Trip To Yellowstone National Park

    After leaving the Black Hills, we drove to Yellowstone National Park via Sheridan, Wyoming, the Big Horn Mountains and Cody. This is a drive we've done several times before and are always captivated by the beauty of the mountains along a road that follows a stream into a large valley. Unfortunately it was raining when we drove through the mountains so we didn't get nice photos. We spent the night in Sheridan where we walked around downtown visiting the famous Mint Bar and King's Saddlery which sells quantities of anything anyone would need if they own a horse.

Our first night in Yellowstone we stayed (via reservation) at the Fishing Bridge RV Park hoping to charge all our batteries and replenish the water tank on our camper. Unfortunately their electrical system was broken (they gave us $5 off the camping fee of $36). We just could not get a break!

The next morning my husband and I got up early and drove to the National Park Service's campground at Norris and waited in line for a campsite (pictured). Still no electricity but it was a big site with lots of shade and only cost $7 a night (with my mother-in-law's senior discount). The sites at the RV park are very small so when you walk out your door you are right next to someone else's camper. I don't know why the National Park Service has such low standards for their campgrounds. It's really a disservice to people who like to camp without living like a homeless person. We had to drive 24 miles every day just to take a shower. (That's my editorial for this post.)

An advantage to driving in

the park that early was the

beautiful sight of fog (or maybe it was steam) in the valleys as the sun came up.

Our first full day in the park we drove north to the Mammoth area. This is the only part of the park that is like a town as the headquarters are there and there are homes for people who work in the park. This area features the Mammoth Hot Springs where the hot water creates terraces of chemical deposists that step down hills. Many of them have dried up but there are several that still have hot water trickling (or gushing) down the terraces.

We drove out of the northern gate (the original formal entrance to the park) to Gardnier, Montana. This was the only time during the week I could get a wireless internet connection. Most of the time in the park we couldn't get cell phone service and the only place with wireless was at Old Faithful Inn but it was secured so I couldn't use it.

We drove west to the Lamar Valley which is famous for wildlife viewing. We hoped to see some bear or moose. This area is close to the Gallatin National Forest where a bear had attacked campers at Soda Butte the week before, killing one of them. If we saw bear, I was happier to see them on the other side of the park from where we were camping. Alas, we never saw bear or moose at anytime when we were in the park. We saw buffalo and pronghorn in this area.

On our way back to our camp, we saw a herd of elk in the Canyon area. Canyon was where we went each night to take our showers. It was 12 miles from our Norris campground.




Of course the highlights of Yellowstone are the hydrothermal features. They are all over the park and you can see steam rising from them along the roads, in the various geyser basins and in the hills. We spent the next couple of days touring the different geyser basins to see all the different features.

One day we drove to the Canyon area and took the scenic highways that go on either side of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. Here the Yellowstone River, which flows north, has created a canyon of yellow walls and has two big water falls. This is the Upper Falls as seen from the South Rim Drive.

There are many overlooks along both the South Rim Drive and the North Rim Drive. The most famous is called Artist's Point on the North Rim. Many photos and paintings have been made from this point. This is my husband and I at Artist's Point with the Lower Falls in the background.

On Friday night we went to the Old Faithful Inn for dinner. This historic inn was designed and built in 1903-04 by architect Robert Reamer and set the standard for the great rustic lodges in the National Parks. It is the largest log hotel in the world.

You can view Old Faithful geyser from some of the rooms. There is a viewing porch of the Upper Geyser Basin that has a great view of Old Faithful and many of the other geysers in the area.

The other area of the park we visited was Yellowstone Lake. The lake is huge covering 136 square miles with 100 miles of shoreline. It sits in the bowl of an ancient volcano. Fishing Bridge, Bridge Bay, Lake and Grant Villages are all located in this area. The West Thumb Geyser Basin is along the shore of the lake.


The Lake Hotel was built before Old Faithful Inn but in the style of the grand resort hotels of the turn of the 20th century.




Here are some photos of buffalo I took on our drive to the lake:

The last night in Yellowstone it rained as we drove back from the showers at Canyon VIllage. Just as we reached camp the sun came out and we saw a beautiful double rainbow over the meadow next to the campground.