if they are an enemy to you) word for these animals. Here goes blog post number three about bison. This has to be the last one, if for no other reason than I don't know where exactly I'd go that I haven't already seen these creatures.

Although I guess there might be some in Nebraska.

Bison on the move in Badlands National Park.

I have documented the almost extinction of the bison on my two past posts on this same topic but a refresher is probably in order: when European settlers first arrived in North America and had an opportunity to see just how many bison there were out there in what is now the United States of America, they used estimates of 30 to 60 million of these animals. In 1889, the number was down to 1,091. North of 30 million to about a thousand in about 100 years or so. It was a staggering slaughter driven by greed, cruelty and a desire to cut off one of the essential natural resources available to Native American tribes. Kill the bison, kill the people who relied on them, or so went the thinking.

If we had visited South Dakota 200 years ago, we likely would have found vast herds of bison, thousands upon thousands of these animals with enough mass to make the Earth tremble when they started running. We would have also found a thriving Lakota culture whose very spiritual and literal existence would have revolved around the animals. Food, clothing, housing and tools would have all been missing without the bison.

Fifty or so years later, there would be no bison in South Dakota. Extinct in the 1870s.

Wind Cave National Park, Black Hills.

So considering their total extinction in the state in the nineteenth century, we knew our bison-watching experience in South Dakota was likely to be way different than in a place like Yellowstone National Park, which is one of the very few places on Earth where there is a herd descended from animals that roamed in the same spot hundreds of years ago. Not that we really care about lineage of bison or anything like that. We don't need purebred bison to enjoy watching these magnificent creatures. But the ones we hoped to find in South Dakota would have been deliberately placed there. They also would be roaming a far smaller parcel of land than Yellowstone National Park, which is larger than the state of Rhode Island.

For that last reason, we thought we'd stand the best chance of finding a significant number of bison by searching in a few places. Like a couple of National Parks and a State Park.

And yes, you read that last part correct, there is a State Park (Custer State Park, site of a memorable 2020 de-pantsing incident for a tourist who ignored the "don't approach bison" warning) in South Dakota with a herd of bison. This is not the first time we'd been in a such a place. There's one in Utah also (Antelope Island State Park) but Custer has a significantly larger bison presence, or at least it did when we visited. And they are not in pens or cages or anything like that. They are roaming free (although the whole place is fenced with cattle guards where roads cross the fence line). I'm completely jealous. I can't remember the last time I went to a Virginia State Park, probably because there are none nearby (or anywhere for that matter) that have their own herd of bison. I'd be there all the time if I lived in southwest South Dakota. 

Custer State Park. The horns on the first bison are particularly impressive.

So what were we up against, here? Well, Wind Cave National Park has between 250 and 400 bison; Badlands National Park has about 1,200 or so; and Custer State Park boasts 1,000 to 1,600 at any one time. All of the Parks (not just Custer State Park) are fenced to keep the animals in a relatively small location. At Custer, the herd is managed to right-size it to its location. There are no predators large enough to take down a bison in the Park so to prevent over-grazing, some members of the herd are auctioned off every year. You might think fencing and herd-managing equates to a zoo. I can see you thinking that way; we didn't. These are still free-roaming wild animals who survive out on their own. It may not have quite been Yellowstone, but this counted for us.

And as we found out, just showing up and paying admission didn't guarantee a bison sighting. We worked for the photos that I'm posting on here. We also didn't want to find ones and twos of bison like we found four years ago in Theodore Roosevelt National Park. We really wanted to find a sizeable herd with some baby bison, considering our visit coincided pretty well with the mid-point of calving season. Who doesn't love baby bison?

Close-up. Wind Cave National Park.

We started our bison hunt last month in Wind Cave National Park and Custer State Park. The two Parks share a common boundary so driving from one to the next was extremely convenient. Both Parks are located in the Black Hills, a coniferous forest with intermittent meadows and open landscapes which in theory would make bison-spotting much more difficult than somewhere with a more open landscape. The Hills are also sacred to the Lakota and several other Native American tribes, but that's another story for another time.

