Day 9: Yellowstone National Park, Old Faithful

I woke up around 8:30am and made myself some coffee before I started researching Yellowstone National Park. After about an hour I had a pretty good idea of our plans for the day so I jumped in the shower and let Andrew sleep just a tad bit longer. I woke him up and began packing the car and making breakfast. We thanked Charlie profusely for his hospitality. He made sure to give us a Snake River Brewery shirt for the Rec Room at Mulberry Gap! We know we are going to miss all the luxuries of the house; every entity of the bathroom, kitchen, and living room. Our stay with Charlie was awesome, it was only heightened by the natural beauty. 

We pulled out around 10:30am and made a stop by the gas station and the dollar store before we hit the road. We entered Yellowstone National Park through the south gate by 12:30ish and headed west at the intersection past Lewis Lake. Andrew and I were immediately reminded of the 1988 fire as soon as we hit the park. Thousands of burned trees still stood; the char marks gone after 23 years of 4 seasons. However, just as many were down, releasing important nutrients back into the soil. We learned that the pine cones of the trees can only be released in a fire, when the heat forces the seed to explode. Otherwise, the new growth would have never been possible. 

We stopped at a full pull offs and hikes back to some small waterfalls before we came to the upper geyser basin where Old Faithful sits. Before we walked over to the geysers, we ate lunch. The first geyser we watched was Beehive. This one only erupts once a day, so we got there at the perfect time. We walked around the basin, photographing the various geysers until it was about 10 minutes until Old Faithful’s predicted eruption. Once she was done we headed for some ice cream. We’ve been watching it walk past us every day for almost a week and we could no longer turn our heads, especially in this heat. It was exceptionally windy out today as well though. One minute we’d be burning up and the next, we’d have goosebumps. Either way, the soft served ice cream was delicious and just what we needed as a refresher. We walked through some of the gift shops and checked out the visitor’s center, which is LEED Gold Certified. It was an impressive building. Here, we walked through the museum d watched a 15 minutes informational video of what to expect in the park. We headed over to the Old Faithful Inn to see the woodwork within the building; it was built in 1904 and almost burned down in the 1988 fire.

The first waterfall we stopped at.

Upper Geyser Basin

Beehive: erupts once a day.

By now it was 5:30pm and we wanted to get going on finding a campsite before we ended up setting up and cooking in the dark again. All the camp sites we passed were full. We decided it we should pull over in a picnic spot and at least cook while there was still light out. It wouldn’t be a problem if we had to drive past dark as long as we only had to climb in the back and fall asleep. We drove through a few more scenic areas of the park, looking for wildlife and scouting out potential picnic/camping spots. We found a quite area by a river that was set back a bit from the road. Maybe we could just sleep here and no one would know or bother us. Andrew began cooking stuff for our burritos while I read the park newspaper. I turned to pg. 6 titled Camping and read the section about not camping anywhere other than the designated campsites. I’m out here to enjoy life, not break laws.

We ate, cleaned up and used the restroom before getting back on the road. We drove up to the Madison intersection and went left, heading west again. This road would take us outside the park. We figured we would have better luck with camping there. Along the way, we saw an elk on the other side of the river, so we pulled over to get a few shots.  It was getting dark as we came up to the Madison intersection. As we went along this road, we came across some great opportunities to get pictures of the sunset. It was gorgeous! We crossed into a touristy town in Montana shortly after, found a dark corner in a hotel parking lot by a mini golf and jumped in the back. We watched the rest of our Yellowstone DVD and went to sleep.