City of West Yellowstone, Montana, and Hebgen Lake

West Yellowstone City and Hebgen Lake - July 27

Enough of geysers, etc., here are some pictures of the town of West Yellowstone, Montana, where our RV Park is.

Here is the RV Park we stayed in. We both recommend it very highly. Great place to stay, and great people running it.

There is a place across the street called 'Hibernation Station' where they rent out log cabins that are quite unique as can be seen in the following photos.

There are some great statues in town too.

And there are bison statues that are all painted in different motifs.

There are ravens out here the size of eagles…

That is a whole chicken wing in its mouth. Pretty hard to believe, isn’t it??

Well, I exaggerate slightly. It’s not a chicken wing, but the ravens are really big out here.

W Yellowstone is a typical old western tourist town. Here are some of the shops:

The Bear Tooth Barbecue Shop.

Lots of places to get your fly fishing equipment and arrange guided fly fishing trips.

Or you can wet your whistle or lose your paycheck.

A Mexican Food BUS  ?? 

And Ice Cream and Espresso places everywhere.

This place always has a line out front, from when they open at 7AM, to closing. I caught Sylvia in the line this evening .

Huckleberry Ice Cream is a REAL BIG thing out here, of course so is Huckleberry Jam, Huckleberry Syrup, Huckleberry chocolate bars, Huckleberry Wine, Hucklebery Cereal, and just plain Huckleberries. Anything associated with Huckleberries is also real expensive. About double what you would expect to pay for berry anything.

But Sylvia passes up Huckleberry for her all-time favorite ice cream flavor – 'Chocolate Runs Thru It'.

Well, I guess you can tell what we did in West Yellowstone. We also located tennis hard courts and practiced for a couple hours 3-4 times over the 13 days we were here. If you have never hit a tennis ball at 7000-8000ft altitude on a hard cement court, you haven’t experienced real moon balls…. Topspin really does funny things to the balls here when they bounce off the court.

North of town there is a lake called Hebgen Lake, a scenic lake, fed by the Madison River. The area has mosquitoes the size of ravens. Well, I exaggerate again, but they are large, in the millions and they really bite, and with the 75 MPH speed limits here they also mess your car up real bad. Wear your DEET, or don’t come to Hebgen Lake.

We took a ride to the lake to try and capture some sunset shots around the lake and I managed to catch an Osprey doing what Osprey’s do. Check out these pictures. Sorry for the image quality again, but the light was pretty low.

That is what I call a successful 'fly fishing trip'.....

Hebgen Lake - about 10 miles north of West Yellowstone

There was an earthquake in 1959 in the Hebgen Lake area during which the earth shifted up and down 15-20 feet, causing landslides and subsequent flooding. Hebgen Lake has a dam at the lower end. During the earthquake, the dam held, but due to the shifting earth and a landslide several miles downstream, another lake was formed over the week following the quake by the Madison River flowing through Hebgen Lake. the new lake is named Quake Lake, and it still has the dead trees sticking up out of the water all around the sides of the lake.

We drove about 60 miles to and beyond Hebgen Lake this evening in an effort to capture a glorious sunset, but the sun and the clouds had different ideas. This shot shows about the best sunset colors we got that evening. At least we got the Osprey.

As much as we like it here we must move on.   Time to leave Yellowstone National Park..