Perhaps it's obvious from the pictures posted so far here but we did succeed in seeing bison at both Wind Cave and Custer. At Wind Cave, we covered the main Park drive down Highway 87 both north to south and south to north along with traveling on the gravel / dirt road called Highland Ridge Road or Route 5. That latter road is not super easy in a Toyota Camry and considering we got a good look at about three bison on the entire road (although that did include the close-up above), we probably could have skipped it and not missed out on anything. Although we had no way of knowing that ahead of time.

Highway 87 is a gorgeous winding road that takes you from prairie to forest and back to prairie with some incredible one way bridges. But the only place we saw bison on that road was at the north end on outside of the forest. And there were not that many bison along that road either. More than the gravel / dirt road but not a spectacular number. Wind Cave had the fewest bison of the three parks so perhaps that's not surprising.

Our time in Custer State Park was remarkably similar to Wind Cave. Custer has a larger herd and a brand new (...like literally brand new as of May 2022) Bison Center in the Park but we saw no more bison on our drive along the Wildlife Loop Road than we did in Wind Cave. One of the first things I do when I get back from any trip is to organize my photos and flag my favorites. Of all the bison pictures we took in South Dakota, only one Custer photo made the cut. That's not to say our experience was worse at Custer State Park than Wind Cave, but we certainly emerged with fewer keeper pictures there than we did earlier in the day. 

Last two pictures from Wind Cave. 

I'm also not saying our day searching for bison in the Black Hills wasn't worth it. It totally was. I'd definitely put it ahead of our experience in North Dakota four years ago, but we also definitely didn't get what we hoped to find. And yes, I've been on enough wildlife trips to know not to have high expectations. Our hopes for the herd and the baby bison were now pinned squarely on Badlands National Park.

2022 was not my first time at Badlands National Park. I stopped there for maybe 30 or 45 minutes on my way from Kansas City to Deadwood in 2011. We drove maybe a third of the Badlands Loop Road (the main road connecting the two primary entrances to the Park) on that visit and saw the amazing landscape characteristic of the Dakota badlands, but certainly nothing resembling any sort of sizeable wildlife. Or any wildlife at all, really. I would not have placed high hopes of Badlands salvaging my bison experience 11 years later based on that trip in 2011. This seemed risky.

It wasn't. Badlands National Park was the best thing we did in our four days in South Dakota. Hands down. We had some amazing experiences on other days. In fact, pretty much everything we did in the four days we were out doing things in South Dakota was really memorable, which is a little shocking to write. But Badlands was the best.

Two bison pictures from Badlands National Park.

We planned Badlands. We charted out a route that had us entering in the middle of the Park fairly early in the day; hoping for some bighorn sheep at Pinnacles Overlook; heading east down Badlands Loop Road; circling back through Wall (and Wall Drug!); re-entering in the middle of the Park; and finally heading west along the gravel Sage Creek Rim Road where, according to the Park's website, we were most likely to see bison.

In what turned out to be a really good omen, we found three bachelor bison before we even entered the Park. We got lucky with the bighorns shortly after that. 14 total, including one lamb, set against the gorgeous eroded landscape of the badlands that looks like some giant had taken a giant plow to the Earth and then just left the ground that way and walked away, leaving it cut and scarred as a series of valleys between sand and orange-ish colored mounds. The Badlands Loop Road winds on top of, between and around these mounds, and we hoped for a sighting of a bison or the whole herd every time we saw around the next one. We got none.

I don't know quite what it was about Badlands. Certainly the bison and the bighorn sheep sightings helped but I think more than anything else it was the landscape and the weather. The place is so different between the badlands (small b) areas and the prairies. There's such a contrast between those two but it IS just those two. It's not like Yellowstone with their five or six or seven or eight or more different environments. Just badlands and prairie. I think it helped that it was sunny and windy to keep us warm and cool. I've been in windier places for sure in my life but I don't think I've ever seen birds fly into the wind and go exactly nowhere or seen fields of grass rippled to make them like impressionist painting backgrounds the way we saw at Badlands. All of that contributed to my love of that Park the second time around. 

