Destination: Yellowstone National Park
Goal: get a first-come, first-serve campsite ASAP
Result: Accomplished.
By 7:30 am, we were in Yellowstone and had landed a campsite along Lewis Lake. The lake is the first major stop in Yellowstone if you come through the south entrance.
We had to wait for another set of travelers to pack up their site, so we spent some time eating breakfast and enjoying the beauty of the lake in the early morning. Once we had our site set up, we immediately set out for the park because we knew we had a big day ahead of us.
I think our travels started around 10. The plan was to do a loop from Old Faithful to Madison to Canyon Village before making our way back to our campsite. Some of that might not make a lot of sense to you if you haven't seen a map of the park or if you haven't visited it before, but it's a fairly popular loop.
It's also a very small section of the park, which from the title of this post suggests, is absolutely massive. We'd sometimes drive for 10-20 miles before making our next stop. I'll do my best to walk you through it.
The first stop was at the Kepler Cascades, a beautiful set of waterfalls.
Next to the Cascades was a trail for the Lonestar Geyser. We wish the park would have told us how long the trail was or even how often the geyser goes off. But we were new to this park and decided to take a chance.
It ended up being a five-mile round trip hike to the geyser, which we later learned goes off every three hours.
We arrived 30 minutes after it had last erupted. That sucked, but it was a nice, smooth hike to get our legs going for the long day ahead.
Once we were back in the car, the next stop was the very popular Old Faithful geyser.
When we got there, we saw that we had a little over an hour until it would go off again. We walked around the visitor center and the park area. About 30 minutes before Old Faithful went off, the park alerted visitors that a nearby geyser, the Beehive, was about to go off. It only goes off once, maybe twice, a day, so we definitely got lucky.
The Beehive Geyser has a very small opening, so it ends up having a very thin eruption that shoots off up to 40 feet up in the air. It was quite a spectacular sight to see!
By the time the Beehive Geyser was done, the four of us decided to walk over to Old Faithful in hopes of getting a good seat for the eruption. We were able to find a bench, so second row back would have to do.
Old Faithful was set to go off at 1:53 pm, and at 1:55, it started to go off. I guess that's why they call it Old Faithful - it never fails to erupt at a given interval (give or take 10 minutes, the park says).
While seeing Old Faithful erupt was something to check off the bucket list, all four of us agreed that it wasn't actually nearly as cool as the Beehive Geyser. I, at least, just watched it go off and thought to myself, well, yeah, that's a geyser.
After beating the Old Faithful crowd to the ice cream shop, we snagged some soft serve cones and headed onward through the park.
The third stop on our tour was part of the Lower Geyser Basin. It's called the Fountain Paint Pot area, and it created a very interesting blend of sulfuric smells, small geysers, blue hot sprints, and orange runoff. I'm not quite sure the photos below do it justice, but I hope they give you a sense of what it was like.
After leaving the Lower Geyser Basin, we headed toward and past Madison to the Gibbon Falls. Here the Gibbon River flows peacefully before falling 84 feet. It's a waterfall like many others you'll see, but it definitely helps add to the wide variety of scenery you can experience in the Yellowstone National Park.
The fifth stop led us to the Beyrl Spring, a lone hot spring right on the main loop road.
We had hoped to do a quick detour to check out the Virginia Cascade, but the road didn't have it very well marked. Unfortunately, we ended up driving right past it.
Our sixth stop took us to what could arguably be the most iconic section of Yellowstone, the Canyon Village and the famous Artist's Point. The amazing backdrop of sulfur-stained rock formations mix very well with the bright blue Yellowstone River. The waterfall along the river even has an interesting hint of green at times. It was a nice day, so the blue sky only added to the breathtaking atmosphere.
Hopefully some of these photos give you an idea of what it was like to see this area.
And here's a quick video of the falls that we saw up close at the end of our hike.
By this point, it was getting past 5 pm, and we still had 40+ miles to go to get back to our campsite. We weren't planning on any more stops, but a seventh detour couldn't be ignored. The four of us all agreed on one more stop at the Mud Volcano, an area of multiple hot springs and mini-geysers.
I think we all came to an agreement that our favorite spring at this point was the Dragon's Mouth.
After a small mile hike around the Mud Volcano, we knew energy was quickly leaving us. We had no choice, but to say we had a fantastic day in Yellowstone and make our way back to camp.
I know that there's a lot in this post, and the amount of pictures in here (and some videos to come!) don't give you a full experience of Yellowstone National Park, but hopefully you can see that this park is one of America's most popular parks for a reason.
After a rough day with car issues in Grand Teton, Yellowstone more than made up for it. The next day, we talked about how we'd want to come back for 7-10 days for a more in-depth exploration of both Grand Teton and Yellowstone. We also figured out how to do the camping in these two parks.
I think all four of us were asleep by 9:30 that night, if not earlier. That was important because alarms were set for 5:45 am on Wednesday. We needed to make sure we got to Mount Rushmore by 3 pm in order for Safelite to take care of the windshield.
After Mount Rushmore, it was on to the Badlands National Park in South Dakota. That was just as visually stunning as the other national parks, but that is a post for another time (hopefully this evening).
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