Yellowstone

In preparation for our visit to Yellowstone National Park, we have been keeping an eye on campgrounds and their availability.  Yellowstone runs a website which allows you to see if a site is full prior to driving many miles to get there.  The problem with this is that many sites are full by dawn.  There are multiple sites that filled up on this day prior to 7:00 AM.  We knew that we had at least an hour drive from Jackson to Yellowstone’s southern entrance and then from there it would be many more miles to some of the more popular campsites.  If we wanted to attempt a popular campground we would have had to be on the road by 4:00AM, and that was not going to happen after the fatigue we were feeling from the day before.  We settled on the Lewis Lake campground which was the first campground we would hit when entering the park in the morning.  This strategy allowed us to find alternate sites if it was full.  Lucky for us the campground had some open sites and we were able to claim one. 

After we staked out our campsite, we headed to the nearest visitor’s center at Grant Village.  We were able to ask a lot of important questions and plan some adventures over the next few days.  The plan for today was to visit the geothermal activity within the park, specifically Old Faithful and some of the surrounding hot springs and geysers.

Old Faithful is a beautiful landscape which seems to be taken from some science fiction plot.  I would highly recommend that any visitor to Old Faithful download the Yellowstone Geysers app.  This tracks the eruptions of not only Old Faithful (every 91 minutes, give or take) but four other major geysers in the immediate vicinity.  We didn’t know about this app until we were already in the area so we just wandered around watching different eruptions.  We agreed that our favorite was not Old Faithful, but rather the Riverside Geyser which erupts violently for 20 minutes every six hours.  It would be easy to spend a day or more exploring the different geysers and hopping between eruptions – had we known this in advance, we would have planned for it. After about five hours, we decided to move on to other nearby geothermal areas.

We walked around Biscuit Basin and eventually found ourselves on a short hike to Mystic Falls.  The hike was only a mile in length to the falls for a total of a two-mile hike.  At the end of the trail was a cascading waterfall which also has geothermal springs feeding the waterfall.  It was an absolutely beautiful view and I would recommend this hike to anyone interested in a short easy hike. 

After returning from our adventure, we realized we were exhausted and a little burned from the unrelenting sun.  We decided we could use some rest so we headed back to our campsite and enjoyed a nice dinner of black bean chili from Harmony House and cheese quesadillas. 

Tomorrow we plan on hiking to Terraced Falls and seeing Grand Prismatic Spring.  

And a parting shot of why proof-reading is important!