West Yellowstone

We spent one day in Southwest Yellowstone (Old Faithful area), one day in the Northwest (Mammoth Hot Springs area) and got rained out one day.

The old faithful area was all about geothermal features, especially geysers.
By making our first stop the visitors center and planning out our day we got to see lots of major geyser eruptions including: Lonestar, Old Faithful, Beehive (my favorite), Lion, Grand (Tracy’s favorite), Riverside and Grotto. We also got to see plenty of mud pots, fumaroles, pretty hot springs, etc. The trick is not to go to Old Faithful first but instead to just fit it and all the lesser features in around the other geysers. Old Faithful goes every 1.5 hours and isn’t the most impressive of the geysers, so don’t worry you won’t miss it. By the end of the day we were pretty geysered out.


Here’s a picture of a fox we got on the way back to the RV (we also saw lots of buffalo and elk) but by now they are so commonplace we don’t bother to stop.

The second day we were rained out and spent most of the day in West Yellowstone doing chores. Really cool thunder and lightning storm that night though.

The third day we decided to drive up to the Mammoth Hot Springs area. We walked all around the upper and lower boardwalks checking out the travertine terraces. The upper drive was closed due to road construction. This was cool because by hiking up there, getting in front of the road crew and doing it on foot, we got the whole area to ourselves.
The terraces are caused by minerals (most travertine) deposited by the water as it flows down the hill. The colors are caused by different types of bacteria that thrive in the hot water and high hydrogen sulphide content (it would be poison to us and the sulphuric acid produced by the bacteria is stronger than battery acid).

After the hike we went back to the car to have a late lunch and ended up watching elk for 3 hours. It is mating season here for the elk and there were three elk herds each with one 5 point plus male and their harem of 7-30 females per male; all within a football field of each other right down near where we parked. The males were strutting their stuff, bugeling at their females and each other (they steal each others females), rounding up their females if they start to wander off and generally being very aggressive. At one point we had one 50 feet to the right of the picnic table we were at and one 50 feet to the left both bugeling at each other. We thought they were going to attack each other meeting right about where we were so we quickly got out of the way.

There were two rangers whose whole job all day was to warn people away from the Elk. I was waiting to get one of those don’t let this happen to you pictures or maybe a short movie clip that would make the news. We did get to see one attack a truck that stuck around close for too long and there were a couple times when the rangers were busy elsewhere when some stupid tourists got very close to getting gored. Darn no luck though, all the tourists made it to safety (barely).