Day 14: Yellowstone

We left the hotel around 8am again this morning, looking forward to another full day in Yellowstone. It wasn't long before we got our first animal sighting: elk by the roadside.

It was only about 6 degrees when we stepped outside and it had obviously been a cold night. The contrast between the cool air temperature and the heat of the hot springs was causing an incredible amount of steam as we drove through the national park.

Places where we'd hardly seen any steam at all when we drove past yesterday evening were now covered in it.

Last night we'd stopped briefly at a place called Roaring Mountain. This is what it looked like last night ...

... and this is what it looked like this morning.

The contrast was incredible. There was frost on the grass in places where the sun hadn't reached it yet and overall we had a really beautiful drive

We were driving south and around 10am we reached the Old Faithful area again.

It was starting to get a bit warmer now and everywhere looked lovely with the bright blue sky.

The next eruption of Old Faithful wasn't expected until 11.18, so we had a bit of time to kill. We decided to go for a walk along some of the paths that we'd visited in the Upper Geyser Basin yesterday.

The rapid progress we were making around yesterday's route came to an abrupt halt, when we reached a small group of people standing with a park ranger. The ranger informed us that there was a bison close to the path. So there was!

The ranger informed us that it was a male bison who seemed a bit agitated by the way he was swinging his tail. We had the option of turning around or waiting for a bit to see whether he moved away from the path. We opted to wait and see what happened.

It was a bit of a long wait, but eventually the bison did decide to cross the path.

Once he was sufficiently far away, the ranger allowed us to continue down the path.

It was really pleasant walking alongside the river.

We were just enjoying the views when Tim noticed a significant amount of steam coming from one of the geysers behind us.

It turned out that Grand Geyser – a geyser we'd walked past yesterday on the opposite side of the basin – was erupting.

This was so exciting to see, because it's one of those geysers where it's difficult to predict the timing of eruptions with any accuracy. When we'd seen it yesterday, the eruption prediction from the National Park Service came with a possible range of 90 minutes before and after, which was too long a window to stand around on the off-chance!

It was incredible to watch and we really have the bison to thank for the fact that we saw it  If we hadn't been delayed on the path, we'd have been much further around the basin by this point and have missed it.

Between the bison and the eruption, we'd spent a bit more time on the trail than we expected and we were conscious that we wanted to get back towards Old Faithful before the predicted eruption at 11.18. We set off across the boardwalks at speed.

However, we soon found ourselves stopping again when we came to the unusually named Oblong Geyser.

It's not a very good photo, but this one seemed to be in the middle of a low but wide eruption.

You should be able to see the eruption more clearly in the video, although there's so much steam it's still hard to make out the jets of boiling water.

And that wasn't the last geyser we saw erupting today! We rounded a corner and found ourselves at Vent Geyser ...

... and this one was in the middle of erupting too!

Water was really shooting out of it, which was so cool to see.

Having looked it up this evening, I've learned that Vent Geyser is connected to Grand Geyser and almost always starts erupting after its bigger neighbour.

By this time we really had spent more time in the geyser basin than expecting and we only had around 15 minutes to get back to Old Faithful. We continued at speed, though did get slightly distracted when we realised there was a bison just off the boardwalk.

Not sure whether this was the same one as earlier who had moved, or a completely different one. It seems strange, though, that they want to graze in this busy area around the geysers when they have the entire park at their disposal!

In the end, all this excitement meant that we didn't quite make it back as far as the seating area in front of Old Faithful to watch the eruption. But it didn't matter, because it turned out we had a good vantage point from the boardwalk about five minutes away.

We heard someone afterwards complaining that they didn't think the eruption was very impressive. Personally, I think I could watch this every day and still be impressed  

Once we'd finished watching the eruption, we walked down the final bits of boardwalk and back towards the car park.

Our plan for the rest of the day was to drive further south through the park than we had previously, towards Yellowstone Lake.

Yellowstone Lake is huge, covering an area of around 136 square miles. It fills the Yellowstone caldera, a huge depression caused by a historical volcanic eruption.

It's a really beautiful lake and we could see towards high mountains in the distance. That's the direction in which Yellowstone merges into the mountainous Grand Teton National Park, which we visited back in 2022.

Our first view of the lake came from a place known as the West Thumb Geyser Basin.

Here we saw an assortment of bubbling mud pots ...

.... and bright blue pools. This one was called Bluebell Pool.

This geyser basin is right next to the lake, which gives it a really stunning location.

It also meant that some of the thermal features were almost in the lake itself.

We've seen a lot of geothermal activity by this point, but these were still fascinating to see.

The highlights of West Thumb for me were a couple of bright blue hot springs.

Oddly, although this one is so blue, it is called Black Pool.

How much of it we could see really depending on which way the wind was blowing the steam that rose from its surface.

At one point the steam blew right towards us and we couldn't see anything at all.

Then it cleared and we had a perfect view again

The second beautiful pool was called Abyss Pool.

It was easy to see how this one got its name. When you peered down into it, it was really, really deep!

Such an amazing place

We'd worked up an appetite by this point, so we got back in the car and drove towards a little settlement called Lake Village. 

As we wandered down to the lakeside, we passed an elk.

We were looking for the general store, where we were hoping to get some lunch.

The store was just across the road from the lake, so we had some more fantastic views.

Once inside, we found it had a small diner section where we were able to order pots of chilli. The chilli came without rice but with something called oyster crackers. I had just about enough phone signal to google them and ascertain that they don't actually contain oysters before we ate them.

From the lake we had quite a long drive north back towards Gardiner ahead of us. We stopped after a few kilometres to view some rapids in the Yellowstone River.

They were quite impressive as rapids go, but we'd already seen so much amazing nature today that they probably didn't excite us as much as they should have done.

Shortly after the rapids, we stopped at a place called Mud Volcano.

As we followed another boardwalk around, I initially thought that this location might not be quite as exciting as some of the other ones we've visited.

I realised I was wrong when we reached a place called Dragon's Mouth Spring.

Wow.

I can definitely see how it got the name

Then we reached Mud Volcano itself.

This one was pretty cool too

It started to rain around this point and so we got into the car and continued our journey north. I figured the biggest excitement of the day was behind us. I was wrong! 

We turned a corner on the road at some point and saw a line of cars parked up, with lots of people standing outside with cameras and binoculars. Initially I couldn't tell what they were so excited about and we were going to drive on past. Then I realised ... they could see a bear

We pulled over and parked up too so we could get a better look.

I should add that we were a very long way away from this bear, using the zoom feature on our phone cameras to the max. That's why the pictures look so indistinct and grainy.

But I think they're clear enough to show that it was definitely a bear You can see his face quite well in this shot.

I wasn't 100% sure when I was taking the photos because we were so far away – and it was also starting to pour with rain – but based on this video which Tim shot, I think it was a grizzly bear (rather than a black bear). One of the distinguishing features of grizzlies is a hump they have on their backs, and you can see that more clearly in the video.

Wow, what a way to end our time in Yellowstone! As we drove towards the park exit to leave for a final time, we got another great view of the big bull elk we saw on our first day. But I don't think anything is going to compete with the excitement of seeing a bear

Despite the fact that we spent the entire day within the park yet again, it was another big day of driving. Worth every mile though for the amazing things we've seen