Day 1 (Monday)

Before heading to Yellowstone I checked out the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, WY. I had visited this museum two decades ago and remember being impressed so I thought it was worth a couple of hours to see again. I recalled many of the exhibits and had visited the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City in 2014, which is very similar, so I spent much of my time in an interesting exhibit about animal movement in and out of Yellowstone which has been a cause of concern in surrounding communities. Late in the morning I headed for Yellowstone.

The drive from Cody to Yellowstone is beautiful with a variety of scenic landscapes on the way and, for the most part, is better than the scenery from the road once in the park. The map and video for Monday’s drive are here.

Since I was able to snag a last-minute lodge reservation in the park I could spend the better part of two days exploring and decided to do most of the thermal features, including Old Faithful, on the first day in case the weather declined for day two. Normally I do not post video within the blog because it can take a while to load but you have to be able to see and hear the features in action to get a real idea of their wonderful strangeness so let the page load fully and enjoy these short tastes of Yellowstone. The smells I cannot convey but they brought back fond memories of teaching 8th grade chemistry classes.

One of hundreds of hot pools in the park.

A general feature of all of the thermal areas are steam vents.

Paintpots – bubbling mud pools.

Two vents – notice the different colors right next to each other.

And this is the start of the Old Faithful eruption which went on for a further three minutes.

One aspect of staying in the Grant Village Lodge was that there are no TVs so I missed the first Presidential Debate (although being here easily made up for that).

Day 2 (Tuesday)

The weather was also wonderful for day 2 although it started off foggy and with a heavy frost on the car. By the time I had eaten breakfast and got going the fog was clearing except for a thin layer over the lake which you can see in one of the photos embedded in the road video. The park roads are in a figure of eight and I had “done” the lower loop yesterday so I headed north to Mammoth Hot Springs via Yellowstone Lake and the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone to do the upper loop.

All were spectacular, as expected, but one annoying problem was that the upper loop road was closed for construction between Mammoth and the West Entrance where I wanted to leave. This meant an extra 60 miles of slow driving on park roads and I was annoyed because the only notice I saw for the road closure was when I was already in Mammoth. None of the road signs in the park had “Road Closed” notices on them to indicate destinations that could not be reached and were, therefore, very misleading. After leaving the park I drove to Idaho Falls for the night.

The map and video for Tuesday is here.

Yellowstone Lake has a geyser basin right at its edge which leads to unusual sights.
The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone is spectacular in its own right with canyon walls rising as much as 1,200 feet above the river and two impressive falls.

Mammoth Hot Springs seemed much less active than I remembered from the ’80s and ’90s but was still very impressive.