Day 13: Yellowstone

We made another reasonably early start to the day today, leaving our hotel in Gardiner around 8am. As we drove down the main street of the town, we realised the traffic had slowed for elk in the road.

That wasn't our only wildlife encounter of the morning. Shortly later, while driving through the national park, we caught sight of a bison not far from the side of the road.

And shortly afterwards we were passed by another huge bison  

The morning had been quite rainy to start with but looked like it was starting to clear up. Although we'd seen a lot of geothermal activity yesterday, we arguably hadn't seen Yellowstone's most famous feature: Old Faithful Geyser. We decided to head in that direction this morning. Because the national park is so huge, the drive to get there from Gardiner was just over 50 miles.

We arrived some time after 10am and got a parking space with no problem. There's a collection of buildings close to the geyser, including hotels and shops.

We only had a short walk from the car park until we got our first glimpse of the famous geyser.

Old Faithful is so-called because it is a geyser that erupts very reliably; approximately every 60–90 minutes.

The National Park Service calculates and publishes expected eruption times each day. We'd probably just missed one, because we could see the next eruption was due at 11.11. 

At this point, we had a choice of what to do. We could wait on the boardwalk in front of the geyser, where there is a seating area for tourists to watch the eruptions. That would be easy, but it can get extremely busy (do a google image search for “crowds at old faithful” to see what I mean!!). The second option was to follow a short, uphill trail to a place called Observation Point. I'd read that you could watch Old Faithful erupt from above here, but wasn't 100% sure how good the view was going to be. We decided to give it a go, on the basis that we had enough time until the next eruption to climb up, assess the view and climb back down again to the boardwalk if need be.

It turned out to be a nice trail, uphill through the woods.

As we climbed, we could look down to the Upper Geyser Basin, where lots of geysers less famous than Old Faithful are located.

We reached the highest point and decided that the view of Old Faithful from here was pretty good

There were a handful of other people at the viewpoint, but overall it was pretty quiet compared to the crowds we could see amassing on the boardwalk down below.

We decided it was worth waiting up here for the eruption. Bizarrely, this viewpoint turned out to be one of the few places in Yellowstone with a phone signal (because of proximity to the hotel complex below).

The national park predictions turned out to be pretty accurate and the eruption started almost exactly on schedule.

It was so amazing to see boiling water shooting out of the ground.

Tim managed to capture the entire eruption if you want to watch  

Once the eruption was finished, we set off downhill on the trail, passing some beautiful autumn colours.

We didn't return along the same route, but walked a bit further on a path that would ultimately take us down into the Upper Geyser Basin.

After a short walk we came to Solitary Geyser.

This one is fascinating because it isn't technically a geyser. It started life as a hot spring, then in the early 20th century someone had the idea to tap it for hot water to use in the Old Faithful area. That interference made the spring start erupting like a geyser and the eruptions continued, even after the water pipes were removed.

The result is that Solitary Geyser has small but frequent eruptions. We stood around for a while to see whether we could witness one ...

... and eventually we did

I was sufficiently excited to take a selfie with it.

From Solitary Geyser we continued down into the Upper Geyser Basin. There was so much to see here!

We passed a little pool called Ear Spring; I'm guessing because the shape looks like an ear.

The water in it was bubbling away like mad!

We saw what looked like a huge geyser emitting steam in the distance ...

... and passed more bright blue pools like we saw yesterday.

We made our way from attraction to attraction via a long series of  boardwalks, which went on for several kilometres.

There were signs everywhere reminding people not to step onto the ground.

Helpfully, each geothermal feature also has a sign with its name, otherwise I'd struggle to remember what we'd seen.

We passed Tardy Geyser ...

... and Economic Geyser ...

... neither of which I'm imagining erupt very frequently or enthusiastically! We also passed bubbling mud ...

... and rivers of boiling water with a strange, orange tinge.

It was hard to know what to look at first  

Some of the geysers were huge and looked like they'd be incredible if they erupted.

They also erupt very infrequently and unpredictably, though. We passed one, for example, where there was a possible window of 90 minutes in which it might erupt.

It was fun just watching the steam blowing out of them, though

One of the most distinctive geysers we came across was Grotto Geyser.

I loved the shape – it really does look like a little stone grotto.

As we stood and watched, we could see boiling water splashing out of it.

After Grotto Geyser we walked a bit further through the colourful landscape.

We were heading towards Morning Glory Pool, one of Yellowstone's most famous hot springs.

I was really excited to see this one ... and when we finally reached it, it didn't disappoint

Wow. The colours of this one are just incredible.

Somewhat unbelievably, the pool actually used to be brighter than this.

An info board explained that, unfortunately, over time the colours have become dulled by the impact of people throwing coins and other items into the pool.

If it looks like this now, I can't imagine what it must have looked like in its heyday! 

After Morning Glory, we walked back towards Old Faithful.

Although it still felt like a sunny day at this point, the sky was beginning to darken in the distance.

As we got closer to Old Faithful, it became increasingly clear that it was going to start raining at some point soon.

There was still plenty to see, though. From boiling water running into the river ...

... to the enormous Castle Geyser.

This is another one which doesn't erupt very often, so we didn't wait around.

We went into a cafeteria at Old Faithful to get lunch. The heavens did open while we we eating, so after the meal we got back in the car and drove for a while around a part of the park that we hadn't visited yet. The rain began to let up when we reached an area of the park known as Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone.

The Yellowstone River dramatically cuts through rock here and the views were really fantastic.

In particular, we could see Lower Yellowstone Falls, which at 94 metres tall make the Upper Mesa Falls we saw in Idaho the other day pale into insignificance.

After admiring these falls we drove to a different viewpoint, from where we could see the Upper Yellowstone Falls.

At around 30 metres, these are not as high as the Lower Falls, but still very impressive.

From here we drove back in the direction of Gardiner, but along a road in the park we hadn't travelled on before. The views of the forests and mountains were amazing and gave us a perspective on just how huge the national park is.

When we saw a few cars stopped by the side of the road, we pulled over and found bison.

They really are absolutely enormous creatures.

We drove through more beautiful scenery ...

... and soon saw the white of Mammoth Hot Springs looming in the distance, which meant we were less than 10 miles from our hotel.

It had turned into a really sunny evening though, so we decided to try our luck and drive deeper back into the park for another attempt at seeing the Grand Prismatic Spring.

Even at 18.30, we only just managed to get a space in the official car park. We followed a trail which crossed the river.

We walked past Excelsior Geyser.

This one was producing so much steam that we could barely see a thing!

From there we followed the crowd of people ahead of us to the shore of Grand Prismatic.

We'd hoped we'd get a good view because the sun was still very bright, which is supposed to bring out the best colours of the spring. What I'd forgotten is that hot springs produce more steam at the start and end of the day, because of the contrast between the hot temperature of the spring and the cool temperature of the air. That meant that there was so much steam over Grand Prismatic that we could barely see it.

You can maybe see a little bit of the colours around the edge of it in this photo, but not very well.

Never mind, it was still a fun experience to visit

And on our way out of the area, we did pass a couple of other smaller pools which were very pretty.

That concluded what has been a very long, but exciting, day in the national park. It was around 8pm by the time we got back to the hotel. And despite the fact that we've spent the day within the national park, we've still racked up quite a few more miles driven!