Yellowstone

There is so much to see in Yellowstone and the few days that we had was no where near long enough to see everything. I had allocated Sunday as our geyser day and Monday as our wildlife spotting day, although we had already done quite well spotting buffalo, a bear and a coyote on the previous day.

We drove up to the Norris Geyser Basin first thing in the morning. Steamboat geyser is the biggest attraction here, it's the world's tallest active geyser.

The picture below is Vixen geyser.  This is just a small one but it scared the life out of us by spurting up just as we were walking past.

We continued driving south to the lower geyser basin stopping at a few different places along the way.

There were some very active geysers spouting steam everywhere!

At the midway geyser basin is the Grand Prismatic Spring which is probably one of the most photographed sights in Yellowstone.  

After stopping at the Upper Geyser Basin we were almost all geysered out so headed to our hotel for the night the Old Faithful Inn.

We had one final geyser that we had to see when we got there - the Old Faithful.  It's a few steps away from the hotel and is one of the most reliable and impressive geysers in the park.  It goes off roughly once an hour and puts on a show for about 5 minutes.  

When I booked our hotels in Yellowstone there wasn't much choice left but I was surprised to find a room available at the Old Faithful Inn which is the famous park lodge.  The catch was that the room didn't have a bathroom!  I decided to book it anyway because there wasn't really anything else available  and I am so pleased that I did.  The room was amazing.  Most of the rooms in the lodge are in a modern wing built around the back but we had one of the original rooms in the log part of the lodge, it was so cute and cosy.  The shared bathroom wasn't an issue at all, it was very clean and right across from our room so we could just dart in there.

The hotel lobby is stunning so we found ourselves a couple of chairs and some hot apple cider and relaxed for a while reading our books before dinner in the lodge's dining room.

The next morning we had a very early start for our wildlife spotting day.  We decided to drive to the Lamar Valley which is supposed to be one of the best areas for spotting wildlife.  Our first spot was a lone elk then we saw lots and lots of bison.  They have an annoying habit of blocking the road so it was a very slow drive while we kept stopping to wait for them to move.  

At one point we had to wait quite a while for a herd to cross a bridge, when we finally decided to drive over we ended up being surrounded by a few stragglers which was a bit scary!  They are a bit unpredictable and will sometimes decided to ram the car so we were a bit worried about our tiny little rental car and kept very still while we waited for them to pass!

The Lamar Valley was beautiful but we only managed to see lots of bison and a few pronghorn. We were really hoping to see a grizzly!

From Lamar Valley we drove back to Mammoth Hot Springs.  

After a walk around the springs we went into the small town where there were a herd of elk. September is rutting season and the elk can be really dangerous to be around at this time, they cause havoc when they decide to walk into town. The Park Rangers had cordoned off the area where they were sitting to make sure no one got too close.

We decided to take the Beartooth highway out of the park, it was a long, slow and at times scary drive but the views were beautiful and definitely worth it.