Yellowstone National Park has been on my bucket list for a long time. When I was 16 I had a picture of the Grand Prismatic spring from the National Geographic magazine on my wall. I was fascinated by the colours created by the thermophile bacteria living at the edge of the spring and have always wanted to see it, so I’m (and we’re all) very excited to see the supervolcano caldera and all the volcanic features of the park that have been created by the incredible geothermal power of the earth.
Approaching Yellowstone we make it to a little national forest campground on the west of the park. We soon realise Yellowstone is huge and we’ll need to move around and stay in different places to avoid long drives at the end of each day. As it’s peak season we’ll have to wing it and hope some of the other closer campgrounds have last minute cancellations. After securing a spot we have a little time before it will get dark and decide to head into the park and try to see Old Faithful - the most regular geyser to erupt in the park!
We get into the park from the West Yellowstone town entrance but it's a bit of a drive to Old Faithful - we arrive and miss the eruption by a few minutes (it erupts approx every 100 mins plus or minus 10 mins currently) so head to the grand prismatic spring (my bucket list view!!) to have a quick look in the fading light. It's relatively cold so we see lots of mist due to the temperature difference between the spring (90degC) and the air (35deg C) and therefore we see little colour the spring is famous for - just hints of yellow and burnt russet at the edges - but enough of a taster for when we see it during the day in all its glory.
We dash back to Old Faithful in time to see it erupt and it's incredibly spectacular! Alex is transfixed and we promptly buy some books on volcanoes and geysers to explain the workings to him - nothing like physical geography in action for learning!!
After the evening drive back to the West entrance (this place is huge so everything takes a while) we bed down excited for the next few days.
Waking in the morning we’re greeted by clouds of wildflowers in bloom all around the van and we head back to the West entrance. There is a bit of a difference from yesterday as now there is a 30 minute queue, as we’re in the middle of summer we expected the crowds. Some bikers try to push into the queue and are firmly dispatched back to end of the queue by a fierce park ranger!
First up is a drive of Firehole Canyon where a hot river has carved through the rock and we see an osprey nesting just next to the road. Next we head back to the Grand Prismatic as I’m dying to see the iconic view I’ve dreamed about. We take a shortish walk and head up to an overlook to see it from a slightly elevated viewpoint. It’s a little overcast so the colours are a bit muted but suddenly the sun bursts through the skies and we get the incredibly vibrant colours we’ve seen in photos with the dramatic backdrop of moody skies. It’s a magical moment and we’re all in awe, although we’ve said we will go back if there is a clear blue sky day to see it in all its glory. When we chatted to a photographer in West Yellowstone town in a photograph shop he told us that there are only a couple of weeks a year in summer where the colours are at their best, the photos don’t need editing to show off the colours and we happen to be there during one of them! (My photography's not good enough without a bit of editing sadly!)
After viewing the spring from above we go back to the ground level boardwalk on the other side of the spring and watch the hot water pour from the lake with bright red dragon flies called meadow hawks skimming the warmed river below. The walk around the spring in daylight is fab and we get patches of colour that glow gold and orange when the wind blows the steam away. Alex loves learning about the thermophiles and extremophiles - with many species adapted to live at different temperatures around the spring and producing different colours.
Our next stop is the Paint Pots where we watch mud bubble and spit with the geothermal energy and then we go back to Old Faithful to see it erupt during the day and it’s amazing again. We take a walk round the rest of the associated geyser basin with lots of smaller geysers (it’s one of several basins in the park) and we miss the Grand geyser, which has a huge eruption, by a few minutes! We love the Spasmodic geyser for its thunderous spouting and great name. One geyser looks like it's shoooting from Guy's ear as we take a quick selfie (well he has been living in a van with Alex and I for a while now!)
After a long and tiring day we head back to our campsite with a brief stop for ribs in Yellowstone town and a quick stop to look at the amazing photographs in an camera shop and then exhausted and very happy we conk back at our camp site.
We have a rude awakening very early as our neighbour puts on their generator around 7am (very bad form!) and we head back to the park. It’s a rainy miserable morning so there’s no queue today and we head straight to the Artists paint pots which have pretty colours (Alex loves learning that the thermophiles that live by mud pots eat rock and spit our acid that dissolves the rock making the mud pots). After which we then head up to the north of the park and the North Basin which is the hottest and most acidic park of the park. It looks incredible, desolate and lunar like and still fizzing and bubbling in the rain. We check out the Steamboat geyser which had the tallest spout in the park but doesn’t erupt to a schedule and meet some avid geyser watchers who will happily sit for hours to wait for their favourite geysers to erupt.
As we travel around the East and North of the park we pick up a couple of hitch hikers. One is a Brit with quite a lot of facial hair. Transpired that he is walking the Continental Divide from New Mexico to the Canada border. That is a truly monumental walk, averaging 25 miles a day climbing up to 14,000 feet en-route. So a few miles in Wendy gives him and his companion a bit of a break.
We finally see a single bison in the distance, we’ve been looking forward to seeing them as a feature of the park but they have been missing from everywhere we go. There is a quick stop at the “roaring wall” a feature that apparently makes load roaring noises but isn’t roaring today.
Heading to the North, we arrive at Mammoth Springs and fort, which is an old US Calvary base. The springs are impressive here, climbing several hundred feet, as they dissolve calcium carbonate in the water which is then deposited in elaborate mushroom formations to make terraces, and some are stained with minerals in the water.
It’s super hot in the park so we were hoping to take a dip somewhere as there was apparently an area of the river that a spring warmed and was a free dipping spot, but sadly this was washed away in a major flood in 2022.
That flood devastated several areas of the park including the main north road into the park and several of the campgrounds (making it even harder to get spots here!). It’s amazing how quickly the people here have rebuilt the roads, just 7 months to build a replacement entrance road of 10 miles, and recovered from the flood but there are still some closures. The flood altered the river course which changed the hot spring flowing into it as well as disconnecting the road access.
Disappointed we won’t get a dip we head out of the North entrance and find a spot at an rv campsite next to Yellowstone Springs, which is a privately run geothermal pool complex. We have an incredible soak in the water, which is 106 Fahrenheit at its hottest and piped about 3 miles from its source, and ease our limbs which are tired after lots of walking.
We’re up early and have a morning dip in the spring before we head back to the park. We stop briefly to see the single petrified tree in the park, which is impressive (and inspires us for a future visit to the petrified forest in Arizona) plus a quick stop to see the impressive Tower Falls cascading between spiky rocks. Then it’s on to the Lamar valley to see if we can find some bison!
We’ve heard this is where they are all currently congregating as it is the rutting season and the males have gone seeking some companionship!
As we begin to arrive in the central area of the valley we start to see hundreds of bison at the sides of the road and in large groups (explains why there were no bison elsewhere in the park!). We stop to admire them and can almost smell the testosterone as the males stomp about and take dirt baths. They are huge with big fluffy faces and make a weird barking bleating sound with their tongues stuck out! It’s amazing to see such large groups in one of the last protected completely natural habitats.
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