And yes, we DID see the herd of bison we hoped to find. We found them on Sage Creek Rim Road, just like the website suggested we would. We actually saw multiple groups of bison along that road, in bachelor groups of twos and threes and a larger herd of what also looked like an all-male herd of 20 or 25 or so. We saw more bachelor bison in Badlands than in Wind Cave and Custer combined.

The herd was the best. 50, 60, maybe 70 bison. Too many to count quickly, or even at all if we had tried because they tend not to stand still. I get that this herd we came across is tiny compared to the sizes of the groups that used to roam the prairies and the hills and the forests and badlands of what is now South Dakota. Those days are gone. For now, the herds in Badlands and places like that are the best we have. Maybe one day they'll get bigger but they'll never get back to the numbers they used to have. There's not enough contiguous open space. Humans won't allow it.

Bison as far as the eye can see. And a baby up close. Badlands National Park.

There were plenty of future bison adults in the herd too. Juvenile males who will one day compete with their brothers and cousins for the right to the herd for themselves along with newly born calfs who couldn't have been more than a few months old, pale brown and not yet the darker color of their mothers or the brood born the prior year. It's encouraging seeing species survive and it's great that all three parks we visited have this circle of life continuing, even if it will never be what it was.

I don't think I'll be writing about bison again on this blog. These creatures have been such a source of joy as they have taken us to new states as we've come closer and closer to all fifty. I'd love to re-visit Yellowstone again someday. That place was definitely the number one bison Park I've ever been to and there's so many other things to see there. But Wind Cave and Custer measured up admirably based on their herd sizes and Badlands will go down as a signature National Park experience. I'm glad I went back. It was sort of a throw-in, too obvious to pass up. It definitely turned out to be so much more than that.

Pretty satisfied with Badlands National Park.

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How We Did It

Wind Cave National Park and Badlands National Park are open year round to visitors. Each Park has a single Visitor Center. Visitor Center hours vary by season at Wind Cave. Badlands' Visitor Center is open year round, except for certain holidays, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Clicking the name of each Park in this paragraph will take you to the Parks' Operating Hours & Seasons webpage. The gift store at Badlands, by the way, is incredible. We could have spent a fortune in that place.

One of the big draws to Wind Cave is the variety of cave tours offered daily into the Park's namesake underground cavern. We elected not to explore the cave. We've been in caves before and our schedule was full enough roaming around on the surface of the Earth that day Maybe one day we'll go back underground, but it wasn't to be in South Dakota.

Custer State Park is also open year round to visitors. Services which operate in the summer may not operate all year. There is a $20 admission for a seven day pass and season passes are available. The Park's brand new Bison Center is open 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Memorial Day to Labor Day with reduced hours during other seasons. There's some good information in the Bison Center but a visit isn't going to take that long.

If you are traveling between Custer State Park and Rapid City, I'd highly recommend a drive along the Needles Highway, otherwise known as South Dakota Route 87. We drove back to Rapid City along this road and the views are truly stunning, particularly through the last tunnel hewn out of a giant boulder.

The cover picture of this post is a detail of a sculpture on the southwest corner of 6th and Main Streets in downtown Rapid City, South Dakota. There are other animals hidden in the sculpture of the native American on that street corner. The bison embedded in the figure's headdress seemed to be an appropriate cover photo to me.

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Bison Bison Bison

About two and a half years ago, we visited Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota. We wanted to visit a new state and see bison. We were successful in both efforts, although I think we never saw more than five bison together on that long weekend trip and we probably saw fewer than 50 bison total the entire time we were there. 

I called the post that I wrote about that trip Bison Bison, the animals' genus and species name, to emphasize that these creatures are not buffalo. Today's post adds another "bison" to the title because we just finished a trip where we saw way, way, way more bison than we did in 2018 in North Dakota. 

When I wrote my last bison blog post, I offered up some pretty chilling numbers: an estimated 20 to 30 million bison on the great plains before the arrival of European man reduced to 1,091 by the year 1889. Those statistics only considered bison on the great plains because that's where the slightly more than a thousand ended up. The real numbers are way worse. There are estimates out there of 30 to 60 million total bison alive before the 1800s, so it's really 60 million to 1,000 in less than a couple of centuries. It's an almost inconceivable destruction of a single species.

How did this happen? Hunting, habitat destruction, disease, the railroad, sport killing, a belief that slaying the bison would hasten the death of the Native American tribes. Take your pick. They are all significant factors. What is it about man that we feel compelled to wipe out every member of a species? Bison ranged as far east as Ohio at one point. Ohio!!!! I always think of bison as a western animal. Who'd have thought they lived that far east? Not me, certainly, but maybe that's because that's because they were wiped out in Ohio in 1802.

Bison sculpture showing Native American warrior on horseback chasing six bison. Antelope Island State Park, Utah.

There were some legitimate and half-hearted efforts made in the 1800s to preserve the herds of bison roaming the American west and midwest. Several states introduced legislation that made it illegal to waste bison meat (bison were regularly killed for hides and their bodies left to rot where they were killed) but the laws were either not enforced or vetoed by the state's governor before they became law (I'm looking at you, Kansas!). Idaho was a trailblazer of sorts in species conservation, becoming the first state to enact a law protecting the bison in 1864. Although they passed the law after all the bison in Idaho were eradicated (d'oh!!). New Mexico did the exact same stupid thing in 1880.

The United States house and senate eventually took a shot at preservation, passing a bill protecting female bison in 1874, only to see it go deliberately unsigned by President Ulysses S. Grant. Further north, Canada did us one better, actually passing sweeping protections for bison all the way into law. And then they repealed it the very next year. Overall, we as humans just weren't very serious about keeping these animals on the face of the Earth.

Thank God we didn't finish the job. Those 1,091 from 1889 have rebounded to about half a million today, although many of those 500,000 or so animals are cross-breeds somehow with cattle. There's a herd of about 500 or so in Theodore Roosevelt National Park and we saw very few of those in 2018. This year, we went big with a trip to Yellowstone National Park which has the largest wild herd in the world at 5,000 or so. Four full days in the Park would likely get us the bison viewing experience of a lifetime.

Bison herd. Lamar Valley. Yellowstone National Park. This is my favorite bison pic of the trip.

So first of all, Yellowstone is not Theodore Roosevelt National Park. It's way bigger, the landscape is significantly more varied and there are a whole ton of bison (not buffalo) everywhere. If we had wanted to spend a single day inside Yellowstone and see no bison, I'm not sure it would have been possible. We saw solitary bison around Upper Geyser Basin on day one in Yellowstone. We saw pairs and threes of bachelor bison in Hayden Valley. We saw bison freezing in the early morning throughout the western side of the Park. And we saw massive herds between Norris and Madison and in Lamar Valley.

By "massive herds" here, I don't mean in the millions or thousands or even hundreds of animals. I mean maybe 100. In 2020, that passes for massive, bison-herd-wise. We tried counting one especially large group and got to 86 before we lost count of which we had counted and which we had not. Still, 86 or maybe up to 100 is way more than the five maximum we saw at Theodore Roosevelt two years ago. 

We saw them spread across fields, running down hillsides, eating at a distance of feet from the roadside and running in a herd in the opposite lane of the road between Tower-Roosevelt and Lamar Valley as if they were moving commuters on the way to work. They were everywhere and there was a ton of time over four plus days in the Park to get some great looks at these creatures. 

Large herd of bison between Madison and Norris. Yellowstone National Park.

Closer look in Lamar Valley, Yellowstone National Park. 

One of the great things about spending so much concentrated time watching bison (or any other large animal for that matter) is that you get to appreciate both how massive these things are but also take in their smallest behaviors. An adult male bison can weigh up to 2,000 pounds and they are solid. And dangerous. I guess you could be fooled into thinking they are just shaggier cows with a bit more weight but they move way quicker and faster than any cow I've seen. You get a sense of that size when they walk or run within a couple of feet of your open car window (not kidding about the distance there). These are some large and lethal animals.

It seems like every year there's a story about someone getting gored or worse by a bison somewhere in the United States, including in Yellowstone. The most notable bison "attack" this year probably occurred in South Dakota's Custer State Park where a woman was picked up by her belt loop and tossed by a bison after getting a bit too close to a calf. What is with these people? Even if you didn't get handed a flyer describing how dangerous bison are when you enter Yellowstone (you do, by the way), what makes you want to get close to an animal with sharp horns ten times the size of a good-sized adult man?

