Yellowstone National Park

Lower Yellowstone Falls

Arguably the biggest draw card and most iconic sight of Yellowstone National Park would be the Old Faithful geyser but this is only one of the countless geysers that the park has on display. Geysers in turn is but one of many types of geothermal features that the park has on display. Of course, the park's attractions doesn't stop with geothermal features either; The wonderful scenery and beautiful wildlife would have been enough already to inspire awe and justify a visit.

Yellowstone certainly packs a complete wallop on the senses and it's all jammed into a relatively small area. We used three days for exploring the park and, while one could undoubtedly spend a month and not see everything, I do think that we did a pretty good job of it. We stayed at the very charming Old Faithful Inn, a log hotel built in 1903, from where we explored the park.

Old Faithful, blowing its load

As I'm sure you've guessed, the Old Faithful Inn is located right next to the Old Faithful geyser, perhaps the most predictable geyser with an eruption sequence of 91 minutes. This means that every hour and a half you're treated to a 50m tall eruption of steaming hot water, right on the hotel's doorstep.

Truth be told though, we didn't witness as many of these eruptions as the previous paragraph suggests as we spent a good amount of time exploring the rest of the park. There are numerous hot springs, prismatic pools, fumaroles, mud volcanoes and what-nots to marvel at. Apart from these, there are also plenty of waterfalls, meandering rivers, mountains, valleys, forests and meadows.

Bull Elk, growing a new set of antlers

But what would a National Park be without wildlife? And Yellowstone has it. We did some homework before we came and established that the "big six" could be considered to be the Grey Wolf, Elk, Moose, Bison, Black Bear and Grizzly Bear. We thought it'd be cool to see some of these... we saw all of them, and some. Bison were everywhere and Elk were nearly everywhere. We saw two Meese (that's my plural for Moose), no less than 6 sightings of Grizzly Bear, some with cubs, and a single Black Bear (which is supposed to be the more common species of bear in the park).

Black Bear

The thrill of thrill however was getting some good, albeit distant, views of two Grey Wolves. We used the first two days to find out where the best spots would be to look for Wolves and on the third day we left the lodge at 04:00 so that we could be on site at 06:00. We happened to be exactly at the right time at the right place when another car also stopped, pulling out their spotting scopes and two way radios. It turns out there is a network of dedicated wolf watchers that trawl the park and circulate the information on sightings. No sooner had we spotted the two wolves when a cavalcade of cars, upwards of 30 in number, rocked up at the spot and we all stood watching the wolves as they made their way across the hillside - a right and proper twitch and a moment etched in memory.
 

This morning early saw us get up to make the long journey south towards Salt Lake City - only to discover that an inch of snow had covered the area and turned it into a winter wonderland. Real pretty but real daunting considering that we had to drive through all of that, and over Craig Pass at 2500m above sea level. But with painstaking caution, we made it over the pass and out of the park, ready for the next chapter of the adventure.

Old Faitful Inn under an inch of snow