August 1-13

The first weekend of August we went to the Fiddler's Picnic. It was such a wonderful experience. It was like the Woodstock of bluegrass musicians. People came from everywhere to pick and grin with other musicians, in fact we were probably among the only people who didn't have instruments. Everybody pulled up in RVs, camper vans (including us) and pitched tents for the weekend. We were only there one night, but wish we could have stayed the whole time. Sean and I were so mesmerized by the atmosphere that we neglected to take any pictures of the actual festival, but I did manage to get a pretty cool close up shot of the moon from our campsite, that counts right?

mad skills.

The twelfth we hiked the South Rim trail, which gave us a relatively flat 8 mile tour of Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, aside from one very steep climb down into and back out of the canyon. The trail basically takes you past all of the popular touristy pull outs, so we got to see everything in one trip while getting some much needed hiking in instead of starting and stopping the van. The canyon area was GORGEOUS. It's host to the Yellowstone river and two waterfalls, including Lower Falls, the tallest in the park. The most treacherous part of the hike was Uncle Tom's trail, which is essentially hundreds of stairs that twist down into the canyon for a closer view of Lower Falls. This hike was awesome and we wore ourselves out just enough.

Lower Falls with a Rainbow

One of many flights

Photo-op =)

The weekend ended with a pretty casual/easy hike to Ice Lake. Sean got a lot of footage of these weird but cute swimming ducks, but our internet is too slow to upload video, so I'll just have to share it later.