Yellowstone or bust

On Thursday, we decided to drive up into Yellowstone before the holiday weekend started and the park was packed. Yellowstone has an amazing diversity of land, mountains, rivers, and lakes, as well as geysers, hot springs and a sulfer cauldron. It even has its own Grand Canyon. Yellowstone Lake is the biggest lake measuring 20 miles long, 14 miles wide, and 460 feet deep.

Yellowstone is a huge park that has 2 loops. To go around both loops and stopping occasionally, it takes a good 8 hours to see the park, and I think we put on 150 miles on the car. Most of the trees in the picture above are Lodgepole pines (a.k.a.Norweigan Pine) These make up 80% of the trees in the park. We first went to Old Faithful to watch the geyser shoot off. It is quite interesting to think about the amount of volcanic activity that is evidenced in that park. Old Faithful supposedly goes off every 92 minutes but the times can vary. On this day, it was 3 minutes late but well worth the wait.

We then headed for Hot Mammoth Springs in the northern area of the park near Montana. It was really funny and cool to see a herd of bison walking down the road. They certainly held up traffic.

We were able to see quite a few animals including elk, bison, pronghorn deer, mule deer, and 3 bear. I guess I thought we'd see thousands of animals in the plains but considering the millions of acres there are, I can understand why the sightings are a little more obscure.

We also enjoyed looking at the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone. It has a wonderful waterfall that I think I've seen on an old stamp. It also has a deep canyon with lots of colors.

The driving could be treacherous as the cliffs were sometimes 2000 feet down. And then there were times where there were miles of fields. We plan to go back one more time before we leave. It was clear to us that most of the animals were in the northern part of the park so looks like we'll be doing the long drive again. Definitely a place we'd recommend seeing.