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| Putaansuu Family at Castle Geyser |
Please forgive us as we keep posting from our vacation in July. Both Caroline and I remember visiting Yellowstone in our youth. Since we were in the area for Caroline's family reunion, it seemed natural to make the drive to experience it with William.
Our first stop were Mammoth Springs with the terraced features. It was a rough introduction to the park since it started pouring rain with lightening striking VERY close. We snapped a couple of pictures and sprinted back to the car. We drove the short distance to Mammoth Springs to find a place for lunch to find that EVERYBODY else had the same idea and there was absolutely no place to park. We had three days of Yellowstone in front of us, and this gave us a very sour taste of what we might be in for. But, it certainly got better.
We weren't terribly hungry, so we just moved on. Stopped to see this petrified tree. Looks similar to the plants I failed to keep alive in my life. We eventually stopped in at Roosevelt Lodge for lunch. There was parking and only a 20 minute wait.
Then on to site seeing. This is William at Tower Waterfall.
We drove up the hill in search of a high altitude hiking path for William and I to train on (for our future attempt at climbing up Mt. Fuji). We saw many wonderful sites including this pretty mountain meadow.
Bear! We saw our only bear along the side of the road. A brown bear had killed a hiker a few weeks before we got there, so people were a bit concerned about these critters. This one was more concerned about eating the grass.
We had taken some long telephoto pictures of Bison before we realized, we'd have plenty of close encounters with them. It is really cool to be on land that is the closest thing we have to how our country looked and lived originally. And with these guys always getting on the road...
...it caused quite a few back-ups. Imagine the entire country covered with Bison. No wonder it took months for the settlers to cross the country! :-)
Even before visiting the geysers, there was lots of evidence of Yellowstone's volcanic origins.
Our first night was spent at Roosevelt Lodge. He had never actually visited here, but it was a nice rustic looking lodge both outside...
...and in. Though, it was a bit campyish with the mason jar glasses.
The truly rustic aspect of Roosevelt lodge is that you stay in the "Rough Rider Cabins"
They are actually kind of nice. They had power, but...
a more traditional heating system. Caroline was lucky to secure on park reservations. They fill up a year in advance and we were making these plans only a couple months before. Caroline figured out what phone numbers to call to see if any rooms opened up and she called them religiously every day until it appeared that someone cancelled their reservations in the three places we wanted to stay on the nights we wanted to stay there. Awesome. This eliminated hours of driving on and off the park to allow more time to site see. And...
...you just wouldn't be on the park this early to catch the morning beauty of the place.
Lower falls on the Yellowstone river.
We kept seeing this one-eye'd red-shirted shutter-clicker where ever we went. Kept diving in the way of our pictures...
This is apparently the area where the hiker got killed by the Grizzly bear a week or two before we visited. Apparently someone ignored these signs and was camping in the area a month later and was also killed. Did I mention this area was like the wilderness used to be...
The Yellowstone river was very high.
It really made for some spectacularly powerful rivers and waterfalls. This is the Yellowstone river just above the upper falls.
Here are the two victors at the top of Mt. Washburn. Aren't we so Japanese with our peace signs...
For the Geyser Basin, we stayed at the Old Faithful Snow Lodge, which is a nice newer hotel close to the geysers. It was very nice, but the truly interesting lodge is the Old Faithful Inn.
Inside you can look up seven stories of old school log cabin craftsmanship gone insane... I'm so glad they saved this place from burning down during the forrest fires. It would have obliterated as much forrest again to rebuild it as the fires had burned.
Caroline caught this picture of Old Faithful erupting while inside the visitor's center getting the geyser schedules. Nice.
I dressed William this morning, but I did not purposefully put him in a blue shirt to go well with the scalding hot pools. Sometimes, I get lucky. You know, the one-eye'd shutter-clickers in this area seemed to have a blue shirt too. They must be color changers and therefore related to the chameleon somehow...
Boiling water everywhere...
We were headed over to Daisy geyser which was supposed to erupt in the next half hour. We saw this one bubbling energetically and figured this was it. We took a few pictures and waited, but the guide said that it just had a minor eruption which meant it MIGHT do something in an hour and a half. We had just turned to walk away, when it burst to life. It was a spectacular and long eruption. Halfway through, we found out that this wasn't really Daisy after all, but rather Castle Geyser that wasn't on Caroline's schedule at all. Lucky us! We eventually saw Daisy go off as well, but it paled in comparison to Castle.
At Artist Paint Pots we saw our only mud pots. These were going great and making great "Bloop" sounds that had the kids giggling.
Our last night in the park was spent at Yellowstone Lake Lodge. Another huge classic.
They warned us that it might be hours before they could squeeze us in for dinner, but our pager beeped just after we dropped off our bags in the room. It was a very nice dinner with a wonderful view of the lake. A beautiful way to wrap up our Yellowstone adventure.
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