Yellowstone National Park - Wyoming

Here we are after a little over 4 months on the road; we make it to another one of our bucket list places - Yellowstone. We have reservations in Yellowstone for five days, so we should have time to see quite a few of the sites.

We reach Yellowstone's west entrance after about a four hour drive - including stops for lunch, gas and propane fill. I'm thinking - Great, time to pull into our campsite, get out from behind the wheel and relax... but NOOOOOOO. Yellowstone is so immense in size, Grant Village campground is still an hour and twenty minute drive from the west entrance.

If you look really closely you might find Wendy... stalking a pronghorn antelope

Grant Village campground sits on the West Thumb of Yellowstone lake. The lake elevation is at 7733' above sea level, making Yellowstone lake the largest high elevation (above 7000') lake in North America. It freezes about three feet thick in the winter and stays pretty cold year round, so swimming is for the hardy few... and Tank (of course).

The campground itself wasn't anything really special or picturesque, but it did put us smack dab in the middle of Yellowstone and was a great base of operations from which we could do our day trips. After getting checked in and setup in our spot, we opt to hang around the campsite, get our bearings and some dinner, and plan our upcoming week.

We decide to spend the start of our second day there (our first full day) nearby at West Thumb Geyser Basin. We got there just in time to take a ranger led hike of about an hour around the basin, and we were very glad we did. The ranger really knew his stuff and was very interesting and informative. 

This area is unique in that it is the largest geyser basin on the shores of the lake and is full of "paint pots", geysers and crystal clear hot springs.

We head back to the RV and get some lunch before heading up thru Hayden Valley, along some beautiful stretches of the Yellowstone River, and up to the upper and lower Yellowstone Falls.

On the way back, we were slowed down by some slow moving northbound local who didn't seem to care at all about slowing down traffic behind him...

After a full day of exploring, we leave Hayden Valley around sunset to head back to the campground.

We plan on getting up early the next day and hitting the big tourist spots - Old Faithful, the upper geyser basin and the Grand Prismatic Spring. We'll go see Old Faithful first and then over to Grand Prismatic Spring before the crowds start showing up in the park. After all, you can't really go to Yellowstone and not see Old Faithful! 

We get to Upper Basin early and find an almost empty parking lot. We head over to Old Faithful and find only one other couple on the benches in the viewing area. We set our stuff down, get our cameras and smart phones ready, and wait for the imminent eruption... and wait... and wait... seems we got up before Old Faithful this morning! After doing some checking and a little bit of research (and yes maybe we could have done aforementioned checking earlier), we find that we missed the earlier eruption by about 15 minutes,and the next one would probably happen somewhere between 50 minutes to 1 hour and 20 minutes from now. OLD FAITHFUL, MY EYE! Someone needs to go in there and adjust the plumbing; we got a schedule to keep today! As we wait, more and more people start gathering around us, and the place is starting to get crowded, but at least we have primo spots to view the coming eruption.

After seeing Old Faithful FINALLY go off, we and the rest of the crowd (that gathered while we waited) head off to view the other geysers, fumaroles and springs in the upper basin. After that, we're off to see Grand Prismatic Spring.

The next day, we head to the Lamar valley, which is in Northeast section of the park.

We're hoping to see some wildlife. Bison, wolves, grizzly bears, pronghorn antelope, bighorn sheep, moose and elk are on our list of hopefuls. Turns out today is "bison" day. The Lamar valley area is home to multiple herds located in several different areas

This is bison rutting season, so the males are in especially feisty moods, fighting with other males or sticking very closely to a chosen female.

We were really hoping to see a pack of wolves. We were told the Lamar Valley pack had three pups this year and can sometimes be spotted. Unfortunately, we weren't lucky enough to see them. We did spot both a pronghorn antelope and a couple of beaver on the way back to the campsite though.

Yellowstone is a beautiful and exciting place whose character changes dramatically with the seasons. We're just going to have to go back again.