DAY TWO: Yellowstone again
It WAS a cold night. Nevertheless I was firm on our purpose of waking up early to hike around the park. Best hour to see wildlife is dusk and dawn, remember? At 7 a.m. I had a sleepy AND complaining Roberto in the car, for another wildlife sighting hunt. We parked Gilda in a desert parking lot near the Uncle Tom's cabin, in the canyon, and started our hiking (we just made a small detour to avoid an early bird bison grazing in the area). Roberto was loaded with his usual fifteen pound photographic gear and I had a backpack with the essentials: water, dry food, sunscreen, binocular and who knows what more.

We walked up to the Crystal Lake and reached a moonlike landscape of hot springs and mud holes, for which Yellowstone is famous. The whole park is placed in an old Vulcan crater, and there is still a direct link to the very inside of the planet.
You can see green grass, trees, and all of a sudden, a fuming hole in the ground and feel the characteristic sulfur smell. This special geologic history also counts for the incredible colors in the sides of the Yellowstone canyon. Yellow (where do you think the name comes from?), red, pure white, black. The canyon is awesome, with two huge waterfalls (the bigger is about 93 meters high) of very green water (sulfur again?)

Our hiking took several squirrels, one deer, a family of ducks, two lakes, about three miles of canyon rim (with ups and downs, lots of them) and about four hours.
Now, can you imagine what four hours of hiking do to two computer junkies such as Roberto and I? In the afternoon we were in coma state. We slept in the tent (it was raining, anyway) until dusk, time for new safari. This time again, some elk, some (guess what?) buffalo, but no bear. Though we saw several times trunk that looked like bears. I think they do that on purpose: the rangers place some "bear like trunks" in the forest, at safe distance. The tourists see them and feel great, "I saw a bear, it was huge and dark!" and everybody is happy. Let's try again tomorrow.