We spent four days at Yellowstone National Park. We stayed at Grant Village campground for the first two nights. The campsite wasn’t special, but it provided a good location to explore the park and it kept us distant from other people. Due to our change in plans from the pandemic, we extended our stay by an additional night at Mammoth Hot Springs hotel. It was nice to sneak in a National Park “lodge” for the trip.
As much of Yellowstone is made up of a supervolcano caldera, many of the places of interest contain geothermal features in various forms including: geysers, fumaroles, hot springs and mud pits. We stopped at many of these features, including the popular Old Faithful geyser, which erupts every two hours or less. Despite the pandemic there was a huge crowd at Old Faithful with very few people observing social distancing (6 feet was recommended) and only half wearing masks. This made it clear that people weren’t taking the pandemic seriously. This was a very sad observation as it meant millions of people were getting infected and hundreds of thousands would die because people didn’t care enough.
We did many short hikes to see the various features, but did a longer 6 mile hike to Fairy Falls. The crowds were bad at the beginning, again with half the people not wearing masks and making no effort to stay distant, but as we got further out there were fewer people and more of them were following safe practices. Along the way we did a side hike to an overlook with a fantastic view of the stunning rainbow colored Grand Prismatic Spring. At the end of the hike we reached the 200 foot Fairy Falls which offered a cool location to take a break before heading back.
Like Grand Teton, we had a difficult time finding animals in Yellowstone. The easiest to find were the Elk. We saw many elk cows at Mammoth Hot Springs during dusk. We could even see them from our hotel room. It took some work to find the bison which are normally abundant at Yellowstone. We had to drive almost to the northeast entrance to find them, but we were rewarded by finding a large herd both on and off the road. The herd caused a bit of a traffic jam due to their wandering along the road, but it made for a worthwhile experience. We had no luck finding bears for Lily. We had just missed seeing one at Roaring Mountain and saw nothing along the rough Blacktail Plateau Drive road where bears were said to frequent.
2020 Road Trip
Travel