Colter Bay/ Yellowstone

Summer is flying by.  Our main event for the summer has come and gone and that's a weird feeling.

Last week we took a trip that covered parts of two National Parks: Grand Teton and Yellowstone.  We joined most of TEC's family and had a great time hiking, camping(ish), and enjoying wildlife and beautiful surroundings.  We started with a couple of nights at Colter Bay.  We fit in most of the favorite activities: hiking around Jenny Lake to the lookout at Hidden Falls, visiting Jackson Lake Lodge in the evening to catch a view of wildlife (this time we saw several elk), canoeing and swimming.

On Saturday, we drove up to Yellowstone, where we stayed until Sunday evening.  It was quite a bit of driving, but the kids were troopers and had fun looking out for animals so they could check them off on the worksheets we picked up from the Park entrance.  And it was quite a successful trip as far as sightings go--we saw 4 bears, a moose, several elk, and many many buffalo (a whole herd of them crossed the road and stopped traffic for quite a while at one point).  Almost as impressive as the geysers, pools, waterfalls, and other land formations we saw at each of our stops, was the enormous bag of salt water taffy that all of us managed to finish off courtesy of Grams and Papa.

waterfall at the bottom of Uncle Tom's Trail

hiking back up the 300+ steps

all of us at Artist Point at Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone

waiting for Old Faithful to erupt

one of our first whole-family photos

where we spent most of the trip:)

At the end of our trip, we spent a couple of days with Grandma Tibbitts at her house in St. Anthony.  TEC's family joined us for a day and finally had the experience of tubing the river.  It was as high as we had ever seen it, and we worried at first that it wouldn't be safe to do it, but it all worked out.

It was Grandma's first time meeting little MEC.  She and her sister Marge, who was visiting from Portland, were quite entertained (overwhelmed?), I think, by our large crew.  They took good care of MEC while we tubed the river.