Yellowstone Day 2

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After yesterday's marathon Yellowstone run (we left Jackson Hole at 6:00am and finally retired at 9:30pm) we decided to take it a little easier today. We started at about 7:30 after a good breakfast at the Comfort Inn in Gardiner, MT. The hotel has been surprisingly nice. Definitely better than most of the hotels in the area.

On our way into Gardiner yesterday, we visited the lower terrace of the Mammoth Hot Springs. Today, we visited the upper terrace, which is much cooler. There's actually a fair amount of activity on the upper terrace whereas the lower terrace is pretty much dead.

From there we wound our way up the west side of the park, visiting various geyser basins that we passed over. The Midway Geyser Basin was more interesting than the basin that Old Faithful is in. While its geysers do not erupt like Old Faithful they are hundreds of times the size of Old Faithful and the hot springs are hundreds of times the size of the hot springs around Old Faithful.

We cruised south, along the west side of the park to Lake Yellowstone where we took pictures. We ran across the mud volcanos, which we had visited yesterday, but Laurie couldn't make it through the entire place due to the smell. So I brought her back to see the Dragon's Mouth, or Dragon's Breath. Could have been named either. We now have a new saying: "Was that you, or did we just pass by a hot spring?"

Then we proceeded to the lower Yellowstone falls, and took pictures.

We then proceeded north to the junction that runs to Cookie City. In Cooke City is where you could take road 212 and take the Beartooth Pass, which was closed. That was the route that we would have taken, had it been open. We didn't go all the way to Cooke City, but went through the Lamar Valley. If you are ever in Yellowstone, this is a great place to go. Because it's not in the main loop, and because there are no geysers, there are not a lot of tourists. However, the scenery is out of this world... except that it's in this world. We made it a little past Soda Butte and then turned back and headed back to the hotel.

So, tomorrow we head to Cranbrook, BC. It'll be a long drive, probably about 8 hours, which will stretch to 9 or 10 once you take some sanity stops, but it should be good. Might not see as many pictures, though. We took almost 200 pictures during this Yellowstone stint.

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Photos

View of Mammoth
... from the top of the hot springs.