While we didn't see anyone get attacked in our week at Yellowstone, we did see several instances of people getting uncomfortably close to bison in the Park. If something had broken the wrong way for the woman who was about five times further from her car than to the approaching bison one morning near Norris, I could have seen something seriously troubling happening. I understand the excitement of wanting to get close to these animals, but just keep your car (or at least another person) between you and them. It's just smart. 

Bison swimming, Hayden Valley, Yellowstone National Park.

Bison keeping warm near a hot spring in the below freezing early morning. Yellowstone National Park.

While you are keeping a respectful distance, watch. You might find something worth remembering.

It's always thrilling to see wildlife super close up. One of the most exciting aspects of seeing bison in particular in Yellowstone is that while we are not supposed to be approaching these animals to closer than 25 yards, there's nothing preventing you from being approached by a bison or two or twelve or more. And if there's a species that will get close to you in Yellowstone, it's the bison, the biggest species in the Park.

I feel pretty comfortable in saying that it's unlikely that a bison is going to attack your car. I'm not saying it's never happened, just that I felt pretty secure inside with the doors closed and the windows up (and mostly when they were down too for that matter) when we were in Yellowstone. But there were times I worried just a little bit which I guess made those bison encounters all the more thrilling. These animals are aggressive with one another and I don't know enough about bison to know if they are play fighting or really getting serious. There was one time that two bison in a pretty confined spot tussled with each other and then raced past our car. No danger really but there was a sense for a second that something could have gone wrong, if a bison had decided to run headlong into a large metal object. Although why would they, really?

The two aggressive bison rushing past the passenger side of the car were part of a bachelor foursome. We thought we might be subject to a second round when we saw one of the two left behind digging in the dirt with his front hoof, looking very much like a bull ready to charge. As it turned out, he was just loosening up the dirt so he could roll around and cool off in the dust. 

Nothing like a good dust bath! Between Norris and Madison. Yellowstone National Park.

Bison in the road in Yellowstone. Not an uncommon sight.

We'd seen bison in the distance earlier in the week roll around in the dirt in a couple of other locations in the Park. Never really understood that if the dirt wasn't loose already, the bison were willing to break it up a little so they could get good and dusty. 

We got plenty of insight into bison life in four plus days over and above their dust bathing habits and plenty of time watching them eat. When in herds they are clearly protective of calves. We always felt a little skittish even in the car when around young bison, especially when the one 20 feet or so away looked right at us and mooed towards us through the open car window. And there was lots of aggression between males (we assume) manifested in pushing and shoving (mostly with their heads) and chasing each other away.

They also clearly appreciate Yellowstone's thermal spring areas. We saw several groups of bison near some of the steam vents and hot springs in the Park, particularly early in the morning (the temperature swing in Yellowstone in early October is pretty much low to mid-20s to mid-70s each day). It was actually pretty amazing to watch the steam freeze as ice on the bison's backs. I read one sign in the Park that said only the fattiest and furriest bison would survive the Rocky Mountain winters. They think they need those steam vents in early October? Just wait until February or March. 

More bison in the mist.

Sitting in a car (or sometimes even venturing outside of the vehicle) watching bison in Yellowstone in the middle of a global pandemic was incredible. It almost made it seem like things were sort of OK and almost normal. I mean, I'd be watching bison the exact same way if there weren't a deadly virus on the loose. And there's a lot to see and observe. Leaving behind West Yellowstone, Montana each morning and heading into the Park in search of wildlife was an escape. And bison, the most visible and obvious animal in the Park (despite numbering fewer than the elk), were the symbol of that escape, just like they represent both the National Park Service (they are the Service's mascot after all) and the United States in general.

Although I have to say the one added wardrobe accessory that this pandemic has mandated in the form of a face mask or neck gaiter does come in useful when you are standing outside before dawn with the temperature in the 20s.

