Bison up close & personal

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51 degrees when we headed north to Yellowstone National Park. Smoke was heavy in the air and we could smell smoke. I called Yellowstone Inn yesterday to make sure none of the forest fires would alter our route or keep us from getting to the inn in West Yellowstone. One of the fires is about 8 miles from our inn.

We entered the South entrance of Yellowstone NP. 2.2 million acres make up the park and 80% of it is forest. We definitely saw trees and more trees. Finally we viewed the West Thumb & Yellowstone Lake. Suddenly our lane of traffic came to a stop. Traffic coming toward us had stopped as well. To our amazement a very large bison was ambling toward us in the left lane. Cars behind him were barely creeping. Tim stopped & left a big gap between us & the car in front of us & sure enough he came across the road right in front of us to get into the grass beside the road on our right. See my picture! Next we pulled off our loop tour to see Dragon's Mouth Spring, Mud Volcano, geysers, & Sulphur Caldron (very smelly). Winding on up our loop road we came to another traffic jam. Everyone was stopped to photo a fairly large herd of bison. Carolyn counted 105. We continued on our way & entered the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone. We bypassed Upper Falls & went on to view Lower Falls from the canyon rim. It was another spectacular site to add to our list! We took a little side trip on Firehole Canyon Dr. & saw Firehole River & Falls. We had options of seeing Lower, Midway, and/or Upper Geyser Basins. We chose to stop at Midway, where I hiked out to see Excelsior Basin Geyser. The steam the geyser was spewing was quite warm. It last erupted in 1985, however it still pours out 4,000 gal of boiling water per minute. Our final site for today was Old Faithful. It erupts about every 90 minutes and lasts around 4 minutes. It did not disappoint, as we added it to our list of spectacular sites. Fortunately there were benches all around the geyser so we could sit and wait for the geyser to erupt. We were told to be there 15-20 min. early as the exact eruption is hard to pedict, so we arrived at 3:30 & patiently waited until 4:14 with over a thousand others--one of the largest crowds we have been in thus far.

After Old Faithful quit spewing we headed for the West entrance of the park and on to West Yellowstone, MT where we will stay in 2 little cabins Sunday & Monday nights. We will be back in Yellowstone tomorrow looking for wildlife in Lamar Valley.



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Photos

Excelsior Basin
At Midway Geyser Basin

Comments

[Joyfish]

So cool!
Wow-- amazing that you had a bison cross in front of your car. You are seeing so many amazing places and formations. Glad you are enjoying it so much. Scary that the fires are so close.