Wyoming: Day 5 - Yellowstone - Old Faithful, Grand Prismatic and Geyser Basin Tours

We woke up in our Old Faithful Snow Lodge cabin around 7AM and packed up and saw Old Faithful erupt around 8:15 and started a ranger led tour, on a whim.

We learned the history of Old Faithful and all about the dozens and dozens of other geyser and boiling brightly colored waters that bubble out of the ground. We learned about a few of the key early explores of this area like John Colter, who was a member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. We also learned about James Bridger, who in 1859-60, visited an area known as Colter’s Hell and later described its geysers and other natural features to unbelieving listeners. This region later became Yellowstone Park.

There are 150 geysers in upper basin and 400 total in YSNP and only 900 geysers in the entire world. There were several times that you look around and that you felt like you were looking at a scene from a different planet.

We were still on the tour of the upper geyser basin and suddenly the sound of a huge pot of water rapidly boiling off to our left.

After seeing the Grand Geyser erupt, which is called being "kissed by the Grand Geyser," we stumbled into old Faithful Basin Store and met our friendly waiter, Paul from Estes, Colorado. We ate bison everything while we were in the park and he introduced us to Huckleberry water and he shared the history of general store and reminded us how the people working inside Yellowstone have such amazing stories! He also gave me the YNP employee wifi code because we were so cool! ;)

In the afternoon we went to the Fairy Trails trail head and walked the 1.5 mile round trip path to the new wonderful Grand Prismatic overlook. The overlook was super cool and although it was a HOT hike at 1:00PM, it was one of my favorites, during the trip to date, with the kids, just laughing and having fun on the way back keeping Delaney motivated to get down. It was a true example of the family working together even though we were hot! In the 18 hours we had been inside Yellowstone, we had already seen a fox, a yellow belly marmot, bison and here on this trail, rare badger.

 

 

 

Trying to find some post hike shade while Blake went and got the car.

Getting hotel rooms inside of the Yellowstone National Park in late July, which is peak of peak season, is not for the faint of heart. I had been working at fine tuning our itinerary since I had initially started booking it 7 months prior. I knew that I wanted 2 nights to explore the Old Faithful area, especially since we arrived at dusk the first night. This was an example where I had gotten 2 nights in a row at the same hotel yet I had 2 different types of rooms. I was hoping there was a way to stay in the same room once we arrived but unfortunately they were oversold and there was no chance of this luxury, so we had to change rooms in the hotel, for the second night. It wasn't ideal, but it was totally fine. We got lucky with our new Snow Lodge room being ready around 2:00 when we got back and all just chilled in the hotel for a couple of hours. In retrospect, the "upgraded" more expensive room we moved to inside the hotel ended up not being as great as the "cabin" we had the first night. See, there is NO air conditioning at any of the 7 hotels inside the park. So, the cabin had more windows and therefore more of a breeze and the kids loved playing right outside our room in the forest.

Staying anywhere other than inside the national park was never an option to me, personally. I knew this particular trip, we were in Wyoming for Yellowstone and all it's wonders and being in a nice hotel or Airbnb outside the park just didn't interest me this time. During the trip and even months later, I don't regret my decision at all. This especially most touristy part of the trip, made our decision even more sound, as the evenings after 6PM and before 10AM, we had the natural wonders to ourselves and we never were stuck in the car in traffic jams for a huge amounts of time, as we would have been trying to get in and out of the park each day. Plus, we wouldn't have a collection of these special Yellowstone National Park soaps from each night of our stay.

There was absolutely NO good internet signal. It felt weird at first but then I realized it was AWESOME. It was old school driving with a map. It made us repeatedly pause and be so grateful I had researched everything before arriving and had an organized notebook of notes, since we would have missed so much if we had relied on an internet signal.

We ate an early dinner at the famous Old Faithful Inn and had to tour the famous National Historic Landmark hotel and it's stunning log lobby. Eating dinner was one of my very favorite memories of the day. It was such a fun night as the kids taught us to "catch the woah," and we will always remember how it suddenly started hailing and the kids ran out side the front door of the famous Inn and we just watched the 3 of them playing in the hail outside of the largest log hotel in the world. It is a mental memory that I will remember forever.

After dinner, we had to enjoy the traditional Old Faithful Inn ice cream on the most famous patio that overlooks the Old Faithful geyser.

Then, we ended our most quintessential Yellowstone National Park day with a "Twilight on the Firehole" tour on a 1937 bus. Only 8 of these historic busses are in operation, although there used to be 97 used in the park in the 1930's.

It had been such a BIG day, so we celebrated when Delaney took a power nap on the tour!

We saw Great Fountain in Fire Hole Lake Drive. We learned the differences between a fountain vs. cone geyser. One of most beautiful one was a 20 foot cone called White Dome.

Wow... what a day. Oh and the funny memory of the day was when Carter found an old school phone book and started looking at it and was in complete confusion on what it was. I don't think I could love a vacation as much as this one.