We didn't just see bison in Yellowstone on this trip. We drove up to northwest Wyoming from Salt Lake City through Grand Teton National Park. We saw our first significant-sized herd of bison in the Tetons but none of those pictures made the cut. 

We also hit up Antelope Island State Park just north of SLC right after we landed. This was the second time this year we found ourselves in a Utah State Park (who'd have thought it?). Antelope Island is a piece of land in the south end of the Great Salt Lake with its very own bison herd. While the quality and quantity of bison sightings were nowhere near what they were in Yellowstone, the backdrop of the shoreline of the Salt Lake made for some different types of bison sightings. If you are in Salt Lake City, I'd recommend a visit.

Bison with the Great Salt Lake. Antelope Island State Park, Utah.

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How We Did It

There are bison all over Yellowstone National Park. They are not difficult to spot. Just cruise around the Park and look. And watch the road while you are scanning the horizon for wildlife. One of the easiest places to spot bison is right in the middle of the road you are driving on. Yellowstone is open year round, but there are portions of the Park that close each winter. Check their website for more details.

There are many species in Yellowstone that you will need to get up early or visit right before nightfall to see. Bison are not one of those species. I guess being the biggest animal around affords a measure of safety. Or at least the illusion of it.

The entrance to Antelope Island State Park is about a 45 minute drive from Salt Lake City airport. From there, things slow down a bit. It took us about an hour and a half to drive down to the southern end of the island (with stops) and back. The drive across the Great Salt Lake is pretty impressive. It was hazy the day we made the trip. I bet it's way better when it's clear. The Park is open daily from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. There are allegedly pronghorn, mule deer and bighorn sheep in the Park. We didn't see any but we were focused on bison and had a long drive ahead of us to Jackson so didn't linger too long.

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Yellowstone

It's been almost three years since I've pre-blogged about a destination. I figure it's about time for one of those posts in advance of next month's travel plans.

In 2011, I spent two weeks with my friends Mike and Bryan driving across the United States from my home in Arlington, Virginia all the way to Portland, Oregon. It was the first time I'd ever driven across the entire continent and it's a kind of trip that I won't likely ever make again. 

I actually probably shouldn't make statements like that. If there's one thing that 2020 has taught me, it's that things I never expected to happen will happen whether I like it or not. So yeah...never say never or even won't likely ever.

One of the highlights of that long distance drive was a two night stop at Yellowstone National Park. We arrived there in the afternoon from the east after traveling 12 plus hours from Deadwood, South Dakota, and left maybe about 40 hours later to the west en route to Seattle. With so far to go in just two weeks, there just wasn't much time to linger, but we did think it was important to get in a whole day in the Park. That meant two nights.

In our one full day there, we set out first thing in the morning from our hotel in Lake Village and headed north and counter-clockwise around the Great Loop, hitting the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, the Tower-Roosevelt area and Mammoth Hot Springs, before heading south to Old Faithful and then back around to the hotel. If there's one thing to be said about our time in Yellowstone, it's that we didn't run out of sights to see. 

The main reason we didn't run out of stuff to do in a single day is Yellowstone National Park is massive. At almost 3,500 square miles, it's bigger than the entire state of Delaware by about 40% and it's more than twice the size of Rhode Island. Maybe you don't think of Rhode Island and Delaware as being big but we're comparing the size of an entire state to the size of a single National Park. This place is big. Too big, in fact, to cover in a single day. One day I figured I'd have to go back and do it right.

The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone.

2020 has been littered with cancelled trips. Costa Rica in March. New Mexico in May. California in June. Maine in July and (again) in August. England later in August. And most recently we made the decision to give up on a trip to Rwanda, Uganda and Zanzibar in October. That last one hurt, but there was really no other option.

It hasn't all been doom and gloom this year. We have both been healthy all year long and we've been able to transform some of those cancelled trips into reasonable facsimiles of the original intent. A national parks trip to California got morphed into a national parks trip in Utah and Colorado. Maine got replaced with Vermont, although Maine was really a substitute for Costa Rica so Vermont didn't stand a chance of coming close to the original deal there. New Mexico and England? Well...some other time maybe.

