Wildlife, Waterfalls, and Other Worldly Wonders
“I would like to die on Mars. Just not on impact.”
Yellowstone National Park is one wild place.
Yellowstone was established in 1872 as the world’s first National Park. It’s iconic.
At 2.2 million acres, the park is simply huge. The park encompasses 3 states: Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho. It can easily take over 2 hours to drive from one end of the park to the other. And that’s not counting any bison traffic jams.
Yellowstone is a super-volcano with half of the world’s hydrothermal features (over 10,000) found within the park. And then there’s over 500 active geysers (again, more than half of the world’s geyers can be found here).
Here’s one you might be familiar with. We missed an eruption by about 5 minutes, so we waited another 90 minutes for the next one. It was about 10 minutes late. Apparently, it’s not as “faithful” as commonly believed.
Our first goal in Yellowstone was to see some wildlife. Specifically, Lisa was looking to get a peek at some bison. While the bison are supposed to be plentiful, we struck out for the vast majority of our first day in the park. After heading back to camp for a rest, we decided to go back in during the evening when it cooled down a bit.
We took a ride out to Hayden Valley (about an hour from camp) and still weren’t finding anything of interest. We sure found evidence of them.
But no sightings. We took a break and hung out on an overlook for a bit. But we only saw our shadows.
Disappointed, we turned back to drive the hour back to camp and - then out of nowhere - we finally saw a guy. Right there on the side of the road. I used the Adventure Genie Jeep as a shield and I started shooting away.
I came up with this shot which looked like I put myself in a lot more danger than reality.
Over the course of the next couple of days on our hikes we came across a lot more wildlife. Here are a couple of our favorites.
First is the elk with the big a$$ antlers.
And then there was this deer that we stumbled across while hiking the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone.
On another day we hiked into another world. It’s as if we landed on the surface of Mars.
We hiked around the Grand Prismatic Spring, which is the largest hot spring in the US and the third largest in the world.
Here’s a peek at what we saw from the overlook.
Ok, let’s hike down for a closer look.
Well, that’s a bit steamy.
We got up close and personal. I’ll let the pictures do the talking.
Lisa had one more goal and that was to hike the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone along the Yellowstone River. We saw it from afar the evening before from Artists’s Point.
And then started our hike early the next morning.
The Falls were loud and powerful..
The river flowed fiercely
And, of course, I had to get in the middle of the action.
A couple of shots from the rapids around me …
… a view down the river …
… and back to safety where I caught a nice little reflection shot from an overflow pool of water.
Next up: Grand Tetons with a stay in Victor, Idaho.
But first a stop at the drive-in.
