Yellowstone in Winter - Part 18 - Landscapes & Snowshoes

Tuesday, 30 January 2018

In between a short snowshoe hike in the morning and a somewhat longer one in the late afternoon, we had an extended visit with wildlife photographers Dan and Cindy Hartman in Silver Gate/Cooke City. There's much more snow in the eastern parts of the park, and I'm not sure that I would like to deal with the challenges of living here in the winter!

The park road follows Soda Butte Creek to Cooke City (outside the park). The namesake of the creek is Soda Butte, the travertine cone of a long-gone hot spring.

I liked the red lichens in the travertine layers. The rock looks very similar to Liberty Cap in Mammoth (for good reasons!).

We had a short hike along Soda Butte Creek in the Barronette Peak area. Melissa and Megan are real fans of snow flops, and most of us joined in.

Lon making his "flop". I declined to join in because I had already made too many of my own unplanned flops, and I knew that getting up would be very difficult.

The aftermath of a flop.

Humans aren't the only things making "flops" in the snow. This crater was made by snow falling off a tree branch. I liked the classic crater with rim, center peak, and debris thrown off in a circular pattern.

We ignored the threat of snow and had a late afternoon snowshoe hike up to Trout Lake. It's a short, steep 300 ft climb from the road to the rim around the lake.

This was the largest tree I saw in Yellowstone -- very much bigger than the surrounding trees. (And clearly there is some snow on my lens!) Our experts said it was a Douglas-fir, but unfortunately, it's clearly dead.

Trout Lake

Along the shore of Trout Lake.

We finished our snowshoe hike shortly after sunset in the midst of a significant snowfall. The first third of the return to Mammoth Hot Springs was under near white-out conditions. We found out first-hand the importance of the snow-poles along the side of the road. The back of our Suburbans were completely snow-packed by the time we got back to the hotel.