Advertisement
Published: September 5th 2017
Edit Blog Post
09-02-17 Old Faithful
Out about 10 and we drove for 2 hrs to get to Old Faithful. There was construction and lots of traffic, who would have thought there would be traffic on Labor Day Weekend! When I made the plans for this trip I just didn't think about it being Labor Day won't make that mistake again. It took us 15 min. to get through the gate then along the way every attraction had " full" signs at the entrance to their parking lots. Our destination was Old Faithful, the most popular attraction in the park, so I was nervous what mess we would find.
There was some traffic but we managed to find a parking place and found out that we had 45 min to the next scheduled eruption, give or take. There was a nice log in the shade with our names on it and 2 ravens hopeful for food to entertain us. Realizing we were hungry too Ginnie got us each a hamburger and made it back with time to spare for the show.
There was a family with 2 children sitting near us and they were doing the Park Ranger program so they
had jobs when the eruption began. One was in charge of timing the length of the eruption and the other how close it was to being on schedule. We had heard from our neighbor that only 1 out of 3 times is the magnatude it's best so we were hoping for a good blast.
At 1:33, only 3 min late, there was a sputtering, more steam, then shooting water up into the sky. It went down then up again further this time then really let loose. The height was quite impressive with huge amounts of water and lots of steam, it was the big one! Lucky us....
After perusing the gift shop we were back in the car and traffic leaving the parking lot. While getting our books stamped again we talked to an employee about seeing the Grand Prismatic which is supposed to be a beautiful blue pool. He said to take the Fairy trail for about a mile going on the left fork and we would get the best view. Ginnie and I looked at each other and with that knew we were never going to hike 2 miles in this heat. It was 94 when
we got back to Gardner and found out later it was almost 100 in the geiser bason. Dry heat... right!!!
So we headed home and got to Mammoth Hot Springs and did the upper terrace loop. There was a parking place so we took it and hopped out and enjoyed the different formations in this area. It sure doesn't look like it did when I was here in the 80s. Most of those old formations are dead now and the new ones are scattered about, still pretty but not as dramatic. Pictures.
The boys were happy to see us and we sat outside in the shade and breeze talking to our neighbor who works in the General Store. He told us his friend had just come back from Glacier and said the smoke and fires were terrible up there and the air quality was dangerous. That did it for us, we decided to stay here another night and see what we had to do to avoid the fires.
A restaurant by the name of Cowboy had been recommend to us so we went off to town 5 min down the road and sat down in this quaint
little place with all the local critters decorating the walls. There were elk, big horn sheep, mule deer and everybody's favorite, a mountain lion perched on a beam in the ceiling seemingly ready to pounce. I had the special, pulled pork, baked beans and corn on the cob and Ginnie had a prime rib sandwich with french fries. Excellent meal with very friendly staff.
After dinner we sat outside, enjoyed the cooling air and watched the moon rise with a table full of maps. It looks like we can stick with our plans to head to Washington and have enough time to stop in Bozeman to get an oil change in the motorhome and do shopping for things we need that only a bigger town has.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.333s; Tpl: 0.024s; cc: 14; qc: 93; dbt: 0.2199s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb