Yesterday was our third day in Yellowstone Park 
and we were booked onto a private guided tour with Safari Yellowstone 
.
Most of the wildlife in the park wakes up at an ungodly hour, which meant that we had to too. Our guide picked us up from our motel at 5:45 and we headed into the north end of the park.
The light at sunrise makes for some great photo opportunities and during the first couple of hours we saw deer, elk, pronghorn, lots of bison and thanks to the supplied binoculars and spotting scopes we were able to watch an osprey nest from afar. We watched for about half an hour as the mother looked after her two chicks and kept lookout while she waited for the male to return.
Our guide said that normally he would take guests up to a mountain lake to watch the otters that were usually around at this time of year but it was a bit of a hike and he hadn’t seen them so far this year so he decided to push on and try to find us a grizzly bear.
We didn’t have to drive far. The traffic jam after a couple of miles gave away the fact that there was an adult grizzly about 150 away from the side of the road. That’s a fair distance but as you can see below I managed to get a few photos. They’re fairly low quality because I was on maximum zoom but I wouldn’t have wanted to get any closer,our guide said the bear could cover that distance in under 10 seconds!
The hardest animals to spot in Yellowstone are the wolves. They were reintroduced into the park in 1995 and there are only around 120 in a park covering over 2 million acres. Add to this the fact that they don’t like humans and tend to stay away from the roads and you’ll understand why sightings are rare. Our guide took us to a few spots where they tend to hang out and managed to speak to one of the foremost wolf biologists in the park but it was looking unlikely. There had been sightings that morning and lots of people were waiting for one in particular to return but we could have spent our whole tour waiting so we decided to push on and see some more of the park.
After a picnic lunch by the river we saw some mountain goats (from over half a mile away so no photos) and ground squirrels, which are kind of a cross between grey squirrels and meerkats.
So, the tour was over and we were on our way back towards our Motel when our guide spotted his boss in a lay-by and pulled over to get some info. It turns out that his boss had been up to the trout lake where the otters hang out and they were back! The guide swung the car round and drove us back to the foot of the trail. We hiked up the short (but steep) trail to the mountain lake and sure enough we found 3 otters swimming and fishing by the side of the lake. We followed them around the lake for half an hour or so and managed to get some nice photos of them playing and eating lunch.
Unfortunately our time was up and after nine hours, which seemed like about one, we headed back to our motel. We won’t be forgetting today in a hurry.