We got up and ate breakfast at the hotel, then we headed out. From this point, there has been no Internet access, so these posting have been delayed. The wireless coverage pretty much bites, and once we entered Yellowstone, the provider didn’t support any dial-up coverage. My phone kept saying “alternative provider”. I need to ask at work what that means. I did get SMS pages though. Most of the time though I had no signal in the park.
We drove to Livingston, Montana to fuel up. This is where you turn south to enter into Yellowstone. They promote themselves as the original gateway to Yellowstone.
We got there pretty quick, it took about two hours. The remaining time to the visitor center at Yellowstone only took another hour, so we had almost a full six hours to explore the park today. I am not sure why Google thought it would take five plus hours. Perhaps the final destination was further then we went?
We stopped at Mammoth Hot Springs visitor center and chatted with the park ranger to figure out what we should do. After getting our brochures and maps, we watched a short video about yellowstone. When we walked out of the visitor center we got a surprise! There was a small heard of bison grazing in front of our parked car.
We decided to eat some of our leftover food for lunch. We ate and watched the bison, We then started driving down the road to some of the hot springs. We stopped at Mammoth Hot Springs terrace and walked the trail (it was a wooden walkway). We walked up to one of the springs and watched the water bubbling up and running down the hill.
We then drove the upper terrace drive. This is a one way road that gives you great views of some of the geo-thermal features. Some of the sites you had to hike a quarter or half mile to, but most of them were easy enough to do. We read that one of these springs is a site for some of the best travertine formations.
Next, we drove down to Norris Geyser Basin. This was a good 1.5 mile walk through several geysers and hot springs. BOY! the smell of sulfur is strong! At the end of this trail, we had a lovely overlook of Porcelain Basin. We were too tired to do that trail. Although it was only a half a mile, you had to climb down a very steep trail. The down part isn’t so bad, it’s the back up. So onward we went.
We drove down to Old faithful and checked to see if the Yellowstone Lodge had any rooms. We were in luck, they did! We stayed in one of their cabins. Fortunately, they still had cabins with bathrooms and showers! I don’t think Angie would have appreciated it if I got a room without them.
After we unpacked, we wandered around the area. We walked the old faithful trail. This was a circular loop around the geyser. We walked all the way around it, then we found a seat for the show. We learned that old faithful does not go off on a regular basis. Again, that wonderful state education at work imparting incorrect information. The geyser goes off approximately every 92 minutes, but as we learned it can be late or early by about 10 minutes. The next morning, it went off and then again 34 minutes later. The lesson learned is that you can’t predict when it will go off, just make an educated guess.
Not sure why this image is rotated. I am working on fixing that later.
After watching the geyser erupt, we ate dinner at the Yellowstone Inn. It turns out that this was their first night being opened. They had a lot of kinks they were trying to work out. Fortunately, we were not in a hurry so it was a very low stress dinner. After dinner, we drove back to our cabin and got ready for bed. Angie and I read and finished the newsletter entry for this day.