But when it came time to think about if we should even try to replace a trip where we'd be trekking into the mountains to see gorillas in the wild, driving around Queen Elizabeth National Park on safari and walking through the jungles of Zanzibar looking for monkeys, we were a little lost. We thought about a trip up to Churchill, Manitoba to see polar bears but the fact that Canada is not admitting Americans to their country right now killed that one pretty quickly. Ultimately, we decided if we were going to replace an animal watching trip with something similar that had to be in the United States, we should head out to a place where we could see the greatest collection of wild wildlife in our country. And that meant just one place: Yellowstone. Looks like that return trip I thought about in 2011 is happening this year.

This time we are doing it right. No 40 hours in the Park this year. We are dedicating three whole days plus whatever time we can squeeze in from a fourth day driving up through Grand Teton National Park starting early in the morning. We'll be hitting parts of the Park like the North and South Entrances, but most especially the Lamar Valley, that I didn't get a chance to visit in 2011. I have to say I'm pretty excited about that last part.

When I visited Yellowstone in 2011, my greatest hope was that I'd see a bison. Just one would have been enough. At that time I knew precious little about the Park, including that seeing a bison was pretty much a sure thing. We saw one strolling down the middle of the road in front of our car within the first half hour we were in the park. After that, we saw them everywhere. Our car was even surrounded by them on the way out of the west entrance. I need not have worried about seeing a bison. 

I was incredibly casual about looking for animals back then. I didn't make a deliberate effort to find the spots with the greatest concentration of wildlife or go out looking at dawn or dusk when I now know the chances of spotting creatures is the greatest. We just roamed at a time that was convenient for us. And honestly, while we saw a grizzly bear and tons of bison, we really didn't see much else. There are supposedly more elk in the park than any other mammal species and we saw one. And at a great distance at that. I'd forgotten we spotted a coyote until I looked through my pictures from that trip while writing this post. The 2011 trip to Yellowstone was all about that one grizzly and the many, many bison.

This year will be way different. I'm certain. Or at least I'm hoping since I'm way, way more prepared. There's no way we aren't seeing much, much more wildlife this time around. 

2011 in Yellowstone: grizzly bear, elk and coyote. And a whole lot of landscape.

Wildlife wasn't the only reason I put Yellowstone on our 2011 westward journey. I also went for the scenery and for the volcanic action, including a stop to watch Old Faithful geyser erupt surrounded by hundreds if not thousands of other people. Here again, we just scratched the surface nine years ago. I was impressed by the colors and landscape at our stop at Mammoth Hot Springs and the Rockies are amazing. But in the last month I found out we missed as many impressive spots as we saw, if not more, including Grand Prismatic Spring. No way are we missing that this year, not even if its guarded by a few grizzlies and a pack or two of wolves. 

I might chalk the animals and the geysers and hot pools we missed up to a mistake or two. But honestly, we didn't have any time to spare in our one day anyway. Three whole days seems much more sensible. 

2011 is a long time ago. I've changed so much in the way I travel since nine years ago, from the knowledge I carry with me, to my travel habits, to the technology that I've embraced. I've gathered together the most spectacular photographs from nine plus years ago that I could for this post and I'm not thrilled. My photos of animals likely stretched the capabilities of my Blackberry to the max and my landscapes aren't much better. I even managed to cut the top of Old Faithful off with my beginner camera skills. 

There were also fewer than about 30 total pictures to choose from. If there's one definite improvement I've made in my picture-taking habits, it's to take pictures in bunches. If I come back from this trip with fewer than 500 pics of Yellowstone I'll be surprised.

I'm lucky to be able to have a second shot at Yellowstone, even as I continue to whine about being (mostly) confined to the United States. I get that our country's government has badly bungled the response to this global pandemic and by the time it's all over or close to it, I'll have abandoned international travel for 12 months or probably more. Yellowstone won't be Rwanda, Uganda and Zanzibar but it will likely still be an incredible natural showcase. I'm excited to see it again and for a lot longer and in a different season. And not just for the wildlife. I know we missed some incredible sights or made short stops at others in 2011 which are now on my list for this year.

Yellowstone in an American icon. And I think it's going to be spectacular the second time around.