YCGL - Yellowstone - Tuesday, September 13, 2022

 Yellowstone is Big!  2.2 million acres.  That's 3438 square miles.  Or, it's very close to a square with sides 60 miles long.  The main road is the "Grand Loop".  It's like the outside of a figure eight with the center being the cross road between Norris and Canyon Village.

(Note: You can enlarge the map by right-clicking on it and "Open Link in new Window"  Same with other pictures.)

My campground is a BLM campground 23 miles east of the East Entrance.  It's 27 miles from the East Entrance to Lake Village, 21 miles to West Thumb and 17 miles to Old Faithful.  That's 115 miles from my trailer to the geyser.  The max speed in the park is 45 mph, but you can only go that fast on occasion.  So, it all boils down to, its 3 hours from my campsite to Old Faithful under good conditions.  

So, I got there at noon, just as people were walking away from the view area around the geyser.  

It erupts every 90 minutes +- 10 minutes, so I need to be in sight of it by 1:20.  I don't need to go into one of the four or more gift shops in the area, so I start on the Geyser walk.  I walked the outer loop on Geyser Hill and down to Castle Geyser.  Of course, none of the geysers are on a schedule, so one may stand around and wait for burbling to happen, or walk on and hope that its active when you walk back.  

 

Crested Pool - A Hot Spring                                           Castle Geyser A Geyser

I promise I won't show all 50+ pictures I took on the walk, but these two are especially nice and represent two of the main types of thermal features in the park.  The two other types are fumeroles and mud pots.  We'll see more later.  

I walked maybe 1/3 of the Upper Geyser Basin walk and passed probably 15-20 features.  There are far more further down the walkway (a boardwalk so people don't walk on the delicate crust or up to a spouting geyser. I wanted to get back to the inner loop on Geyser Hill for my Old Faithful shot.  I wanted a picture showing both the geyser and the Old Faithful Inn.  

                      

A closer shot of Old Faithful                                         The Required Selfie at Old Faithful

(I don't suppose you know, but when you enter the park, you are required to sign a form saying that you will take a selfie at all the iconic features in the park.  Otherwise, if you skip one, they will confiscate your phone and slap your hand.  Skip two and they stomp on the screen and crack it.  You don't want to know what happens if you miss the third or fourth booster shots. {Hint, you'll probably get Covid.})

Next, I wanted to take some pictures of the Inn.  It is a wonderful old building.  I remember being there when I was about 5.  I remember better staying in one of the cabins.  It had a pot-bellied stove for heat and I remember the smell of the pine logs crackling in the stove, and dad getting up several times during the night to add logs.  (Or maybe Mike....or Pete.  He was always the firebug of the family.)

                      

The Stone Fireplace in the Inn                                The Fifth Floor Balcony.  I was told

                                                                                              it was closed.  I wouldn't know.  I would

                                                                        never make it that high......

Erik called while I was there and talked to him for a while.  I looked for a small book on hikes in the park and found one.  And by that time, it was time for an eruption of Old Faithful again.

                  

It was a better eruption that time than the first.  The water manager must have allowed the steam valve to stay open longer and at greater volume.    (I wasn't about to lose my phone at this point.  Besides, I would have been the only person in the crowd that didn't take a selfie.)

Heading out, I skipped the next two geyser basins (Black Sand and Biscuit), I remember them from before and it was getting later than I had expected.  I did want to stop at Midway Geyser Basin and see the Grand Prismatic Spring there.  As you can tell by the pictures, it was cloudy that day.  When Sally and I had been there in 2015, it was bright and sunny.  Also, it wasn't windy (imagine that) so the steam hung over the pool and blocked the light.  Because of the poorer light, Grand Prismatic was almost dull and hardly showed any color at all.   Opal Spring next to it showed what Grand Prismatic was supposed to look like, only Grander.  

           

I then drove north to the Lower Geyser Basin, which is the Fountain Paint Pot Trail.  This short (0.6 miles) boardwalk seemed to have it all, geysers, springs, mud pots and fumaroles.  

In simple terms, the four main thermal features: geysers erupt, springs spread, mud pots boil and fumaroles steam.  Following the trail counterclockwise, First is Silex Spring.

This is very high in mineral content, which causes the blue color which is a reflection of the sky.

Next is Fountain Paint Pot, a mud pot.

Hey, the little index card is good reading for you geotechs out there.  It's hard to see in the picture in the lower right, but there are three burbles bubbling out of the mud.  It is the end of the summer season, so the mud is really thick.  In the Spring, this is more liquidity.  

The fumarole is next to the Red Spouter which developed after the 1959 Hegben Lake earthquake.

The steam sometime causes the mud to splatter and drip.  This shows the stalactites and stalagmites formed from the dripping mud.  

Finally, these are the three spouting geysers, Twig, Fountain and Morning.

They are each at different stages in their eruptions.  The one in the foreground had had been shooting about four or five feet moments before.  

In summary, the Lower Geyser Basin has it all.  

My last destination for the day was the Mud Volcano, located near the East Entrance road and my campsite.  You drive north a few miles to the Madison Junction, which is the way out to the West Entrance and West Yellowstone, MT, where a lot of people stay.  You continue to drive north to Norris, then across the middle of the park to Canyon and then south towards Lake.  It should take about 45 minutes and there would still be a lot of light when I got to the Mud Volcano area.  "It should....."

Traffic was stopped a good mile from the junction, so I figured it was a "bison jam", but the line creaped forward and cars came from the opposite direction.  After about 15 minutes, I got to the turnoff to the Firehole Canyon Drive (The Firehole River flows past Old Faithful and the Upper Geyser Basin and is the river that flows past the other geyser basins also.)  So, to kill time, I turn into the Canyon Drive.  It is really pretty, one way, so a little narrow, but an easy drive and you can see the river most of the way.  

There is a nice waterfall

and even a swimming hole with a bath house.  (I didn't have my swimming suit or I might have tried it.  I'll try to remember if I go back.)  And when I get to the Grand Loop Road again, the road is open.  Good side trip.  

Until I get to the about the same spot where the traffic jam started.  Still inching ahead, still occasional cars coming the other way.  I finally realize it is the backup from the Madison Junction intersection, where three roads meet.  While it would be really out of character for a National Park, things would have been much smoother and quicker with a traffic signal there, letting 10-15 cars go through at a time from each direction. Because, as I drove past the junction up to Norris, the line was about 2 miles long.  Just incredible.  And this was a week after Labor Day when numbers of visitors starts to drop.  

And driving from Norris to Canyon, the overcast skies began to drop and fog in, so by the time I made the turn at Canyon to go south, it was rainy and foggy.  Ten miles down that road got me to the Mud Volcano, to which I was going to go to come Coulter's Hell or high water.  

Well, it was a bold move, but not at all practical.  By this time, it was dark and rainy.  I stopped, took a picture of the sign, walked to one mud hole and said that was good.  

It was after 9:00 when I got back to the trailer.  It was a long day, but really worthwhile.  My goal tomorrow is to drive straight to Canyon, view the Yellowstone Falls, go to Tower and then to Mammoth and see the rest of the damage that occurred during the flooding in June.  

Enough!
 

More later.