Day 32 – Yellowstone National Park

The thing about Yellowstone is that it has such tremendous variety – the vast difference in ecosystems going from thermal to mountainous to huge meadows to pine forests. It is not only stunning but amazing to travel from one to the other in the course of a day. Our coyote was once again in the same area this morning. I got another photo of him. We drove through Firehole Canyon with a river running through a narrow canyon. After the Old Faithful area, we were in new territory climbing up to Craig’s Pass at 8200’ through pine forests. We stopped at West Thumb thermal area which is right on the enormous Yellowstone Lake. This was not as neatly done as the Old Faithful area, but there were still some stunning pools and even a few underwater in the lake.

We drove around Yellowstone Lake stopping to have a picnic in a pine forest on the shore of the lake. Driving through Lake Village we stopped at the Lake Village Hotel originally built in 1891. It has been renovated and is quite lovely. Next we stopped at the Mud Volcano thermal area. Most of these pools and geysers are very muddy. The Dragon’s Mouth Spring even had neat sound effects! The neat feature here was ‘cooking hill’. The whole area was heavily forested until 1978 when an earthquake hit. The ground water heated tremendously and killed most of the trees on the hill. It was a rather steep climb for part of the mile hike around the area, but it was well worth it.

We then drove through Hayden Valley which was a vast beautiful valley. We saw herds of buffalo and elk. One buffalo was right next to the road looking at us and causing another animal traffic jam. We passed Canyon and headed home. We have now traveled the entire Grand Loop road. We still have much to go back and see. And we are planning a day at Grand Tetons next week.

I posted 28 photos from today in a new set called Yellowstone2 which you can link to on the left. I don’t want you to have to sift through all the older photos unless you want to!