Today (June 22) we left Grand Teton and headed north to Yellowstone. It was hard to say good-bye to the view form our campsite, but other exciting things lay ahead. Below is a pic from our campsite and a pic of the bear locker we had to keep stuff in so teh bears wouldn't get it. Scary!
The South Entrance to Yellowstone is only 15 miles from where we were in Grand Teton, so it didn't take long to get to the park, but Yellowstone is over 2 million acres, so it takes a while to get around the park. We were going to stay in the Madison campground, but decided to change that up and head further north to the Mammoth Hot Springs campground on the Wyoming-Montana border. It has showers and a general store and will alos allow us to make it up to Glacier National Park in one day, instead of two. More on Mammoth in a moment.
The Old Faithful area was on the way to Mammoth, so we decided to get a look at that first. We walked around the Old Faithful Inn, which is pretty large, but this is the most touristy part of the park. It was very crowded which was a departure from what Grand Teton was like. We got a good front row seat for the geyser's eruption which was very cool. They said it woudl erupt around 1:30pm and they were right. I'll try to post video later.
There are a bunch of thermal features around Old Faithful and below is a pic of the Blue Star Hot Spring.
The campsites at Mammoth are first come first served, so we got on the raod and headed north toward that area. We came across a traffic jam, and saw a coyote taking a nap in the middle fo a meadow which was pretty neat. We thought it was a wolf at first, but a ranger later told us that it wasn't. We finally made it up to Mammoth after some road construction delays and got our campsite set up. It's pretty windy and cold, so we'll be bundling up, but we're sleeping much better now that we got a sleeping bag to put under us.
The Mammoth area is set up like a little town, with a hotel and stores. The elk, apparently don't know that they're supposed to stay in the woods, because they enjoy dining on the lawns of the hotel.
We decided to go see what thet Mammoth area is named for before supper. There are hot springs that expel minerals and gases (sulpher being one of them so it stinks!) The minerals trickle down and create these terraces. The park has a boardwalk around all of them so wew walked around it. It's hard to believe that it's a naturally occuring phenomenon.
After a supper of smoked sausage, peppers and onions and potatoes, we wrote some postcards and called it a night. It stays light until 10:00pm so our internal clocks are still a little off.
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