Yellowstone

We spent today in Yellowstone. Yellowstone is a BIG park. Our usual park exploration method is to drive around the park to see the sights near the road, and then choose something interesting that worth hiking into or otherwise spending more time at. This technique does not work as well in Yellowstone, since we were less than 1/3 of the way through the park by the time we had to leave in order to get a hotel before dark. This probably has something to do with the fact that the park is larger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined.... (Seems to me like Yellowstone belongs in Texas!) Time permitting, we would have liked to spend more time exploring the middle and northern sections of the park, but we're now into the last week of our trip, have many things to see, and are still over a 1000 miles from home....

Back to what we DID see, though. We entered Yellowstone from the west entrance. This area is relatively flat, with dense pine forest and occasional meadows which all seemed to contain at least a few bison. It was very neat to see them roaming in the wild! As we drove on, we turned to the south since we wanted to make sure that we saw Old Faithful and the other geysers and volcanic features which are heavily concentrated in this area.

Along the wide, we took a side trip around a short side loop paralleling the Fire Hole River, which had incredible scenery as is turned and cut it's way through the volcanic rock, forming steep waterfalls and rapids.






It was immediately obvious from quite a distance when we began to approach the volcanic areas, since steam was rising in large quantities from the landscape. You cannot walk on the ground in these areas for obvious reasons, but the park has installed boardwalks through the various volcanic basis that bring you within 10 or 20 feet of many geysers, mud pots, and hot springs. We were even lucky enough to be near one or two of the geysers when the erupted, which was very cool.

No trip to Yellowstone could be complete without the most famous geyser of all, so we headed down to old faithful. It wasn't predicted to erupt for another hour, so we grabbed lunch and were in the viewing area right in time. This was far larger than the little geysers we'd seen earlier, and well deserving of it's reputation. We can check one more American icon of our list of things to see!

We drove through the lakes district of Yellowstone to the East side, and stopped at one last volcanic area to look around before heading out the east edge of the park. Since hotels near Yellowstone were so booked, and our time is growing short, we elected to press onward to Cody, WY and leave Yellowstone behind, despite having skipped over 2/3 of the park. If you're ever heading to Yellowstone, plan 2 days for even a superficial visit to the park!