Folks taunt the animals at Yellowstone often.....
....occasionally there isn’t a happy ending.....the animal wins.
Once we were driving down (probably this same stretch of road)...
...and a whole herd of buffalo started across....
....all the cars could do is stop and wait
...we have a picture of a huge buffalo walking past our car...so close we could have touched it!
“Folks taunt the animals at Yellowstone often...”
And it has been that way for some time. I last visited Yellowstone Nat. Park in 1962. At one wide point in the road, several cars had stopped to photograph a number of bears, which were hanging around that spot. Some of the people had gotten out of their cars to take pictures, and some of them, as well as some of the people still in their cars waved food at the bears. Maybe they thought this was some kind of zoo? In those days, you could watch people at the bear pits at the National Zoo in D.C. trying to get the bears to pose for pictures by offering them food. But these bears at Yellowstone were not in cages or behind moats, they were all around the people and cars. I recall one carload of tourists teasing a bear by displaying lunch meat inside the car, with the window rolled down just enough to let the scent out. Eventually, the bear reared up on his hind legs, put his forepaws on the roof of the car, and pushed and rocked the car and its occupants back and forth like a toy. At that point, my father, sensing a bad scene about to happen, started our car and drove away.
We had hardly gone a few minutes down the road, when we passed a family setting out a picnic at a table alongside the road. Too close to the bear picture taking in my mind, but you couldn’t see the first place from the picnic area, and it *was* a picnic area, with tables and such.... A minute or so past that, and we passed a bear loping along, headed straight for that picnic area, so obviously intending to join that family for lunch that it was almost cartoonish.
Yellowstone can be a crazy place during tourist season.