Yellowstone Day Two - OR - Bears Are Extinct

We have a full-day tour scheduled for today. We get up in time to scarf down some breakfast before the guide arrives. We load into the van and he takes us around the various parts of the park leaving some of the area around our second campsite for us to discover on our own. He is very knowledgeable and we see all the major sites. Half the day is spent looking for bears. We go on hikes, we eat a very nice box lunch out in a nice spot for ten minutes before we are chased back to the van by a quickly passing rain shower. We go to Lamar Valley where everyone has seen bears. We hit a traffic jam with a park ranger watching over many people. This is a sure sign of a bear sighting! The guide pulls over and we pile out. He walks to the ranger and asks what they have and the ranger replies, “Badger.” A badger? I ask, “Is it the world’s largest badger?” Hte ranger says, “Yes, and it was just doing cartwheels.” The guide has never seen a badger back-up before and we leave dissappointed in our lack of bear luck.

We are out all day, from 9 until 5 with the guide and the kids are getting antsy. They want to play with their new found friends and I am getting a little carsick. We get back to camp and the three kids from Indiana have just returned as well.

We get together with our new found friends again this evening and talk about our day. “We saw a grizzly take down a baby elk and drag it into the woods,” says the family from Australia.

“We saw a bison carcass and black AND grizzly bears today,” says the family from Indiana.

 “We heard about a badger but didn’t see it,” say our children.

Every time we inquire about bears, everyone has seen one in the exact same place we were, but an hour before, or after, our arrival. We are beginning to believe that we won’t see any bears on this trip. It is an interesting phenomenon. We noticed this trend in the Tetons. We would be driving down the main drag in the park and would come across a sign that would say something like, "Wildlife next twelve miles". this would inevitably lead to a vacant, almost desolate stretch of road without so much as a sick duck flying overhead, let alone large herds of anything anywhere in sight. We are fairly certain that those signs deter all forms of animal life.