Yellowstone, Part 1

I've been working on Yellowstone photos in my spare time at home, here are a few from our first couple days there.

Driving...had to document this, since that's what we did for the majority of the time. We drove 2600 miles total, and went through 5 states, two national parks, Mt. Rushmore, and the Badlands. 

The first night, we stayed in a hotel in Casper, Wyoming, not much to document there. The second day, we drove up to Jackson and took a gondola up to the top of a mountain in the Tetons. Jackson Hole seemed like it would a fun place to ski in the winter, we may have to go back some time for that.

That night we stayed in a little cabin that was super cute. I tried to get Adam to take a nice picture with me on the porch... it didn't go so well. And the couch in our cabin was the same one that my parents have at their house! Felt right at home... :)

That evening, we went to downtown Jackson to walk around and eat dinner. There was some interesting stuff...

The next morning we got up and drove into Yellowstone. Yellowstone is a close runner-up to Hawaii for the most beautiful place I've ever been. I expected there to be like 3 or 4 main things to see, but there was crazy stuff everywhere you looked - canyons, waterfalls, geysers, wildlife. On our way to Old Faithful, we stopped to see this waterfall. The photo on the top left shows the "trail" that we hiked/climbed up and down to get to the bottom of the falls.

Next up was Old Faithful. It was crazy to see in person. It goes off every 90 minutes and there were tons of people waiting to see it. There was another geyser nearby that erupted at about the same time, which was pretty cool. We overheard someone say that the water below ground is about 200 degrees.

There are a bunch of places to hike and things to see around Old Faithful. There were hundreds of mini-geysers and hot springs. We took a 5 mile hike around to see all the stuff, and it was neat because while there were a ton of people there, there were a few times where we were all alone in the wilderness, minus the concrete path we were walking. :) Can you smell the sulphur? Mmmm yummy.

We saw lots of wildlife and even took our picture with a real live bison! This elk or moose or whatever it was, decided to cross the highway about three cars in front of us, and then just calmly walked by our car. I shot this out the window of our car, and I actually am as close to it as it looks. If you click on it to make it bigger, you can see that he's smiling.

And here's a preview of what's still to come in Part 2 of the Yellowstone Saga: