Day 8: King of the Road

King of the Road.

Old Faithful, right on time.

Usually, driving in the night is a pretty dull narrative. It's dark and no one's around, which makes for great driving but not much else. That is unless you are roving through the wilds of Wyoming, where giant mining operations loom in the distance and where you are driving over what might be big mountain cliffs, if only you could see the other side of those S curves. We drove through Big Horn National Forest and were dive bombed by two giant owls and heard some creature when we stepped out of the car to check out the stars, so I guess I should say driving at night can be dull elsewhere, but not in Wyoming. We also got to stop in the Mavrik gas station, we joked it was Sarah Palin's gas station, but it was a Mecca of met needs in one place. Really, a gas station designed for the traveler, everything right there, the right kind of options for what you'd like. After South Dakota, which might not be known for its options, it was exciting.

We stopped at a place and slept for a few hours and woke up around 5:30 and headed to Yellowstone. It was a stunning ride to go through Shoshone Park. We got to Yellowstone right before the ranger got on duty and waited to pay and for the great maps. The ranger told us to head to one of the bigger stations to ask about the elusive Yellowstone campsite so we headed that way, spying a black bear, elk, buffalo, and Yellowstone Lake on the way in.

We stopped into Canyon to ask about campsites and the guy said to Josh, there's people leaving every day, go find a site! We both felt it would have been fantastic to have this information before stopping in Canyon, but headed to Norris campsite regardless and managed to get a campsite almost right away. I guess if you're there by 8 am, you can get a site. We set up camp and headed on our way.

Sulfer Springs aren't aromatic.  

We started at Norris Geyser Basin, a pretty impressive place to start our thermal features viewing and a great spot for the scavenger hunt. We had naturally occurring bad smells, in fact we had so many Ellie, who is usually a pretty good hiker, was not enjoying herself, we had geysers, although we didn't see any go off, and we had amazing multi-colored hot springs. From there, we continued in a souther loop to the Artist Paint pots. There was a spectacular 1930s building with amazing beams and giant boulders. If I was to design a place for us in Lake George, it would be based on one of these designs. There was also crazy colored mud and exploding mud.

Gibbons Falls

Fun fact: if there is a picnic table on the map in Yellowstone, it does not mean you will find a picnic table at the place that it's at. I think they just didn't know what else to put there on the map so they went ahead and put a picnic table the. We stopped at Gibbons Falls planning to picnic, but we just had our breath taken away by an amazing waterfall and headed down the road to the meandering river to have our lunch.

One does not go to Yellowstone without saying hello to Old Faithful and we went over to say hello. We went into Yellowstone Lodge, another one of those 1930s creations I'm obsessed with and then waited for the famed eruption. It was as expected, a giant rush of water from the ground and it didn't disappoint.

We then took the small geyser trail and saw several small geysers, the most impressive of the bunch as Anemone Geyser, which is a small geyser which erupts about every 10 minutes. It's amazing to watch because you can see it go through the whole cycle in that time. You see the geysers fill with water, watch it begin to bubble, then it shots into the air, calms down and then the geyser drains with a gurgle and it starts all over again. We watched it twice, I honestly could nave watched it all day. When we finished our stroll around it was almost time for another eruption from Old Faithful (90 minutes apart), so we asked about a good swimming hole by our campground, which is the beautiful meandering river right next to it, and headed over to wait. I'll talk more about the bizarre combination of tourist and nature in a different entry, but at both eruptions we watched, there were easily 200 people watching. After several false starts, people on the other end started a wave, which continued through the viewing area. Right on cue, Old Faithful erupted, it just needed a little wave. It was an amazing first day and we headed back to our campsite to make dinner and we hoped go for a swim. Until a ranger announced a buffalo talk that the kids were interested in, the swim was our plan. But regardless, we slept well.