Built To Roam: Buffaloes and Pronghorn and Wolf! Oh Shit!

Open Google. Search: "Best place to see animals in Yellowstone" and the top responses will all say Lamar Valley. So naturally that is where I choose our next hike to be.
I really underestimated the size of Yellowstone, it's literally bigger than the state of Rhode Island and Delaware combined, and the morning of the Lamar Valley hike it took us nearly 3 hours to get to the trail head from the west entrance of the park. It's worth noting that thirty minutes of this was directly due to Nancy insisting she needed to go to the bathroom in the middle of a 10 mile construction zone which caused us to wait two full cycles of one lane traffic. Christmas gift idea for Nancy.
We arrived at the trail head around 1 pm and started out on the Lamar River Valley Trail toward Specimen Ridge. The trail traveled through an open prairie of primarily scrub grass (possibly 5 trees in the first 4 miles of the hike) and Buffalo shit. There was more buffalo in one square mile here than all the buffalo I had seen in my entire life put together, and it made all those stops for one buffalo on the side of the road in the days earlier seem overly stupid.
After traveling a little over three miles we stopped to eat lunch on a log next to a small group of buffalo, which seemed like such a solid idea at the time. I decided at this point to hardcore jimmy rig my camera on a lean-to of branches in order to take a picture of the three of us eating with buffalo. Anyone who knows me will attest to my luck with technology and my uncanny ability to never do anything clumsy, which is why moments after clicking the ten second timer I got my shirt caught on one of the branches, tripped, knocked the camera over, yelled F*CK!!, and alerted the buffaloes to our presence. And like city folk to a redneck, we were instantly unwelcome. We began to pack up our stuff and a pronghorn walked right by us, not 5 feet away from the tip of my camera lens and suddenly there was three species of nervous mammals trying to get though the current situation safely and be on with their days. Nancy was worried, which on a scale of 1 to 10 on the oh shit scale ranks in at about 11. We said our good byes to the safari and headed on down the trail towards a large river crossing and the first overnight camping spot on this section of trail.
I'm a giant nerd when it comes to fossils (and in most other circumstances too) and as we sat by the river I realized there was tons of petrified wood littering the ground and I started loading up my backpack with it. At this point Nancy was off in the nearby field collecting elk bones and I was convincing Mark, with complete success I might add, that the Elk antler tip he had found was a wolf tooth, and with child like eyes he stuffed it into his backpack. Almost an hour had passed and we decided to make our way back to the car in order to get back into town before night. On the hike back we had to zig zag our way through the now alert buffalo herd I had pissed off only hours before.
We had just a little over two miles of hiking left when a large storm began to roll in over the valley. Within minutes the sky went from blue to yellowish orange, the wind picked up quite a bit and we could hear thunder in the distance. This turned our hike into a light jog and with the first bolt of lightening, a run. The last half mile was spent sprinting toward the car as the clouds opened up and it started to downpour. We jumped into the car, Mark turned to me and said something sassy along the lines of "I'm never hiking with a ginger again." Which is when I decided to tell him that sweet wolf tooth he had carried the whole way back was just a broken piece of elk trash.
Thanks again for reading! Cheers!

Remember to head on over to my Prints site if you like the pictures from the blog, and give me your miles for the community site! There is still a free pair of boots up for grabs.

Mileage: 7.5 Miles