Yellowstone

Old Faithful and a rainbow in its mist

The Grand Prismatic Pool

Lower falls in the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River

Mammoth Hot Springs cascading travertine pools

After leaving Jackson, we spent the better part of 3 days in Yellowstone NP.  At the outset, we weren’t sure how much time we would need to see Yellowstone.  It’s a pretty big park, but we were staying about an hour drive away in Big Sky, so any day visits would require at least 2 extra hours of driving.

Well, it was fantastic enough that we spent (quite literally) every waking minute inside the park for 3 straight days.  We left our condo in Big Sky at dawn, and returned home at around 10 or 11pm on average.  We didn’t sleep all that much for those 3 days.

It started when we took the ‘scenic route’ from Jackson Hole to Big Sky – passing through Grand Teton NP and Yellowstone NP on the way up.  We hit the Yellowstone park boundary at probably 2pm.  From that point forward, we stopped on average about every 5 minutes to see some natural wonder or other.  And it turned out Old Faithful and the incredible lower geyser basin were on our way up as well.  So of course we had to stop and see it.  (We accidentally missed Old Faithful’s first eruption at around 6:30pm, and so had to wait until around 7:45 to see the next one.  Old Faithful is about a 2-2.5 hour drive from Big Sky.)

The best way to describe Yellowstone is . . . weird.  Over the next two days, we saw and did some simply incredible stuff:

In the geyser basins, bacteria grow in the thermal pools, each type a different color, able to live in a different band of temperature.  The colors therefore roughly indicate the temperature at various parts of the pool (blue for very hot, orange somewhere in the middle, brown for not that hot, etc.)  Some geysers were erupting constantly.  At Mammoth Hot Springs, hot water traveling up through limestone picks up minerals and precipitates them out as travertine, forming incredibly odd cascading pools (again filled with bacteria that color them rainbows).  Steam just comes up out of the ground all over the place, indicating the insane amount of thermal activity in the area.  We got to swim in a river that had hot spring runoff draining into it, creating natural spa-like water conditions.  We saw petrified trees.  We did a short hike along the rim of the ‘grand canyon of the Yellowstone’, a massive steep-walled canyon that has actual yellow stone walls.

And the wildlife.  We saw pretty much every animal on the ‘animal identification’ section of the visitor’s pamphlet.  Herds of bison, elk, moose, mule deer, a coyote, bald eagles, and our personal favorite, a set of pronghorn antelope.

When we planned this section of the trip, my dad was insisting we visit Yellowstone.  Now I know why – this is an incredible, bucket-list kind of place, where you can drive from one “wow!” to another “wow!” for days on end.