Skiing the Lamar

It's easy to get caught up in the steep and deep around Cooke City.

But it's also terrific to explore lower elevation landscape down in YNP.  And it goes without saying, but the Lamar is about as interesting as it gets.  

Kt talked me into an afternoon trip down to the Boiling River (after a big day of vert), so I agreed with the caveat, that we sneak in a ski tour.  

You're almost assured a mixed bag of challenging ski conditions (breakable crust and sagebursh being the norm), but with the abundance of wildlife you'll hardly notice.  

On this particular tour, we were about 2.5 hrs in, and had just crested the ridge, when we spied a herd of bighorn sheep.  The crazy part was that they walked right up to us.! (tail wind) We sat there mesmerized for about 20 minutes.   It was great and quite surreal.  

On the descent, there were so many old elk and bison beds that it felt like we were skiing a broken glacier, or a mogul field.!

Two wolf packs calling the valley home this winter as well.