Yellowstone Adventures!

I’ve spent a lot of this trip traveling to places I’ve never heard of, on the word of a passing stranger, or in the case of Yellowstone National Park, the general fame of the location. I had, of course, heard of this park, but to be honest, I never really knew what the place was all about. I’m sure most of you are far more learned than I, but for those of you who, like me, always heard it was cool but never knew why, allow me to shed some light.

Yellowstone is the home of Old Faithful, a geyser that, as the name suggests, spews at predictable, regular intervals (every 45 min – 1.5 hours) and has been doing this for forever. Probably not forever, actually, but I don’t feel like looking up when it’s estimated to have started. The entire area comprises the largest volcanic system on the continent, and as such is covered with over 10,000 geothermal features, including 300 geysers and massive amounts of beautiful hot springs. It's also well known for a wide variety of wildlife.

I didn’t find the park itself to be very pretty… in part because of a fire about twenty years ago that the forest is still slowly recovering from, and because we came at the wrong time. I assumed autumn would be beautiful, and apparently it was, but for this national park, winter has arrived. When we started from Boise to Yellowstone, the RV park reservation guy was like, “You’re from Texas? You know it’s supposed to be eight degrees tonight, right?” EIGHT?! No. I did not know that. This would be a good spot to mention that our heater was broken, and there was nobody in Yellowstone available to fix it in the amount of time we were staying there. So, we toughed it out with layers and layers of clothes and blankets, huddled around our little space heater. We have since gotten that fixed. ANYWHO, back to my original point, the park itself is a little dead right now, but the geothermal features definitely made it a fascinating day!

So, pictures! Here are a few geysers. The upper left photo is Old Faithful, which was cool, but hardly the most interesting thing we saw that day. The far left part of the white in the photo is the actual water spewing upward, and the rest of the white part is the accompanying steam. If you look close, you can see a rainbow! The other two are just other geysers in the park that I manage to catch on camera. 

The hot springs, in my opinion, were really the highlight of the park. The colors were just unreal. The photo on the far right is a spring called the Great Prismatic. It’s tough to see in photos, but the steam coming up from the hot spring displayed a beautiful spectrum of color. The surroundings of that one were pretty insane as well.

We didn’t get to see much wildlife this late in the year, but I did see my first bison… and then HERD of bison! Also, again, difficult to tell in the picture, but that raven was about the size of a large cat. And not even remotely wary of people. Wicked.

Oh, a quick word about the Grand Tetons. As I mentioned previously, winter has begun in the park, and we missed all the beautiful fall colors. The day we tried to see the mountains was foggy and overcast, with a layer of clouds covering up the jagged peaks. The lakes and ponds that are usually mirrored were not, and we didn’t see a single of the many varieties of wildlife in the park, which is a major draw to this area. After stopping to take a few unimpressive pictures, we ended up deciding to keep driving.

So, we are now in Fort Collins, Co, which will be followed by Denver, Santa Fe, and finally Austin for Halloween. We are officially on our way home, and I have some serious mixed feelings about it. I can’t believe how quickly this year has gone, and I don’t want it to be over! At the same time… well, you know how when you have to pee, and then you actually SEE the restroom, you have to pee so much worse? That’s how I feel. Now that we’re this close, even though I’m sad that our out-of-state travels are ending for this year, I can’t wait to see my friends!!