Yellowstone Day 2

Bubbling mud in Miday basin area

We hit Yellowstone for day 2, which was primarily geysers (the Midway Geyser Basin area), the Grand Prismatic Pool and Old Faithful – you’ve seen one geyser, you’ve seen them all, is what we were thinking after awhile.  We hit the Midway Basin area and walked around checking out different geysers and bubbling mud.  We got some cool video but the video is upside down and we are still trying to figure out how to rotate it. 

Spasm Geyser in Midway area

Outfall of grand prismatic pool

Grand Prismatic Pool from ground level

We then hit the Grand Prismatic Pool – and had quite the adventure trying to get a good view of it.  When we saw it from the “tourist boardwalk” you couldn’t really even see it because it was slightly elevated.  Just as we were remarking about it, 

Grand Prismatic pool from ground level

we looked across the 200+ foot pool and saw small human figures climbing up a mountainside, and thought hey, let’s go up there and see what this pool looks like from there! 




Grand Prismatic Pool from above

Grand Prismatic Pool from above

Actually, Bill thought that – I wasn’t real keen on the idea at first, but I could see he was hell-bent.  So I just accepted that it was happening and moved on.  We figured out where to park to access the area, followed a trail to a small dirt path that led us up.  It was a relatively short climb, but extremely steep!  There were fallen timber logs all across the mountainside, seemed they were purposely laid out just to facilitate climbing.  We got up to the top and took some stunning pictures of it (see pics), including of course what we’ve been calling “face-time” pics with my iPhone (we can see ourselves as we take the pic), with the pool in the background.  Amazingly enough we had cell service at the top and all I wanted to do was “check-in” and post my pic on FB, when we heard thunder.  I felt a twinge of panic, and tried to type faster to get the pic posted, and then we saw lightening.  That’s when Bill cut me off and told me “shut the phone down, we have to get off this mountain!” – now I really started to panic!  But then Bill went back to his calm, cool, collected self and started talking me through the steep descent we were about to embark on…”don’t rush, take your time, use the logs, hold onto the evergreen for support, lean into the mountain, etc.”, and we made it safely down to level ground.  Our hearts were pounding with excitement – what an adventure!  One of our highlights so far, for sure.




Old Faithful (this blog re-orients photos)

Old Faithful was a bit of a letdown, maybe we expected too much.  We sat around it – did meet a nice Oklahoman (?) while we waited for her to “blow” – it goes off every 90 minutes, plus or minus 10.  In hindsight, we should have planned better and done a hike right in that area that went up and had a great lookout point to see it from above – now that would have been cool.  And God knows what we would’ve seen along the way.  Instead we opted to check out Old Faithful, and then do a hike, but it started to rain and got very dark in general, so we decided to do some gift shopping and then hit the road to the Tetons.  We stopped at Kepler Cascades for a quick photo shoot – beautiful spot. 



Keppler Cascades



Keppler Cascades

In vicinity of the cascades the park road crosses the continental divide three different times.  At the first crossing we stopped for a quick pic and found a beautiful rainbow in the distance. 

Rainbow near Continental Divide