Old Faithful

Slept in late - yes! We needed it. After buying some more serious strength mosquito repellant for serious strength mosquitoes, we headed north out of Grand Teton NP, and almost immediately into Yellowstone NP at the south entrance, where of course more fees were due. Actually, I don't want to sound like we're complaining. The facilities and ranger programs that each park provides is first class, and always worth the admission fees. They do it so well.

OK, here's everything you need to know about Yellowstone NP. It was the world's first gazetted National Park in 1872, it is approx. 9000 square kms or 2 million acres in area, had 283 million visitors in 2012, has the largest concentration of geysers in the world, sits over the largest volcano in the world (by area), and bear spray costs $49.99 a can. Oh, and Yogi Bear and Boo-Boo live here, and are always stealing pic-a-nic baskets.

Once in the park, we crossed the continental divide three or four times at elevations between 7500 and 9000 feet. It's really odd to think that this little stream is going to end up in the Pacific Ocean, and the one next to it is going to end up in the Atlantic Ocean thousands of kilometres apart.

We stopped at the first Visitor Centre, which was Grant Village, for a coffee and a talk with the ranger about the things we should see. The ranger even looked up the web camera at various points around the park to show us, and the camera happened to show Old Faithful erupting at that moment. It's on a 90 minute cycle, give or take 10 minutes, so that gave us a target of 80 minutes to drive to the site, make lunch and hike 1 km to the viewing point. No pressure or anything. I'm sure that they'll hold the eruption for us. Made it by 3 minutes.

After the show, from the observation point we made a side trip to Solitary Geyser which blows every 5 minutes, then a loop around all the geysers near to Old Faithful and fed by the same underground system - that's 13 large named geysers and another 100 or so small ones. Lot's were bubbling, most were steaming, and a few erupted at different times.

Mid afternoon, I paced myself and went back to the lodge for a drink and a rest, but Brendan and Mandy continued on a longer loop walk a lot further down the geyser basin.

Late afternoon we kept driving to Biscuit Basin which had another endless series of puffing, wheezing, bubbling and gushing geysers, but a few of them were really pretty springs rather than erupting ones. Headed off for a walk on a side track for a couple of kilometres to Mystic Falls which was very pretty, though the mosquitoes thought so too.

Finally arrived at the Madison Campsite around 7pm, to find it full, but our site still waiting for us. Brendan braved the mosquitoes after tea to swim in the river while we did the dishes, and was rewarded by some elk sightings in the dusk.