A Yellowstone is a Smelly Stone: Days 4 & 5

Things that Look Weird and Smell Funny

Our first order of business upon entrance to the park was to find ourselves a campsite. We registered for a site at Grant Village on the south side of the park, close to Yellowstone Lake. We got our reservation and the weather forecast. Apparently, the forecast included afternoon thunderstorms and the possibility of snow over night. Wow, night number four in the tent was looking good. We set up camp one more time and got back in the car. Yellowstone has to be the quintessential American park. To view the sites, you pretty much drive to a parking lot, park, walk between 20 and 100 feet see something cool, get back in the car, and repeat.

We got in the car to drive to see Old Faithful. We crossed the continental divide, twice. Just as we were approaching Old Faithful, Adrian saw it erupting. I totally missed it. Lucky for us, they don’t call it Old Faithful for nothing, so it would happen again soon enough. We made ourselves some lunch from the parking lot to pass some time (and keep me from getting too cranky). We walked over to Old Faithful and overheard that it would be erupting again at 1:45. That gave us enough time to check out a whole bunch of other geysers in the area. I had no idea there were that many geysers in the park, much less in just one spot right next to Old Faithful. Adrian took no less than three pictures of every one we passed. Old Faithful erupted around 1:40. It was cool. Yup, once again, I rock it up with great descriptions. There’s about a gazillion geysers in the park and most of them reek of sulfur. My favorite one was this crazy clear blue, but it really smelled bad.

The plan was to drive north as far as we planned to go for the day, saving all the stops for the way back south. We drove as far as the Norris Geyser Basin. We stopped, got out of the car and did a little more hiking on boardwalks around the geysers. There’s a sign about every 10 feet that says to stay on the boardwalks, just to be sure you don’t go off the path and fall into some boiling water. I have to admit the illustration of the boy accidentally doing this on the signs was a bit funny. So, by this time, I’m exhausted and already pretty bored with the geysers (they all start to look the same after awhile). I go anyway, so Adrian can get his three pictures of each geyser. We did find one that was about the exact same color of my coat, so that was exciting. After Norris Basin, I crashed out in the car for a bit, waking up to take pictures of the random wildlife we’d catch along the road. We stopped at a nice waterfall. Our last stop for the day was at the Grand Prismatic Spring. After that, it was back over the Continental Divide, twice, and to our campsite.

Since it was cold enough for me to sport my fleece, jacket, and beanie hat all day, I was glad that we had bought firewood for the night. We decided to make spaghetti carbonara for dinner. It was somewhat difficult to get enough heat from the Coleman stove to both boil water for pasta and cook bacon, but we managed. Eventually we just threw the spaghetti pot on the fire to boil there. It tasted insanely good. I made the perfect amount for us to finish without leftovers (although it was so good I’m sure we would have finished it no matter how much I made). Since we had a fire, we made s’mores for dessert.

Around 8 pm we decided we’d try to shower in since we hadn’t had one since Jamie’s. We got all our stuff together, put out the fire, and drove over to the showers. We arrived just in time to find out it closed at 8:30 pm. We missed it by about a minute.

Since the fire was already out, we decided to make it another early night. We pilled a mountain of blankets over us and tried to sleep. Apparently, when it’s cold enough for them to predict snow, four blankets aren’t enough to keep warm. I had the pink fleece Powerpuff Girl blanket on standby just in case it got too cold. I broke it out pretty quick. Adrian is no longer allowed to make fun of the Powerpuff blanket, since it was much needed. I was slightly warmer than Adrian, because I had brought my beanie hat into the tent. Mr. Warner told us all in 5th grade that you lose like 50% of your body heat from your head, so I was all over that. Adrian was not. He considered a trip to the car for the extra blanket and a hat, but reconsidered after stepping out of the blankets for a millisecond. I offered him my fleece jacket to wrap around his head and he gladly accepted. We still barely slept. I decided another trip to Walmart was in order, we needed more blankets!

Do We Have to See More Geysers?

In the morning, it was time to pack up camp once again. We considered making breakfast, but like almost every morning on the trip, it started raining as we packed up camp. Back on the road in Yellowstone, we stopped at a few more geysers. Since geysers were all starting to look the same, I was thrilled that next destination was the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone. On our way, we stopped to photograph some wildlife. We saw a bull elk along the road, a bison right on the road, a coyote down along the river, and a bald eagle perched along a ridge. We eventually made it to the Canyon. The canyon had two falls, the upper fall dropped 109 feet and the lower dropped 308 feet. We parked and walked to photograph the upper falls. There were stairs built down to the lower fall so we made the trek to the bottom. We got a few pictures and then made the climb back up.

We drove over to the other side of the canyon and did the American tourist thing. Drive, park, photograph, repeat. There were several spots to view the falls. We drove through the rest of the park fairly quickly. We stopped again at Mammoth Hot Springs on the north side of the park. We saw an elk, just chilling out on the lawn in front of a chapel. Later, when we were eating our lunch, a man told us that he and his wife had watched an elk head butt a parked car. Interesting. Mammoth Hot Springs was more geysers. I was fresh out of interest in the geysers, so Adrian took off with the camera and I started downloading pictures to the laptop. We had filled both memory cards so it was time to clear them off.

The entrance to the park was just a few miles north of Mammoth Hot Springs, so once we were done there we hit the road. I was exhausted so I crashed out in the passenger seat. We stopped for gas and a few Red Bulls right before Interstate 90. I got into the driver seat to head towards Missoula to stay with Jamie once again. Adrian spent about 2 hours in the car deleting the pictures we didn’t need to save. He even started putting captions on them, which I thoroughly appreciated. We got to Jamie’s around 8:30 pm. We were both happy to have access to hot water and a shower. Apparently, we needed a good warm night of sleep, because by the time we woke up it was already 9:30.