Twilight Tours in Yellowstone Park

This is the famous Yellowstone Bus.  We've talked about them before, but you probably slept through that post.

Guests love to take tours on them because they are historic.  Well, part of them are.  The body is on a Ford frame, but I can't give you more than that since I know nothing about cars.

Roomie wanted to take the Twilight Tour of the geyser basins.  I wasn't excited, but I thought, "What the heck.  I'm leaving soon."

Here we are, snug as bugs on our bus.

That's Deb on the left and there's the roomie next to her.

We're ready to learn some things. 

Then, Jim, the tour guide, suggests that we roll the canvas top back.

Why? 

Cause we can, that's why.

It's probably hot and humid where you are.

Notice that we are wearing coats.

Here's my arty shot of our reflections in the rear view mirror.

Notice the hats and scarves.

Summer isn't even a twinkle in Mother Nature's eyes here.

I think this is where she hangs out to play practical jokes on humans.

Two other Yellowstone employees, Ricca and Vicky, took advantage of the open top to snap thousands of pictures of the Park.

One is from Viet Nam and the other from China.

These pants belong to one of the paying guests...a 70 something lady.

Don't think I've seen bells like this since the 60's.

She also had a big floppy hat.

Flower children never die.  They just travel to Yellowstone.

I have to mention that at this point, the temperature had dropped to 30 degrees, maybe.

I could only judge by the blue color of my fingers and my running nose.

Tour Guide Jim shared a lovely story with us as we huddled around a hot springs, hoping for some heat.  He claimed to have seen a bison stuck in a huge snow drift one winter.  No one in the Park interferes with nature, so when he returned to the scene the next morning, the bison was still stuck, and coyotes were chewing on it. 

It was still alive while this was happening.  Before you despair, I don't believe him for a minute.  The Rangers will put a suffering animal out of its misery, so stop crying my sensitive friends.  I looked Jim in the eye and promised that if I ever saw him in a similar situation, I'd be sure to let nature take its course.

We, the frozen passengers, started to get a little nervous when the sky turned black.

We went trotting back to the bus, only to realize that without the top up, it didn't make much difference.

Tour Guide Jim finally decided that macho time was over.

I did get one pretty picture of bubbling water in a hot springs.

Before my I lost feeling in my fingers.

Is there a moral to this story?  Probably not.

Did I learn anything?  Nothing other that I wouldn't go winter hiking with Tour Guide Jim.



That's all from Yellowstone Park, where the good looking men are few and far between and the women don't shave.