They may be situated in 69th place among Google search results for “Yellowstone Park tours,” stuck on Page 5, but they’re No. 1 in our book for creating the best possible vacation memories.
Yellowstone Day Tours is a relatively small operation, offering tours to Yellowstone National Park or Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming. The company doesn’t herd passengers aboard tightly packed buses that shuttle out continually like New York City taxis. Instead, Yellowstone Day Tours operates one bus and two SUVs. That’s right, just one bus. What it lacks in sheer volume, it makes up for in personal attention.
Chief Executive Officer Brian McCooey often drives one of the buses; on this overcast day, he did precisely that on a full-day Yellowstone tour that I had purchased for my family to finish a spectacular Western vacation. A knowledgeable guide sat near the passengers, who did not take up quite half of the 25-passenger bus this particular day. The bad weather forecast (which did not materialize) apparently dissuaded many visitors from venturing from their hotels and lodges for the day.
We noticed immediately that individual attention is a hallmark of Yellowstone Day Tours. Because we were lodging in Moran, Wyo., north of Jackson Hole and Teton Village but just south of Yellowstone, we were the last ones picked up. The bus retrieved other folks at lodging properties along the way, traversing to Moran while the backdrop of the 13,000-plus-foot Grand Teton mountain range majestically soared in the distance.
When we stepped into the bus at around 7:45 a.m., the driver excitedly told us that they had encountered a “bear jam” about five miles away. A “bear jam” is caused by tourists who stop to look at bears near the road. The driver had already polled the passengers, who agreed to backtrack to revisit the bears if we expressed interest in seeing the animals. When we showed high interest, the driver eagerly drove back near the spot in the Grand Teton area, announcing that he would lengthen the Yellowstone tour accordingly to make up for this lost time.
What transpired is the memory of a lifetime. The bears had dispersed and were nowhere to be found, but the driver knew the area like the back of his hand, and drove the back roads to an area where he figured National Park Service Rangers would be located.
Sure enough, he spotted the rangers, who were monitoring the bears. A mother grizzly bear and her two cubs playfully romped in a meadow just more than 100 yards away. Suddenly, they stopped, sensing a possible predator. A larger, adult male grizzly appeared in the distance, standing on its hind legs to see over the shrubs. When he spotted the others, he ran that direction, and the mother and cubs scurried away.
A few minutes later, the tables were turned. The adult male ran back the other direction, with the mother and cubs hot on his heels. The rangers at first were confounded, until their powerful binoculars revealed information that explained everything. The rangers could see the ear tags on the bears, disclosing that the adult male was, indeed, the grandson of the mother bear. And this was no ordinary mother bear; it was No. 399 (rangers here identify bears by number), which has been beloved in the area for years as a bear that likes to graze and hunt in meadows in plain sight of humans.
No. 399’s daughter, No. 610 (the second-most-beloved bear in the region for mimicking her mother’s behaviors), had produced a male offspring a few years before, No. 760. The rangers were jumping with excitement as we all witnessed the two bears acknowledging their familial connection with playful cat-and-mouse activities.
The reunited bears frolicked for several minutes before finally disappearing into the woods.
We would have missed all of this if not for the customer service of Yellowstone Day Tours.
Similar customer service continued through the 13-hour tour. When the driver observed that all the passengers were adept walkers, he suggested an added vantage point while at the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, which is the first large canyon on the Yellowstone River downstream from Yellowstone Falls. The spectacular scenery and pounding waterfalls at the Brink of Upper Falls and also at Artist Point created a powerful feeling that we were at one with nature.
While on the bus, the guide spoke of the rich history of the hallowed grounds along the Lower Loop, mixing humor with facts and always keeping the conversation lively.
Outside the bus, the guide led us around the boardwalk of the otherworldly Upper Geyser Basin, the area that truly makes Yellowstone a one-of-a-kind destination full of spouting geysers, colorful hot springs and steaming fumaroles. The two-square-mile area makes up nearly one-quarter of all the geysers in the world. That includes Beehive Geyser and, of course, Old Faithful, which sprung its 199-degree magic by sprouting more than 150 feet in the air within a minute of its projected eruption.
The driver and guide took us to other expected spots, including the Grand Prismatic Spring, the ultra-colorful and largest hot spring in the United States located in the Midway Geyser Basin; the Fountain Paint Pots located in the Lower Geyser Basin; Hayden Valley; the Mud Volcano Area and nearby Dragon’s Mouth Spring; and more.
However, Yellowstone Day Tours solicited passenger requests to stop and view any attraction, so when I saw a near-hidden lake with a great view, we stopped for several minutes and were treated to a tranquility that I never could have imagined.
Our eagle-eyed driver spotted a bison in the distance that he deemed was coming our direction. Sure enough, he stopped the bus, and the bison kept coming at us like we were magnets to its steel. The magnificent beast crossed within five feet of the back of our bus and ambled into the road, stopping traffic cold.
The driver also spotted a moose and antelope, and came across a herd of bison grazing in a meadow. Our bus group was allowed to watch and snap photos as long as we wanted.
Yellowstone Day Tours, a member of the Jackson Hole Chamber of Commerce, may be 69th in the hierarchy of the Google world. But that means nothing when you’re No. 1 in Yellowstone’s otherworld.
Note: Yellowstone Day Tours offers full-day or half-day summer and winter tours of Yellowstone National Park and Grand Teton National Park, from early May to Oct. 31, and early December to mid-March. These include Snake River rafting trips that combine with the Grand Teton tour, and snow-coach and snowmobile winter tours. They also offer Jackson Hole wildlife tours year-round as either full-day or half-day options. Visit www.yellowstonedaytours.com or Facebook (Yellowstone Day Tours).