Today was our first full day of exploring the Yellowstone area, so why not go to Yellowstone's most famous thermal feature... Old faithful!
We decided to tour the lower loop, so we headed to old Faithful first. On our way, we saw a Coyote and more buffalo. We got to old faithful sometime around 9am and were able to beat most of the crowd. After we toured the Old Faithful lodge, we settled in for the show. Old faithful was running a little late (by about 8 minutes), but was still within it's +/- 10 minute window. I went and told the rangers to open the main valve a little to see if they could fix their slight timing issue... I kind of thought they would have it computer controlled by now.
After Old faithful, we went into the Old Faithful Inn (which was amazing), went to the van and ate, then walked around the other geysers in the lower geyser basin. We got to see Grand errupt, which is the worlds largest predictable geyser. It was amazing! It only erupts around twice a day, so we were lucky to see it.
After the geysers, we continued around the lower loop, stopping at the lake, mud volcano, and the Dragon's Mouth. I was disappointed at the Dragon's mouth, it was MUCH less active than I remember. The sign said that it had been decreasing in activity since sometime in 1993 when it had suddenly just decided go into a quiet phase.
The mud volcano was not what I expected either. the mud was very thin, almost just dirty hot water. The park is so wet that the mud just wasn't that muddy.
On our way back, we were stopped in traffic twice, once there were multiple rangers packing bearspray, we heard someone say something about a grizzly, we looked, and turned around, braving the traffic again to see it, but never did.
The second time we were stopped, we got to see a wolf. It was in the distance, and laying on the ground being lazy, but there none the less.
We made it back to the cabin, ate, and went to bed.
No comments:
Post a Comment