Day 64 - Yellowstone Day 1
It wasn’t as cold last night as the night before (only in the 50’s in July). Thankfully everyone slept all night. This morning was a slow start since we had to get packed up and move out of the KOA today. This is quite the effort since we had a tent with lots of stuff on one side of the campground and a small camping cabin with stuff on the other side of the campground. We had one of our favorite camping breakfast of pancakes with Hershey chocolate bars (since we had no syrup) and sausage. I think we finally left the campground about 10:30.
Our first stop was to drive through Firehole Canyon. There was a set of falls which was beautiful and an awesome canyon. There was a swimming hole but we decided not to stop due to the crowd. So to compensate we stopped at a close by creek called Nez Pierce which allowed everyone to play for a few minutes. Of course, that meant we had to drag them out of the water to keep moving for the day.
The next stop was called the Painted Pots. There were several hot springs which are heated by the volcano under the park and each one causes this special algea to grow around the sides and they are sometimes unique and pretty colors. The big negative was a horrible smell that reminds you of boiling eggs or deviled eggs or rotten eggs, we aren’t sure we just know we don’t like it. It apparently is the smell of sulfur and it comes with steam. It is amazing to me how popular these smelly things are. Gretchen had to drive around several times to find a parking place there were so many people there.
It started to rain so we skipped more hot springs and drove to Old Faithful. We got there just in time to get a seat on the boardwalk that surrounds the geyser. There were several hundred people there and we all waited for about 15 minutes or so to see it blow. It is amazing to see how high this blows and on schedule which is even more amazing. Only God can time such things. Even funnier is that once it blows everyone applauds it as if it were performing. We spent some time in the visitor center which is pretty new and in the Old Faithful Educational Center which was pretty cool as well. What an awesome learning experience about all the Geysers in the park and what causes them to spout off. Our last thing at this stop was to see the Old Faithful Inn which is an architectural wonder of its own. It is huge and built out of logs. There is a really cool perch at the top of the ceiling that was originally built to house a small orchestra but due to an earthquake some years ago it is no longer stable. We ended up spending so much time here that it was time for Old Faithful to blow again. One of my co-workers had told me that he and his family enjoy viewing Old Faithful from the Inn’s deck. So we meandered up to the deck got something to drink and sat and watched the show. Caleb, of course, wanted to be closer so he sat on the boardwalk again. This time it seemed to blow higher and due to our viewing point we could see the sheer force of the water spouting out. Now that we had spent a couple hours here we determined that we could leave.
We got back in the car and headed back north to see the geysers we missed due to rain. The one that is the most amazing was Grand Prysmatic spring. This particular one is like a huge pool that was level to where we were standing and had amazing colors surrounding it. There was lots of steam also. However, it was so windy that we could barely walk for the wind. There was another pool here that had a wonderful blue color and you could see very deep into it because the water was so cold. We also learned that these pools are so hot that a human could die in less than 15 seconds.
Finally we headed out to go towards Mammoth our final stop for the day. After a few stops due to animal watching we made it around dinner time. We stayed in a nice cabin which is an upgrade because we got a sink but still no bathroom and we were all sleeping inside. After dinner I thought we needed to go checkout the Mammoth Hot Springs to reduce what all we had to do tomorrow. The girls didn’t want to go so Gretchen and I took the boys and we drove up to the springs which again had that awful smell. After a few minutes reviewing the hiking trail we determined we didn’t want to do a 2 hour hike at 8 pm. As we traveled back to our cabin right there in the center of town was a Bison eating and some Elk crossing the road. This whole free range idea is so new to me coming from a farm in TN that has fences.
The question of the day is there are 2 million annual visitors to Yellowstone National Park. For 2012 our family made up 28 of those. How did we do that?