On Monday we didn’t have to travel far to our destination — Cody, Wyo. to Yellowstone National Park. But once we settled into our campsite, we still did quite a bit of driving around this large park.

Getting there

Getting to our site wasn’t too bad, although there was some traffic at the east entrance to the park. Looks like they’re putting up a stone wall to slow erosion. As you can see, our campsite was gorgeous. The lady that checked us in was so sweet. She was going to put us in a tent-only area but then saw a site right next to Yellowstone Lake. So that’s where we settled in.

On to Old Faithful and the unimpressed

We set up our site and took a half-hour nap — we were exhausted from the long drive the day before. Then Bea made some butter and tomato sandwiches, we chowed them down, and took off. First destination was Old Faithful. We got there and found parking, and about two minutes after we got to the site, it started spurting.

The hole steams constantly and the geyser erupts about every 90 minutes. There were benches set up around the site with people just lined up waiting to see it. The spurts start off low and slow, and then all the sudden, the hot water erupts, steam billowing high into the air, and everyone gasps in amazement.

The eruption doesn’t last too long — maybe a minute and a half. But it is great.

Not everyone is as in awe as the rest of us, though. At Mt. Rushmore, I overhead one guy telling his wife: “I wasn’t that impressed.” And then at Yellowstone, a father and son were watching the geyser, and while people were snapping photos of the eruption, the father said to the son, “They’ll be getting 100 pictures of the same thing.” As soon as the spurts got lower, they turned and left. I was like, What? This didn’t impress you? What impresses you then, watching Sunday Night Football on HDTV? Being able to watch cable in your RV? Geez. I didn’t actually say this, of course. This was all interior monologue.

Bubbling mud, waterfalls and buffalo daredevils on the jump…

The Grand Prismatic Pool, Fountain Geyser and Paint Pots

After perusing the gift shops and sending out some postcards, we headed north and stopped at the Grand Prismatic Pool. In a lot of the areas at Yellowstone, there’s a boardwalk you have to travel on to see these sights. The air smells like sulfur and hot steam pours in your face, but it’s worth it. This pool was one of those places.

It’s hard to capture the beauty of this pool in a picture — although we’re just amateurs with our point-and-click digital cameras. But it is almost like a circular rainbow. As you get closer and closer to the steaming water, there are deep reds, oranges, yellows, greens, blues, and then a deep violet color in the center of the pool.

Fountain Geyser and Paint Pots

Next we moved onto a different geyser area, the Fountain Geyser. This one was smaller but just as cool, because the boardwalk was a lot closer and you could feel both the hot steam from the eruption (hot) and the water spray that came out (cold). This is Bea in front of the spraying geyser, which erupted a lot higher than this but I’m no professional so that’s why it looks kind of low.

At this site, we also went to the Fountain Paint Pots. This is an area that is basically a pool of thick, boiling mud. In the summer the mud is thin and boils like when you blow into chocolate milk through a straw.

When it gets colder, the mud will bubble up and then freeze, and you can see the formations where these bubbles have hardened and created a moon-like appearance with grey-brown peaks and valleys. If you click on this picture, it will take you to a short, two-second video that Bea took of the mud bubbling.

The Upper and Lower Falls

It was getting later into the afternoon and so we didn’t have time to head farther north to the Mammoth Hot Springs, so we went east toward two large waterfalls in the park. We ended up at the Lower Falls, a 300-foot waterfall that you can take a trail to the brink of. It was a great repreive for both of us, mainly because the place doesn’t smell like rotten eggs like the rest of the park with the geysers and hot springs. Don’t get us wrong — we loved that part, too. But after a while you get a headache from feeling like you’re smelling some disgusting dude’s farts all day.

More buffalo, and the buffalo daredevils

As we continued on our journey, we saw a ton more buffalo — herds of them across a valley in the mid-east area of the park. Can’t think of the name of the valley right now. Before this, though, at one of the parking areas for the Lower Falls, we came upon this beast.

You always know something potentially interesting is coming up because there are 30 cars parked on the side of the road, with 25 people running outside with digital cameras in their hands and hanging from their necks. Sometimes it’s just a deer or two, and that’s lame. But sometimes it’s something like this.

What was amazing to Bea and me was how close people were willing to get to the buffalo. You can see the guy in the background of this shot, and he’s not that far away. Sure, the buffalo was just kind of lazily crossing the street here, but if he ever decided to charge, Mr. I’m-A-Tough-Guy-Because-I-Can-Get-Close-To-A-Buffalo-With-My-Kickin’-Digital-Camera is going to have two holes through his midsection from getting gored. Good luck with that.

Eventually we made our way back to camp and started a fire, which warmed us up a bit, and then hit the hay.