Our first stop in the park was the famous Old Faithful Geyser, the most reliable geyser in the park blowing on average every 90 minutes. It doesn't even matter that the people are standing and watching 5 rows thick for 360 degrees around the geyser, since it spews water so high up in the air that you could probably see it halfway across the park. And as it spews over 100 feet in the air, you can see it fan out in the direction of the wind and turn to vapor before it can even hit the ground again. Any photograph you've seen of Old Faithful won't do it justice (although a video probably would).
From there, we drove all the way up to the other end of the park to see Mammoth Hot Springs. I don't really know exactly what they are or how to explain them (sometimes I get tired of listening to all of Mike's science-y explanations of things ;) ), but that certainly didn't take away from their beauty. There were like stepped levels of limestone that looked practically like snow with brightly colored pools of water flowing over the sides and off the edges.
From there, we made a quick stop at Tower Fall, which, at about 130 feet tall, is the tallest waterfall in the park. You can only see it from a reasonable distance so it's impossible to truly understand the enormity of it, and I'm sure the tremendous power of the water streaming down the side of a cliff, but it was beautiful nonetheless. As we were driving from Tower Fall to our last stop at Mud Volcano, we drove the road through Hayden Valley, home to much of the park's wildlife. As we entered the valley, we could see two buffalo a ways back from the road, one of which even dug and rolled around in the dirt while we were watching. We thought that was cool, but we had no idea what was coming. We came around a bend to see a herd of buffalo on a hill to our right, and a line of cars that was practically stopped right in the middle of the road. As we inched along, we saw a pull-off on the left side of the road, and as the cars in front of us cleared, we saw two more buffalo standing right smack dab in the middle of the pull-off, mere feet from the road! As we kept driving, there were more pull-offs with people stopped watching buffalo far off in the distance, but we didn't stop because nothing could compare with what we had just seen. We finally made it through the buffalo craze to our last stop, Mud Volcano. This area had a few bubbling pools of mud that were once enormous geysers, but now just bubbled and steamed and gurgled in place. But it was still pretty damn cool.
Along the way to these major attractions, we saw plenty of smaller waterfalls, geysers, mud pots (where the ground had basically caved in around hot bubbling mud), and some other similar phenomenon that I don't know the scientific names or explanations for but all basically amounted to holes in the ground with water, steam, and/or mud simmering, bubbling, and/or spewing from them. Of all the parks we've been to, this is the one where I most wished we had had more time, because there's just so much to see that it's impossible to do it all in one day.
states driven through: 24
states visited: 15
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