Day 116 - Yellowstone (Day 2), WY

It was really cold last night but we managed to keep warm and had a good night's sleep. First stop for the day was the Canyon Visitors Center which was located just a 10 minute walk from our campsite. This is one of the best park visitor centers we had been to as the exhibits were modern, interactive and really informative. We learnt that we were sleeping in the Yellowstone Caldera and that on average, there are 1,500 earth quakes in Yellowstone per year although most are so small that you don't notice them but they can change the thermofeatures so what we see today, we might never see again.

When we got back into the car, we both felt like we had earned a qualification in volcanology.

We then headed on the road to the Norris Geyser Basin. We expected to have a quick look around and then get back on the road to our next stop but we were both blown away by the size, scale and beauty of this area, we ended up staying for a couple of hours doing the 2 mile hike around the 550 features. We had always thought that the geyser basin where Old Faithful is located would be the biggest one, but it is just the most popular. Norris Geyser Basin is the hottest and most dynamic basic, sometimes having to be shut for days or weeks if there is a lot of geological activity. We weren't lucky enough to see the largest geyser in Yellowstone -  Steamboat Geyser - erupting but we did see a much smaller one called Vixen. 

The sun was shining and the skies were blue, perfect conditions for photographing one of the sites Lee was most looking forward to seeing, Grand Prismatic Spring. We headed back into the car and drove to Midway Geyser Basin where it is located. Parking was a nightmare here and we ended up leaving the car on the side of the road (with many other people). The boadwalks around the features were also full of people and whilst the park had tried to make it safer by asking people to travel around the springs in one direction, there were still idiots going in the wrong direction. But even with the parking and people challenges, the features here were out of this world. The colours were unbelievable, I actually thought that the pictures you see in books and on TV had the colours added in to improve the appearance of Grand Prismatic Spring but it is actually all those colours in real life. 

(NB: There are one or two pictures in the video where we have boosted the colours on the camera to try to match what we were experiencing in real life, but you will be able to spot these)

There are four features at Midway - Excelsior Geyser, Grand Prismatic Spring, Opal Pool and Turquoise Pool. We enjoyed walking around all of them and found they all offered something unique to look at or learn about. 

Whilst we were looking at Grand Prismatic Spring, we could see people higher up on the hills looking down at it. We decided to try to find the path that led to this viewpoint. The path is not well advertised and whilst it made it a little tricky to find, it did mean that the path and the lookout were both much quieter than the boardwalks. A mile down the road from Midway Geyser, there is a small car park called Fairy Falls Parking Lot. We parked here and hiked up the Fairy Falls Trail but then made a left turn up a side trail to an overlook of Grand Prismatic Spring and the Midway Geyser Basin. The trail was only 0.6 miles long but it climbed 105 feet, the view at the top made it worth it. The spring looked stunning. 

Back at the car, we continued onto Upper Geyser Basin which is where Old Faithful is located. This is the most popular area of Yellowstone. We enjoyed visiting but we couldn't stay her for any length of time, there were far too many tourists! There are quite a few different hotels and facilities here but compared to where we were staying, it felt like too many, they had taken over the landscape. They didn't look very appealing either. Inside the Old Faithful Inn you felt like you were stepping back in time with all the wooden features, but the charm was taken off slightly as we watched the staff in the bar being a little rude to their customers. We got lost looking for a hot chocolate and walked into another hotel called Old Faithful Lodge which had a really dated canteen that reminded me of school dinners, the food looked like school dinners too! I think we were really lucky in the area we were staying. 

We turned up just as Old Faithful was about to blow so we found a front row seat and watched the show. It seemed that each time Old Faithful was due to go off, a huge crowd took over the seats around him to watch. There are 5 other Geysers that the park advertises timings for but these do not go as often as Old Faithful and are sometimes not as reliable. We made it to a couple of these geysers but with an estimated time that was sometimes +/- 4 hours, it was down to luck if you managed to see them going off. We were not very lucky. The saddest park of the trip to Yellowstone for me was hearing about some of the damage humans have done to the park. One of the things that struck me the most was the number of geysers that used to be like Old Faithful which are now unreliable or destroyed due to people throwing coins into them. 

Asides from Old Faithful, there are other features at the Upper Geyser Basin. Although this is the business area for tourists, not many people seem to explore the other features so the boardwalks were really quiet, the quietest we had seen all day. There are so many active Geysers here, if you spent all day, you would manage to see quite a few different eruptions. Even whilst we were waiting for Old Faithful, we saw 2 eruptions in the background but we didn't want to leave Old Faithful to get a closer look at them just in case we missed him going off. 

We both had aching feet by now after a day full of walking so we decided to head back to the campsite. We managed to make a couple more stops along the way at Black Sand Basin and Biscuit Basin, two of the smaller geyser basins in Yellowstone. We also took the short one-way spur road called Firehole Lake Drive where we went past even more geysers and hot springs right next to the roadside, including White Fountain Geyser which erupts sometime between 10 minutes and 3 hours after the last eruption. We waited 15 minutes, probably not long enough but it was starting to get dark! 

There are two things I love about driving in Yellowstone. The first is the amount of geological features you can see from the car. You will be driving through a dense forest one minute and then all of a sudden, the trees are dead and next to the car is a hot spring, steam vent, geyser or mud pots. A few minutes later and you're back in forest or meadows. The second is the bison which plod along next to the cars, almost looking annoyed that you're using their road. 

We arrived back at the campsite and it was too dark to cook so we headed to the canteen and had a flatbread pizza and a beer. The walk to the canteen is only 5 minutes from the campsite and there is a little path that cuts through the trees to avoid having to walk on the road. We were going along this path, Lee in front, when he stops and says "Oh". I look past him and see just a few feet in front a huge male bison. The bison looks up and Lee, blinks his eyes and Lee turns around and says "let's find another route". We took the long way around long the road, it was safer!