Growing Rich Everyday... My Weblog

About 2 weeks ago, we just returned from our much awaited Yellowstone vacation planned for the last long weekend of the summer, Labor Day Weekend. It was well worth the wait.

Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks are situated in north-west Wyoming. With Idaho and Montana bordering Yellowstone National Park, one can enter the park from the west via West Yellowstone, MT or from the north via Gardiner, MT, from the east via Cody,WY or Cooke City, WY and from the south via Jackson. They are a part of the Targhee National Forest area.

Day 1
We flew to Salt Lake City on Aug 29th after work and crashed in a nearby airport hotel for the night.

Day 2
Being 2 hours behind EST, we were up way earlier the next day than we expected to be which turned out to be good. We started driving to West Yellowstone at about 7:30 am, enjoying the hilly terrains and vast vast fields of Utah and Idaho, which we so miss in Florida. The air was crisp at 59 F. We reached West Yellowstone around 12:30-1:00 pm and spent about an hour there walking around the town and having lunch.

At about 2:00 pm we started heading towards the park. The entire park is in the shape of an 8. We had planned our itinerary to cover the 8 in an anti-clock wise direction starting from West-Yellowstone/Madison junction going southward towards Old Faithful area and calling it a day at Grant Village. However the drive from Madison Junction to Old Faithful has a number for detour scenic loops not worth missing and can easily take about 2-3 hours before one can reach the Old Faithful area.The road from West Yellowstone to Madison and further south runs parallel to the Firehole River, a scenic experience. We took our first detour along the Firehole Canyon drive which had breath-taking Firehole Falls as one of its highlights.We then stopped at the Fountain Flats drive before moving on to our first experience of geyser basins at the Fountain Paint Pots trail.


Fountain Paint Pots trail is a kids-friendly trail and covers almost all the 4 hydrothermal features - Hot springs, Steam vents(a.k.a. Fumaroles), Mud Pots and Geysers - that Yellowstone is known for. I vividly remember the Celestine Pool, Bacteria, Fountain Paint Pot (which is a mud pot), Red Spouter and one more geyser along the farther corner of the trail. The temperatures of these hydrothermal features range from 120 - 200 F and they contain lots of acidic chemicals, typically hydrogen sulphides in them. Legend has it (as told by one of the park rangers) that one of the visitors and his dog succumbed to their life as they jumped into the Celestine Pool.

We then went to Firehole Lake drive which has 3 good thermal features - Firehole Spring, Great Fountain Geyser and White Dome geyser. We could see Firehole Spring constantly bubbling, a striking contrast to the cool blue color it possessed. The name Firehole is interesting, a number of natural artifacts are named Firehole in Yellowstone . The park ranger explained that "hole" is the native-Indian-speak for the word "valley". So in effect Firehole means Valley of Fire, which Yellowstone indeed is.
A little further ahead, there was no activity at Great Fountain Geyser which the park rangers had predicted to be erupting later that night between 10:00 pm - 12:00 pm. We were very lucky to arrive just in time for White Dome Geyser to erupt. It was our first ever geyser in the park showing off its scheduled eruption, which was a lot overwhelming for us. White Dome Geyser is a cone geyser.
White Dome Geyser Erupting
After this, we went to the Midway Geyser Basin. Now the entire Old Faithful area comprises of 4 geyser basins - the northernmost being Midway Geyser Basin followed by Biscuit and Black Sand Basins and then of course Old Faithful's Upper Geyser Basin. Midway Geyser Basin is home to the largest hot spring in the park- the Grand Prismatic Spring and Excelsior Geyser. Excelsior Geyser, now a very large thermal spring, has beautiful intricate siliceous sinter patterns that lined on its inner walls. It is very active and pours a large amount of water in the Firehole river by way of minor streams and falls.

By the time we were done with Midway Geyser Basin, we were extremely thirsty. So we decided to skip Biscuit Basin and Black Sand Basin for the moment and head straight on to Old Faithful area which has many cafeterias - big and small. The visitor center at Old Faithful has a chart of various "predictable" geysers and their next expected eruption times.When we first went in there, one of the park rangers was announcing that Bee-hive geyser would be erupting in the next 15 minutes. So we rushed to the nearest viewing vantage point to see the geyser erupting. It went as high over 100-150 feet. Mind-blowing !!

Old Faithful was going to erupt in the next half hour as per the predictions, so we casually strolled around near the benches waiting to see one of the most touted attractions of the park. We had already spent 45 min waiting for Old Faithful and it was taking longer than that to erupt :(. Finally we decided to move on, but just as we were about to enter the visitor center again, there it was. By this time it was already 6:30 pm. We just had a max of an hour and a half before sun-down to see the rest of this geyser basin. But we had no idea how big it was. The Upper Geyser basin itself can take half-a-day to be covered in its entirety along with an hour of Ranger Program worth taking here.

We did the ranger program next which was very informative. She walked us along the upper bridge/loop area explaining a bit of history, geology, animal life, science and contemporary issues of Yellowstone, particularly wrt to the geysers and thermal springs in the upper loop - the Anemone Geyser that erupts every 15 - 20 min and flushes down its own water like a toilet bowl :), Plume Geyser that luckily erupted while we were around in repeatable 5-7 gushes. The upper loop also contained the Bee-hive geyser- it would have been amazing to be soaked into Bee-hive's erupted water from here, Lion Club geyser, Giantess geyser, Doublet pool and Aurum Geyser. Castle Geyser far across, on the other side of this loop was erupting as she continued her talk. Since Castle Geyser eruption lasts for almost 40-45 min, we hurried to see the last glimpses of its gushes.

This was almost the end of our site-seeing day. It was a long day from 5:30 am up until then. We decided to have dinner at Old Faithful Cafeteria and then head on to our our Grant Village accomodation.