Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Pacific Northwest Road Trip - Day 11



Well today we were visiting Yellowstone, but the day started off badly.. actually it stated last night when we got to the hotel and I realized I booked us a hotel that was about 125 miles / 2-1/2 hours away. Now it wouldn't be bad if we didn't have to come back to the hotel later that night. So my mistake added an extra 250 miles to our already 3500+ and an extra 5 hours of driving for the day which takes away time from our visit to the park.

Anyways we get to Yellowstone around 1pm. We enter the west entrance and just a few miles in we see a group of Moose's. One actually crosses the street and walked about 5 feet from me.. it was pretty cool.

When we entered Yellowstone wasn't what I was expecting.. I expected tall trees all over the place and there as nothing but acres of tiny (5 feet) trees all over. I mentioned this to Harry and he said "wasn't there a fire here years ago" and that is why there were no big trees.. they all burned down and what we saw were the re-plants. There were larger trees in other parts of the park and there were also blacken trees that have yet to be re-planted.

A few more miles and we see a few Buffalo's/Bison. We decided to take the south route as this is where the majority of the Geysers and hot springs are. We stop over and over at each group of geysers/hot springs. We took tons of videos and pictures. Because we had the dog we had to go one at a time while the other one watched the dog. I took all the pictures and Harry took all the video, expect the video I took with my still cam for my blog.

We wound up at Old Faithful and missed it by 5 minutes. Since this is something that both Harry and I really wanted to see we waited the 90 minutes for another eruption... and it didn't disappoint. Again because of the Dog I was back in the tree area (where dogs were allowed) and I took pictures and Harry was up where the benches were with the video camera.

We only had a few hours of day light left so we headed toward the north exit and on our way we came across the Mud Volcano section. There were several cool hot springs like Dragon's Mouth and a Mud hot spring.

After that we headed out as the we were losing light but as we were leaving we saw a group of Elks and stopped to get some pictures and video.

Now it was dark and we headed out of the park which was going to take an hour just to get out. A lightening storm started, then rain and then dusty winds. I was driving these small windy roads getting blown around and not being able to see because of the heavy rain and dust. There was one moment where I was stuck between two hills and a gust of dusty wind swirled through and there was a moment where I couldn't see anything.. it was a very scary and slow drove back to the hotel. We got back to the hotel at 1am and there was no time to do any blogging or anything.

Next up Utah!!!

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