Yellowstone: Madison river area, close-up

Back to the Yellowstone posts again today, and I can't believe I almost forgot to post this next set of photos -- I was actually working on the post for the next stage of our journey when I realized that I didn't remember seeing the photo of the campground, which made me realize there was a whole batch of photos sitting there waiting to be shared!

So if you're following along, Sunday (August 18) was our day in the Madison area. We had already explored the river earlier in the day, but I went back in the early evening to get more photos of the plants -- remember I had done this in North Dakota earlier in the trip.

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So today a look at the interesting things I saw along the Madison and Gibbon rivers. It turns out that the campground is right at the junction of rivers, where the Gibbon and Firehole rivers converge to form the Madison river.  So some of these and the last post's photos feature Madison, while some feature Gibbon, and some Firehole. I suppose some of the photos show the spot where all three are mixed together, which is actually quite cool if you think about it!

Here's a map of the area:

The campground is the series of loop roads just north of the river.

These things caught my eye on this particular evening, in no real order. Again, if you can ID any of the plants for me, please do!

This one I know: Achillea millefolium (Yarrow)

I'm hoping that these photos combined with the shots from the previous post are giving you a good sense of this place, and why I loved it so much.

Ahhh...


Since we'll be leaving in the morning (we stayed only one night in each campground in Yellowstone) this might be the best time to show the campground itself, which I thought was quite nice:

You can see that it's a mix of RVs and tents -- this was not a "parking lot" like the RV park at Fishing Bridge was. Here's the view forward as we stepped out of our temporary home:

And here's the reverse view:

Looks like we're in the middle of nowhere, doesn't it? Unfortunately, just behind these trees is one of the main roads into Yellowstone, the west entrance road. That means that we heard quite a bit of traffic noise -- not constant, but enough to remind you that you're not miles from civilization. The road was quiet at night though... but we had some neighbor campers who were not.

I'm not going to let that detract from what was a really wonderful part of Yellowstone though!

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