Yellowstone National Park and Old Faithful

Today our one goal was to see Old Faithful the most famous geyser at Yellowstone National Park. We saw the other sites that were of interest to us on Friday.  I told Huli I bet it will take us two hours to go the 60 miles to get to Old Faithful.  She should have bet me because it took us three hours to get there.  The damn buffalo in the road caused numerous traffic delays.  They need to arm the park service people with long cattle prods to get them off the road.  When we finally arrived at Old Faithful we hit the general store to use the restroom and then walked over to the geyser.  We learned the geyser was not set to erupt again for another hour and fifteen minutes. Instead of having steak back at the motorhome later that evening we decided to go over to the grill and have lunch instead since we would be getting home later  than we originally thought.  After lunch we went back to the geyser and waited another 30 minutes until we got what we came for.  I took a few pictures and a video at the request of our older, more nostalgic son, Gabe.  He told us today he remembered Old Faithful, The Mud Pits, and the burned trees that were caused by a large fire that occurred not too long before we came here in the 80's.  Here are some pictures from today's journey.  In the morning we leave on a seven hour trip to Coeur d' Alene, Idaho working our way west to Seattle.  We will be in Salt Lake City on September 25th to see my favorite brother Skip and his wife Kara and daughter Ellie.  In between Coeur d'Alene and Salt Lake we still have a few stops to make and things to see.  After Salt Lake City we are going to do some serious driving to get home since we have seen these sites along the way before.  We may even try staying at a Walmart parking lot which we have never done.  We'll see.  Here are the pictures and I hope the video for Gabe.

 This picture shows the impact of the fires and the new growth coming in to replace the older burned trees.  Today there is a controlled burn of around 1200 acres taking place in Yellowsonte.  We saw signs saying it was controlled and not to report it.

 We followed this bus for a couple of hours making our way to Old Faithful.  They had stuff pile all over the top of this bus.  In English Quetzal means two things.  A currency in south america or a bird with very colorful plumage.  I think they mean the later since the bus was hand painted purple.

 This is a picture inside the General Store.

 They have some damn big crows here.

 This is the back side of one of the lodges here at the geyser.

 Gabe's video.  Sorry Gabe it didn't work.  The video is too big and I'm not sure how to edit it at this point.  I'll try again later.

 One of our traffic jams

Up the mountain, football, bears, and Livingston, MT

Today for the most part we stayed around the motor home partly so I could watch the Notre Dame football game.  Before the game I drove up a gravel road behind the rv park to the top of the mountain.  When I got to the top I took some pictures of the park.  I am not sure how people who live on top the mountain get up there in the winter time.  There is a sign that says tire chains are mandatory when ice or snow is present. After the game we went to Livingston which is north on route 89 about 52 miles from the rv park. That is the closest descent grocery store to Gardiner. On our way we stopped at a place that was about 10 miles down a gravel road that was suppose to have grizzly bears.  There were seven grizzly bears there but we couldn't see them because they were miles away.  The people watching them were using binoculars that were two feet long.  I thought my camera would work but they were too far even for it.  I think if I could have found them in my camera I may have been able to get a picture but at this distance it is very hard to find things especially things that are moving in tall grass.  Below I'll show how good my camera is at long shots. Some people with the two foot binoculars were nice enough to allow us to look through them to see the bears.


Here are a few pictures from today.

This is where I went this morning.  It's the mountain behind the rv park.

This is the town below from on top of the mountain

This is our motor home from the same spot on top of the mountain

This the yellow stone river taken from an old bridge we had to cross on our way to see the bears

You see a lot of horses around here

 I love this house

 We must be getting close

 Yep this is the spot

 This is where they said they were but I never could see them in the view finder

Livingston MT



Yellowstone National Park Day 1

Today we did the east side of Yellowstone National Park.  Our motorhome is parked just outside the north entrance to the park in Gardiner so we took the loop road that runs down the entire east side of the park. We actually took the loop road around the entire park but only looked at the sites on the north, east, and south sides.  We are saving the west side sites that you have to get out of the car in order to see for Sunday.  The park is very large so we knew it would take more than one day to see the sites.  I think the park is 62 miles long north to south and 54 miles wide east to west.  We left at 9:00 and got back around 4:30 pm.  We wanted to get back by three but some unexpected delays didn't allow that to happen. We were worried about leaving the dogs (TJ) this long but they did fine and we made up for it by spending the evening outside with them.  Sunday we are going back into the park to do the west side which will include Old Faithful.  We drove by it today but didn't want to stop since we are coming back Sunday.

When we first got into the park there were some buffalo by the road which we thought was kind of cool and would make an interesting picture.  When trying to return home going north on the west side of the loop road we got delayed about 30 to 45 minutes.  We thought it was construction but when we finally got to the obstacle we learned it was two big buffalo walking down the road just taking their time.  After finally getting past the buffalo we were stopped for another 30 minutes or so due to road construction. While the park is only 62 miles long it takes about two plus hours to drive it due to the speed limit being 35 mph in many places because of the twists and turns in the road.

The park is very beautiful and while you can still see the remnants of previous fires you can also see the new growth trees that are just perfect.  I now understand why the park tries to allow fires to burn themselves out that are started by mother nature since it revitalizes the park with new growth trees. We stopped at the Yellowstone Lake and had a picnic lunch but other than that we stopped at all of the major sites to see the scenery.  While we had been here before close to 30 years ago neither Huli nor I remembered too much about the park.  We haven't seen any bears yet but did see some elk, buffalo, coyotes, and a moose but I didn't have time to get a picture since we passed it in the car.

Below are a few of the pictures we took today.  Hope you enjoy them.




These were the first buffalo that we saw that we thought were neat.

These are of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone

 These are of the volcano mud pits

This boat came by as we were eating lunch by the lake.

 These are the pain in the butt buffalo that just meandered their way down the road and held us up by 30 to 45 minutes.  It wouldn't have bothered us as much but we were trying to get back to the dogs by this time.