Yellowstone Falls

On our first full day in Yellowstone we decided to stick around the Canyon area because Dan and Rachel were going to be arriving midday.  We stared by climbing down to the top of the Lower Falls.

N2 found spots to sit in and they both needed their picture taken.  On this trip Natalie often times wanted her picture taken alone, not with Noah, so I tend to have the same picture for each individual kid.  Sigh.

 After climbing up-which took some convincing for them to do-they had to take turns leading we went to some overlooks to see the falls from farther back.

We met up with Dan, Rachel and Chloe after that and then went back to the falls and this time walked to the top of Upper Falls.

We then decided to hike down Uncle Tom's Trail to get a good view of Lower Falls.  That was 387 steps down (and then back up).  The down part was not bad but let me tell you how awful it was to go up.  After doing the trail down and up to the top of lower falls my right calf felt like it was going to snap if I did any more steep uphills!  Poor Rachel doing it at 7 months pregnant.  Brian didn't let N2 stop at all on the way up to get water so they were motivated to keep going to the top.  Here are my hikers ready for the trail (Brian bought a fake camel back at Costco and N2 wanted to wear it-that didn't last long so I ended up with it but on the way back up I couldn't get any water out of it so it was not so helpful).

 The view from the bottom:

This is the only picture we have to show that we were together with Chloe:

We then drove to Artist's Point to get a beautiful view of the falls and the canyon.  It was truly beautiful!  It started to drizzle on us there so the lighting wasn't perfect for taking pictures.

Rain happened every day while we were at Yellowstone.  The first night we ate dinner in the cold rain.  We managed to get the tent and everything else set up before the rain came but we didn't get dinner done before the rain.  We ended up with cold, watery couscous.  It rained so much that night that it started entering our tent.  The water came up from the bottom so when I woke up the next morning I noticed that every time I moved on my air mattress I heard slosh, slosh.  We would get the tent somewhat dried out by standing up all the mattresses and then it would rain again at night and if it didn't rain at night, it rained during the day.  Our towels to take showers never really dried either.  Like I said in my Badlands post, rain followed us pretty much everywhere.