Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Western Trip, part I: All Creatures Great and Small

We just returned from a trip out West a couple weeks ago.  We were away for 15 days.  We visited 5 national parks.  We took 4200 pictures.  I have been working on a post about the trip practically since we got back.  It is proving harder to write and longer than I expected.  I also wanted to include pictures, which means that we need to sort them out and match them up with the appropriate parts of the trip.   We're still working on that.  Since the post was getting so long I decided to break it up.  Here is part I.

My husband likes lists.  Thus we had several of them going during the trip.  One of them included our running tally of the animals we had seen while hiking, driving, walking throughout the trip. 

These included:

Damselflies

Lizards

Dragonflies

Ravens
Angus cattle (ok, that's not so different from home)

Marmots



A moose cow
Chipmunk or ground squirrel...not sure which

Bison (in the front yard of the Yellowstone Lake Inn, no less)

Bighorn sheep ewes and lambs

Elk

Black bear (this isn't the best picture, but we were driving by literally about 2 feet away and I had to be quick)

Pronghorn antelope

More elk (this was a herd of mamas and babies just hanging out in the field near the Roosevelt Arch as we drove out of Yellowstone...next to the pronghorns)

Mountain goats (in the road as we drove the Going to the Sun Road through Glacier National Park)

Bighorn sheep

More goats (at Logan Pass in Glacier N.P.)
There were others as well: magpies, various water birds, ground squirrels, chipmunks, wood ducks (mama and babies) and I'm probably missing a few.  The variety of Creation is astounding, as we were reminded every time we turned around.  More pictures to follow.

3 comments:

  1. hey Anna! I love all the animal pictures!! I think my favorites are the goats. They have funny proportions and the white fuzziness reminds me of polar bears. :)

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  2. Awesome! I LOVE the format of this post. A couple of suggestions -- I think we had some closer photos of bighorn sheep from our Mt. Washburn hike, and you could add a photo or two of bison too. Thanks for adding this to your blog!

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  3. How could I forget the bison?! And I added the ewes and lambs we saw on Mt. Washburn too. Thanks for reminding me.
    Erica- I love the goats too! We saw so many of them.

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