After breaking camp, we headed south in Yellowstone, towards Old Faithful. We wandered about the Old Faithful Inn for a bit, which was just a wonderful property. The Inn was celebrating its centennial this year, and I only wished some of my photographs of the interior had turned out better, but the light spilling through the windows washed out the shots. We got the expected time for the next eruption of Old Faithful and decided to hike along a trail and up a nearby hill to a suggested observation point for the eruption. Right on time, steam and then boiling water jetted out of the small spout. The view from the observation point was wonderful and certainly worth the hike.
While we were up there, we met three women who worked in the park. After watching the eruption, we decided to hike along the trail with them a little further. All three of them strongly recommended working in a national park for a summer (or more), and it sounded like a great job for a mobile nature-lover, even working in a cafeteria or gift shop. We followed the trail to Solitary Geyser and watched it bubble and erupt briefly.
From there, we separated from our new friends, and walked off trail for a bit, slowly making a curved path back to the Inn and Visitor Center. During the walk, we had to tightrope walk along many fallen trees to avoid tramping through a marsh, but we managed to stay mostly dry. The best part of this unplanned excursion was that we stumbled across a pile of dry bones from some dead creature. Being minor anatomy geeks, we were excited to be identifying which bones were what and what kind of creature they came from. Our best guess was an elk, and we even brought a vertebra back with us.
After lunch at the Snow Lodge, we started moving north through the park, stopping at several of the featured hot springs and geysers. The cold, damp weather meant we were often viewing grey plumes of steam against a grey sky so a number of the photos didn’t turn out as nice as we would have liked. But, walking around the sites was nice, and the scenery was just wonderful, despite the weather. We experienced the full complement of “thermal events”, geysers, hot springs, fumeroles and mud pots.
The landscape inside the park changed from geysers and hotsprings to deep forest to sweeping grassy valley.
As we made our way towards the northeast corner of the park, we also got many more glimpses of assorted wildlife, including an enormous raven, many bison, an elk and her calf, and a group of three male elk with full racks of antlers.
Eventually, we left the park via the northeast entrance and wound our way towards Cody, WY. The road out of the park dipped up briefly into Montana, but not enough to count it as another state we’ve visited yet. Once back in Wyoming we followed route 196 through the Shoshone forest and some dramatic (and gorgeous) scenery. Although the sky behind us was filled with black clouds, driving eastwards kept us ahead of the storm, and there was even a rainbow ahead for encouragement.
After 12 hours of exploring and driving, we pulled in to a state park and choose a campsite on the bluff next to the Buffalo Bill reservoir. The wind was fierce enough that we closed the pop-top before sleeping, but it was a beautiful spot. We sat in the shelter of the bus drinking tea and watched the lake, clouds, and hills merge into dark grey night.