Yellowstone Road Trip: Vicki & Anna (part 1)

Here are some pictures of my two favorite girls during our road trip. Part one covers the first few days as we were driving to Yellowstone, and part two will cover the pictures of them at the park.

The second leg our our journey (after Mall of America – sorry, no pics), took us to Mount Rushmore in South Dakota.  I had never been there before, so it was a new experience for me.  I definitely enjoyed it, and walking around learning about how it was constructed was pretty cool.

The entrance has pillars and flags for very state, so we had to get a picture by the Michigan one.

Getting a pic from the observation deck was a requirement. The key is to get there early, by the time we left a couple hours later, there were TONS of people around and it becomes much harder to get “clean” pictures.  Of course, that could be said of every place at Yellowstone too.  One thing that worked in our favor was basically staying on Eastern time.  We’d be two hours earlier than many people without even trying.

This one is from our quick hike around monument area.

I really like this one from our night in the cabin we stayed at near Mount Rushmore.

Next up was Devils Tower National Monument in Wyoming.  I really enjoyed checking the tower out, as it has been on my bucket list for a long time.  It was famously used as an alien landing pad in the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It is well worth the effort to take the fairly easy hike around the tower to see everything up close.

We even saw a couple climbing it!!  That picture was taken with a 300mm f2.8 lens with a 2x teleconverter for an effective 600mm focal length.  They were a LONG way away!

 

These next two were taken around the back side of the tower during the hike.

Here is Anna trying to entice a prairie dog to come a little closer with a piece of grass.  It’s not food, don’t worry.  No feeding the animals!!  In a future post, I’ll have one dedicated to all the cool wildlife I was able to get good pictures of, and we’ll see these guys in more detail.

The final picture for this post is from one of the many side-of-the-road stopping points.  According to the sign, it’s part of the Bighorn National Forest.

Be sure to check out part two for our dynamic duo in Yellowstone!