Alas, Old Faithful, The Main Event
- Natasha
- Jun 26, 2015
- 3 min read
Today was our first early day, out of many to come. I was awoken from my slumbers at 7:30am, so I guess it wasn’t all that early but still. We commenced our day by driving into the National Park from our KOA and started the Around The Block driving tour of the volcano caldera with a little side road called Firehole Canyon Drive. We stopped at an area overlooking the canyon and one of it’s waterfalls and the again at a little watering hole. We didn’t go swimming today, but we have plans to return tomorrow. We continued on towards the main attraction (Old Faithful) and we tried to stop again at the Fountain Paint Pots but the parking lot was so full, it was backing up the highway. We arrived at the famous geyser and took a look around the visitors centre, found the time the geyser was set to go off, which was at 12:15pm, and went out back to find ourselves a spot. Old Faithful went off about ten minutes before it’s estimated time and it was extremely cool. It went on for about three minutes, and was a pretty constant stream of water, with occasional burst that sent it higher. After the show had finished, our family went separate ways to accomplish some tasks. Dad went to find out hiking routes around the area, I stayed with Kizmet and mum and Isaac went to find the washrooms. When we regrouped, we planned out some hikes for the afternoon and went on our way. Well as it turns out, we cannot, in fact, take dogs on hikes anywhere in the beautiful Yellowstone National Park, as it is strictly prohibited as the ranger at the Old Faithful visitors centre so kindly informed us. So that sucks. But we did get to see Old Faithful which was pretty freaking cool. Mum and I were about seventy feet back and we still got sprayed when the geyser reached it’s peak. As we couldn’t do much else around the Faithful region, we got back on the road to complete our driving tour. We stopped multiple times on our way back. We got some spectacular views of the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone, saw some bison, some elk and took a hike along the boardwalk at West Thumb, where Mum and Dad traded off with the dog in the parking lot. West Thumb was fascinating. It was described as a volcano that had happened inside the already erupted, much larger volcano and it created an area that was much more sunken in that the rest of the caldera. There was also a little inlet of Yellowstone Lake, the shore of which you could walk along while on the boardwalk, and apparently the water depth is deeper than the larger portion of the lake. There were quite a few hot springs in the West Thumb area as well, most of which were a striking blue colour, which apparently means the water is approximately 92ºC, extremely near boiling. We crossed the great divide and entered the area of North America where all the water flows to the Atlantic, the crossed back over on our loop back. We also stopped in a little town by the name of Canyon Village, just to check it out and purchase some ice cream (I got huckleberry, to go with the Montana/Wyoming theme). We ended up back in town around 7:30pm, stopped at the store and returned to the camper, where we watched an episode of Flight of the Conchords and then we were off to bed. We are planning another early day tomorrow, with lots of stuff to do, and so little time to do it. Ah well. We can always come back, it’s only a ten hour drive from Calgary after all. Peace out m8s.
