Yellowstone Getaway: Day 1

With it being our 5 year anniversary and me being in desperate need of a break (10 months with twins will do that to ya, apparently), we decided to take a short little getaway trip to Yellowstone. It was cold, wet, fun, and exciting! We have a bajillion pictures, so I've decided to split up the trip into each day being a separate post, and try to be selective in my number of photos I'm posting.

My super-huge burger I got at Jack in the Box. I thought by the look of it I'd be dead if I finished, but surprisingly not. I even finished my fries. Go me! (Ignore the goofy face)

"Hey look! Its snowing!" We were so young and naive back then... (PS. I started driving in Rexburg...in my flip flops. It got ALOT worse. Lol )

 After we managed to arrive safely at our hotel and get checked in, we decided to take a trip up to Mammoth that afternoon. I thought it was fairly close, and it was mid-afternoon. We foolishly left our snacks in the hotel room.

We originally thought these were deer covered in snow, and that we hadn't seen any elk the whole trip, but these are bigger than pictures we have of other deer, so I'm gonna say these are snow covered elk. I think this part of the river is like Elk Crossing or something like that, too.

Trail to visit some paint pots. I don't have hiking boots. I was going around all this in small Skechers. When hugging the sides of the trail to avoid puddles I got snow down my back a couple times. Especially when the wind would start blowing it off the trees.

Artists Paintpots

This is how I was bundled most of the trip

Snow covered bison. Look closely, you can see how bad it was snowing.

Roaring Mountain. This is as far as we made it Thursday afternoon because it was still so far to Mammoth, we had no food, it was now about 6:00 from having to drive so slow, the snow was starting to stick to the roads, etc.

Another paint pot. Its amazing the snow is so close to it because the blue water is one of the hottest.

On our way back. We thought it was cool how red the wood looked on the trees.

White tailed deer

Close up of tagged deer.

The bison were notorious for causing traffic jams around this area.  They'd just hang in the middle of the road and wander at a snail's pace. Just because they could.

The little calves were all so adorable and always looked like they were freezing!

We finally made it out of the park and the snow had slowed by then. Of course. So we walked around West Yellowstone before ending up at a walk-up window at Dairy Queen for dinner. And walked back to our hotel in the snow. We ate, developed a new itinerary for the trip, then crashed.