Epic RVing with the Gradys - Day 3 - Snoop Dogg's Windows

Yellowstone, wow! The “grandfather” of the national park system, and it is quite the site!

We started early by our standards. 6:00 AM we were up, teeth brushed, breakfast eaten (waffles and sausage). By 7:00 we were on the road. It was nice to drive the rental car! It could go the speed limit, was maneuverable, and it didn’t get thrown around by the wind so much!!! By 8:00 we were in the park, had purchased our pass, and only had another 1.5 hours to drive before we would finally get somewhere fun to see. Yellowstone is HUGE!!!

About 20 minutes into the park it looks like you are driving on another planet. The ground is steaming all over the place! In some places it is steaming more than others, but it’s just bubbling up from the ground. Quinton mentioned that it looked like when Snoop Dogg opened his windows!

After 40 minutes of driving in the park, we had already seen several bison and one grizzly bear (yeah, the scary ones). We had also seen a moose, but that was outside the park in Gardiner… You can tell you are about to see wildlife in the park when there is a traffic jam! Luckily we were there pretty early, so traffic wasn’t a problem (yet). Our plan was to get to Old Faithful first and then work our way back north. At 40 minutes in, however, we reversed that logic thinking that Old Faithful would have the infrastructure to handle the loads of people coming into the park more effectively than some of the other features we were hoping to see. At a gas station outside the park, the cashier told us that attendence was up 40-70% from two years ago!!!

So we saw lots of geysers. We went to the grand prismatic springs, though at ground level they weren’t all that impressive. We also got to do something we haven’t really been able to do in like 18 months, people watch! Some of the funniest encounters included the guy telling his friend why they called them “million dollar ideas,” (it’s because they are good ideas that can maybe make a million dollars) as well as the well muscled woman near the rest rooms who was shadow boxing by herself. Oh, and the RVs! Having now driven one for a non insignificant period of time, I can tell you that I would never want to drive one on the two lane, busy roads of a national park, not to mention try to park in there!!! But loads of people were doing just that! I suppose not everybody is willing to rent an RV and also shell out for a rental car to get around in the park.

Eventually we made our way to Old Faithful, which was quite impressive. We were lucky enough to see it go off almost simultaneous with another nearby geyser called the Beehive Geyser, which apparently only goes off every 18-20 hours, so that was kind of a neat treat! Apparently Old Faithful isn’t quite as faithful as it used to be. I swear when I was a kid, it was known for going off every hour. Now a-days it goes off about every 90-110 minutes. Still faithful, but things are changing.

Also interesting about geysers, they are apparently created by super heated water that comes in contact with lava far below the surface. The water on top acts to keep it stable, but eventually enough super heated water turns to steam and the energy just has to be released! It’s all pretty fascinating. Equally as fascinating is how the staff would write the approximate time of the next eruption near each of the active geysers. Some were pretty easy to predict, others not so much. We walked by one that was predicted to erupt any time between 9:00 that morning and 2:15 that afternoon. Since it was 1:20 when we walked by, we didn’t think anything of it. 10 minutes later, however, we saw a high stream of water and steam coming from that location - we had just missed it!!! Others haven’t erupted since 2011, but they said it could erupt again at any time!

With lunch and hiking out of the way in the upper geyser basin, we headed back north, this time hiking to the overlook above grand prismatic springs, which was WAY more impressive than the ground level view.

At this point we had walked about 20,000 steps, and things were starting to go off the rails, so we headed north towards Gardiner, the first town outside the north entrance to the park where we would grab dinner and a beer before heading back for the night. We were pretty tired, so it’s been mostly cleaning ourselves and making smores tonight before we all collapsed into bed. I’m about to do that myself. Tomorrow is whitewater rafting!!!