Yellowstone: Day 2, Part 1

On Wednesday, June 10, we woke up to a cloudy day and tried to start our campfire with no luck. So we made breakfast on the campstove again. We had turkey beacon, toast, and eggs we bought in Montana from a really neat Buddhist organic egg farmer. Then we took off at about 9:20 a.m. for Old Faithful, hoping to get there in time to hook up with a 10:00 a.m. ranger talk. We saw several coyotes in trees on the way there. We got there at 10:18 a.m. and it was a huge deal there. We didn't make it the talk. We went into the visitor center to see what time it was set to go off and it was set at 11:20 a.m. It goes off about every 90 minutes. We had time so we walked down to see Castle Geyser (photo with Holden and I) without it blowing off steam. It took about 10 or fifteen minutes to walk there. We passed a huge, Old Lodge and some stores that were off the path a ways. I didn't realized there were 5 geysers in that area near Old Faithful that have predicted times they go off. It would have taken us several hours to walk to all the geysers along the boardwalk. It started to sleet while we were at Castle geyser and so we got a little wet since we didn't have ponchos or our umbrella with us. Then we headed over to Old Faithful. We got there just in time. There was a large crowd there waiting with huge cameras. People from all over the world were excited to be there. It was really neat, but a little creepy that we were all so excited to be inside an active volcano, which is Yellowstone. But it felt safe enough. Both kids were so baffled about why we all standing there waiting for Old Faithful. When it went off they understood. It was quite cool!! I got a video of it as it went off and a photo after it was done. It always had a little steam puffing out. There were many benches on several sides to sit on to watch it go off. You can see those in the side ways video I took. :O)

After that we decided to head back to our campsite to try making a big meal on the fire before we headed to the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. I was really excited about that! It was only a short drive from our campsite, too. And we were planning to take showers at Canyon Village while we were there. I'll post about that later.

Love and gratitude to all!!!

~Heather
xoxox