A full day at the park today, with lots to see. We tried to hit all of the major attractions, but the park is 2,219,789 acres in size, so let’s just say we maybe saw less than half of the park, and only the really important parts.
Started the day at Mammoth Hot Springs, which included a number of pools and springs throughout the area. Once of the more colourful was Minerva Terrace:
Water does actually flow over the terrace, but at a different time of year. Guess that gives us a reason to come back, huh.
Saw a lot of other areas as well, including Norris Springs (a large walkabout area with many small pools and springs throughout), Porcelain and Black Sand. Later in the day, however, we made it to Midway which was highly recommended and we saw why:
The next place to go was (of course) Old Faithful. Talk about a park built around a geyser. This area was definitely the most commercialized as well as the most crowded. Old Faithful erupts an average of every 97 minutes these days, but it varies between 30 and 120 minutes so it was anyone’s guess as to when it was going to go. We sat down and set up to watch and then proceeded to wait just over an hour until we saw some action. By that time there were hundreds of people sitting on the benches that circled Old Faithful. Away she went:
Now we can say we’ve done it…
On the way back through the park to our motel, however, was when we had some real fun. It was later in the day, so there were many more animals that decided to appear. We saw a Buffalo on the side of the road (complete with suicidal tourists stepping right up to it), along with about 50 deer that decided to cross the road as a group – safety in numbers. We were 3 cars back from the front of a line that had to wait at least 5 minutes for all of the deer to cross. Very cool, got a few shots of them too – but they were pretty fast.
Further along, I stopped on the side of the road to get some pictures of 8 deer that were grazing down at the bottom of a hill and was all proud of myself for catching some “in the wild”. Then we got back to Roosevelt Village and there were over 50 of them just hanging around town, pretty much running the show. Talk about taking the wind out of my sails ;). We even had a family of 3 deer try to use the crosswalk and get lost on the whole “get all the way across the street” concept. And then get testy with us, all of 6 feet away as we were the front car, waiting for them to move:
Pretty eventful, lots of miles on our feet so it’s going to be good to have a day “at sea” resting in Provo, UT on the way to Bryce Canyon on Thursday.