The Second Trip to Yellowstone

Our second trip to Yellowstone was a far longer one than the first.  The main road in the center of the park is shaped liked a figure eight and then there are five tentacles off the figure eight that are the entrance roads.  For our Old Faithful trip we probably only drove about one fourth of the bottom half of the figure eight.  This trip we drove the entire upper half of the figure eight.    Our first stop was at Gibbon Falls – there are a lot of waterfalls in Yellowstone.

Next it was off to the Norris Geyser Basin.  This area is the hottest of Yellowstone’s thermal areas.  Our panoramic shot does a pretty good job of showing the thermal landscape ones traverses in this geyser basin. 

One of the hot springs there was called pearl geyser.  It has a very different milky blue color to it.  We might have called it opal geyser or blue topaz geyser, but then no one asked us for a name.  We wondered who had named them all.

 

From Norris we drove north to the Mammoth Hot Springs area.  We had seen other areas where the mineral-laden waters of hot springs had flowed down hills to create terraces of rock, but nowhere in Yellowstone are these terraces larger than at Mammoth.  We drove north out of Mammoth to see the Roosevelt Arch.  This arch marked what for a long time was the main entrance to the park, now the north entrance.  President Theodore Roosevelt visited the Park in 1903 and asked to lay the cornerstone to the arch and it has been known as the Roosevelt Arch ever since.  The top of the arch is inscribed with a quote from the Organic Act of 1872, the legislation which created Yellowstone, which reads "For the Benefit and Enjoyment of the People."

We then took off for the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone and its two beautiful waterfalls.  The rock walls of the canyon are so colorful.  It was just not possible for us to capture all the glory of this spectacular canyon.

On our last blog someone commented about how buffalo and bear can cause traffic jams in Yellowstone.  Here is some proof as this buffalo was just sauntering down the road tying up traffic on both sides.  To say that he passed close to our window as he strode by would be a bit of an understatement.  Hey fella.

And just for the added challenge of a really long day, we stopped at Artist Paintpots and caught this shot from high on the trail that shows all the pots that look like they belong on an artist’s palette.  And we also saw our first mud geyser just a plop, plop, plopping along.