Skip to my Lou: Yellowstone, Day 2

[This was the day that had me mentally stalled. Digital cameras are wonderful because they allow, nay, encourage you to take lots of photos to increase the chances of getting *just the right one*. However, that has its own price. When I finally forced myself to attack the day’s pictures, I whittled them down from well over 600 to *just* 234.]

What’s a first time visit to Yellowstone without seeing Old Faithful? Cliché, I know, but we’re tourists, after all. So I called about the expected eruption times for today – one was ~10:30am and the next was ~noon. We decided to be leisurely and aim for the noon-time eruption rather than rush for the earlier one.

So that’s what we did. On the drive down to Old Faithful, we took the Riverside Drive on the Madison river (rough and not that interesting), the Firehole Canyon Drive (nice), and stopped on Fountain Flat Drive to photograph a bison and hot spring.

Lone bison grazing by the Firehole River.
Not too exciting after the herds at Custer State Park

Hot spring by the Firehole River.
It looks so tempting, at least near the outflow

When we got down to the Old Faithful area, it was the expected zoo with people crawling all over the place. We took our turn and had our picture taken by the sign. Then wandered over to the benches by the geyser to wait. It wasn’t too long, maybe 20 minutes or so, and we got our picture.

Old Faithful. We were there.

Then back to the Lodge (which one?) for some so-so & pricey food and to plan the rest of the day. The walk around Geyser Basin was tempting to me but we decided to skip it due to time constraints. We had decided this would be our last day here and we were picking and choosing what to see. Long hikes to see a feature weren’t going to happen.

So we slowly drove back toward West Yellowstone, stopping at

Black Sand Basin: (hover mouse over to see captions)

Midway Geyser Basin:

Firehole Lake Drive:

White Dome geyser was very satisfactory.
We sat through several eruption cycles

Fountain Paint Pot:

We did coincide with a busload of people here, but managed to dawdle enough to finally shake them.

When we hit the intersection at Madison, we decided there was enough time and energy left for one more bit of sightseeing more. So we turned right and went to Gibbon Falls. The falls themselves were nice but not that impressive. The scenic overlook area, however, was beautiful. I don’t know when it was done, but it reminded me of the CCC construction I’ve seen in other places. Lovely stonework.

Gibbon Falls

The Gibbon River above the falls. You can see the smoke haze still in the air.

On our way out of the park, it was wildlife time. We saw a bunch of people pulled over by the Madison River so we stopped, too. That’s usually the best indicator of something to see. It turned out to be a small group of elk crossing the river. We then looked to our right and saw this big buck just sitting there.

He wasn’t easy to see at first