On to Yellowstone!

On our way in, with the snow melting, the rivers were at full power. This was a stop along the Lewis River (as in Lewis and Clark):

The crowds turned out as always for Old Faithful, which erupts every 90 minutes or so, pretty spectacularly. They say you can tell when the eruption is about to happen by looking at how many people are waiting for it.

After clapping along with the masses for the eruption, we enjoyed walking away from most of them to the miles of boardwalks nearby which run through a crazy sci-fi world of bubbling, steaming, flowing, and spraying vents, holes, geysers, fumaroles, and mudpots. 

If you’ve never been there, put Yellowstone on your bucket list. The park has about 10,000 hydrothermal features, including 500 geysers. About 50% of the world's geysers are in that national park, and they put on quite a show. 

Our favorite geyser, of course, was Daisy Geyser, and she erupts every 2 hours. As we walked up, we could see her plumes of water through the trees and we ran to catch her in action. It was very considerate of Daisy to time her show to our schedule so beautifully!

There’s much more to Yellowstone than Old Faithful and the nearby geysers. The park is gigantic, and as you travel by car through it, there are turnouts and small parking lots each with its own fantastic feature, which anywhere else would be a park of its own. 

We found out from a fellow traveler about an app called Guide Along, which uses your GPS to present you with a turn-by-turn audio tour of the park. “Coming up on your left, you’ll see the parking lot for ___. This is a must see stop because in the late 1800s, …” This tour led us to see things we otherwise would never have known about, including some spectacular waterfalls (of course). 

You can see a rainbow of colors in the hot springs based on what kinds of life can exist, based on the temperature and level of acidity of that particular spring. 

The prettiest springs, in my opinion, were the blue ones, which were also the hottest. At up to 185º, the heat was so intense that nothing could survive in them, even the “thermophiles,” or heat-loving bacteria, which populate the green, orange, yellow and brown colored pools.

Bison were pretty plentiful in Yellowstone, so you could spot them easily from your car. They DO look pretty tame, and some tourists were way too comfortable trying to get selfies. On our rafting trip, we learned that the locals have a name for folks like them: “tourons” (Tourist + Moron). No one got so close to the bison that they were charged or gored while we were watching, so that was good. (You can search for @TouronsofYellowstone on Instagram, actually)

Another local term is a “bearjam.” We experienced two of them (20 minutes of waiting while gawkers in both directions slowed to a crawl on the 45 mph highway through the park as they stared at either a bear OR at a spot on the hillside where a bear had recently been seen). At one point, we waited to get around an RV which was parked right on the two lane road while the driver was outside setting up his tripod. What a touron!

Day 3 was devoted to the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River. From any point you stand, it seems just as grand as “The” Grand Canyon — you just can’t take it all in. But this Grand Canyon was much more accessible: paved paths or dirt trails or even sometimes staircases made it easy to view the canyon from the top or to make your way down to the bottom for a completely different viewpoint.

As usual, we chased down the waterfalls and looked at them from many different angles.

The final morning there, we stopped at Fishing Bridge, where you can’t fish…

And one final visitors center, where the view across Lake Yellowstone was peaceful and lovely.

We didn’t see everything there was to see in Yellowstone, and we’re grateful to those forward thinking folks who pushed in the 1870s to preserve Yellowstone as the very first national park in the world. They made their case through early photographs, sketches and paintings, and those efforts helped decision makers to understand the area’s wonder and value. It’s still pristine and lovely today, and well worth the visit.

We said goodbye to mountains, and started heading toward home. 

On to the Black Hills, Rushmore and the Badlands!