Day 12: Yellowstone, Day 1

Yellowstone National Park is large. It covers more territory than I had realized. In fact, if you placed Naperville where West Yellowstone is, the park would extend past Michigan City, Indiana. That's over 50 miles as the raven flies, and there are no raven-straight roads. At the maximum speed limit of 45mph, you don't get anywhere fast, so it's a good thing we're on vacation!

We are just two blocks from the entrance, and it is 14 miles from the West Entrance to the park to our first destination, Madison. Today, we are going to hit Yellowstone's Grand Canyon, and reserve Old Faithful for tomorrow.

Along that 40 mile trek, there are a lot of wildlife. At the time of writing this blog, we've been in the park 3 days (yes, I'm falling behind!), and we have yet to not see at least one elk on the trip to Madison.

And usually Bison as well. Some of the warnings about the Bison are pretty dire (we also call them Buffalo, but I guess that's not technically correct. Whatever :-). They can charge at 30 mph or twice as fast as you can run, but that doesn't seem to stop some people. I haven't seen anyone try to pet the Buffalo yet, but I suspect it's only a matter of time. You can always tell where the Bison are by the line of cars along the side of the road. They are a popular camera shot.

There are wolves, bears, and moose, which we haven't seen, and coyote, prairie dogs, beavers, and of course those Becky-eating Chipmunks, which we have. (On day 4 we are heading up to Mammoth falls, and we've heard there have been sightings up north of bears and wolves). The picture to the left is a top-down view of a beaver. To the right is the best picture we could get of the coyote pups at the Gibbon Meadow.

The park rangers are very protective of the wildlife, and try to keep people away from nesting eagles, and such. (They don't seem to worried about the Bison though :-) They have a bit of a quandry though -- if they put up cones to keep people from stopping, it results in long lines of slow moving cars; if they don't most (but not all) folks drive right past without realizing they are there. And you are constantly reminded not to feed the animals. So I might get in trouble with this picture. The kids were getting tired, so I enticed them with M&Ms. Like little birds...

Along the way, we saw a few hot springs. The first was visible from the road, Terrace Spring. You can see them by the steam over them on all but the warmest days. And today it's in the 60's.

At the Artist's Paint Pot, we say a number of cool hot springs, and mud pots. Mud pots are fun to watch, but they don't translate well to camera. It's like watching something the consistency of pancake batter boiling.

Finally, we reached Canyon, and took a lot of pictures of the upper and lower falls of the Yellowstone river. Here, at the lower falls, the walls of the canyon are multi-colored from hot springs and fumuroles right in the walls. And there are a surprising number of geysers and hot springs along the river itself. (It does in fact raise the temperature of the water, as we'll find on day 3, but more of that later!) Apparently at least some of the steam from the falls is from a geyser.

Well tomorrow is the trip to the Old Faithful geyser and the rest of its brood. This should be fun!