Yellowstone

Charlie and I were able to go to Yellowstone last week (thanks to our parents who watched Sam for us). Charlie thought it would be really fun to go since I have never really seen much of Yellowstone. I have been through it before with my family, but I don't remember ever taking a trip just to see Yellowstone. Our first stop was a picnic area at Yellowstone Lake, where we ate lunch.

I forgot to pack a knife for Charlie to slice his tomatoes, so he got creative.


Then we went to West Thumb, a basin with a lot of geysers.

These look a lot better in person.

After that, it was on to Old Faithful. We got to the parking lot and drove around for about 5 or 10 minutes looking for an open spot. We finally found one, got out of our car, and looked up to see water shooting up above the trees. We missed it by minutes. It would be a 90-minute wait before it went off again, so we decided to take the walk around Old Faithful where a bunch of other geysers are located.

It only took us about 30 minutes. We needed to get up to Cooke City, so we decided to try again the next day.
We headed off, seeing tons of buffalo on the way. They are amazing animals, Charlie says they're something right out of the ice age.
We had been pretty disappointed with the lack of wildlife we had see so far, but as the evening progressed, we saw more and more. One of our favorites was the grizzly.

I'm pretty sure this is called Lamar Valley. It was really pretty at this time of day.
Here's Cooke City from the middle of Main Street. It was a really small town.
We got to our hotel and checked in. As we were leaving the front desk, the receptionist said, "Oh yeah, don't drink the water." Apparently, Cooke City has a water boil ordinance where you can't drink any water in the entire town. Fortunately, the hotel supplied bottled water for us, because I was planning on filling up our water bottles when we got to the hotel, so I didn't pack a whole lot. So much for being prepared.This is the view from the town. You can see it in the background of the picture of the town.

Basically the first thing we saw the next morning was this black bear. After that was a buffalo holding up traffic.Gotta love those natural traffic jams.

We went on a hike from Upper Falls around to Artist Point. After a couple hours, we decided to head back to our car. We got most of the way back, then rounded a corner. Here's what we saw:

A buffalo was standing right in our way. There wasn't anywhere to go except jumping in the falls. We basically just had to wait for the buffalo to decide to leave. It was the closest encounter I have ever had with a buffalo. It's a good thing we looked up and stopped when we did, because it probably wouldn't have been a very good outcome if would have startled the buffalo.
Upper Falls:
Lower Falls:Me and Charlie on our hike:

Here is what they call Mud Volcano Area
Cooking Hillside: Basically, in this grove of trees, there was a series of earthquakes. The trees withstood these earthquakes, but they couldn't withstand volcanic activity causing the earth to heat up, which cooked the roots right off the trees.
These buffalo were grunting and thrashing in the dirt to intimidate each other. I thought they were going to start fighting, because all of a sudden, they just stopped and faced each other.Too bad though, they didn't fight. It's probably a good thing too, because they weren't too far from the trail, and they may have ended up on the trail if they started fighting.

Dragon's Mouth Spring: This was perfectly named. With the sounds coming from the cave (gases exploding under the water) sounding just like a growl, and the steam coming out, you just expected to see something flying out of there.I don't remember what this area was called, but basically, the same earthquakes and volcanic activity caused this grove of trees just to shoot out of the ground and up into the air.
We tried Old Faithful again. When we got to the parking, guess what we saw. That's right, we saw Old Faithful going off yet again just minutes before we got there. We decided to wait this one out.
Third time is a charm.After Old Faithful, there was one particular hot spring Charlie wanted to see. We never found that specific one, but we saw quite a few others.
Grand Prismatic Spring:

Buffalo tracks in Grand Prismatic Spring:

Jewel Geyser:
Sapphire Pool:It was a really great trip. We had tons of fun and learned a lot of interesting stuff. Hopefully we'll be able to do this trip again someday.