Thursday, June 17 – Monday, June 21

If you read the first Yellowstone post, you can probably tell that this park is actually perfect for an RV motorhome. Since the park is set up to drive, drive, and drive some more, we had everything we needed with us for the day. At all the sights, we had plenty of parking if we got there early. We could eat, relax, and use the bathroom at our discretion.

On Friday, we slept in and vacated the Canyon campsite by 11am.  We took our time driving down along Hayden Valley towards West Thumb and Grant Village.   We stopped at Pumice Point, a black sand beach on Yellowstone Lake, so that the kids could put their feet in the water. Checked in at Grant Village Campground around 12:30 and got site 63 in the B Loop.  We did laundry at the campground – it was especially handy to have bikes and a wagon here to help with laundry, explored the gift stores, and bought some food at the tiny grocery store.  We could walk down to Yellowstone Lake from our campsite.   We were also able to bike to the visitor center (which was closed) but the kids got to play a bit in the water and at the amphitheater.

We realized that the grocery store at Grant Village was not going to cut it for our family, so on Saturday, our first full day at Grant, we made another run to West Yellowstone to resupply our food.   We woke up a bit late and headed out to West Yellowstone via Old Faithful.  West Yellowstone had a great park in the center of town with playgrounds for the kids to play on while I shopped.   I got food for the rest of the trip and we had lunch in the RV.  Heading back into Yellowstone around 4-5pm we headed to Old Faithful.   The section from the West entrance back to Old Faithful is such a beautiful drive along a gorgeous valley with steep walls and boulders all around. When you pass Norris and head to Old Faithful, you are actually crossing into the caldera that is 160,000 years old. We stopped along the Madison River to put our feet into the river. I thought swimming was not allowed in the river, but so many people were swimming that I think I got that wrong. When we reached Old Faithful, we took our bikes and headed down to Castle Geyser. We waited for the prescribed time to erupt but gave up around 7:30pm. A year later, while writing this, we found out that Castle’s eruptions schedule is now longer than it was previously, as this geyser just doesn’t seem to want to erupt.  We continued biking all the way to Morning Glory which was an amazing hot pool with gorgeous colors.  We started to walk the trail to biscuit basin but since it was dusk and we had no bug spray, we started to get eaten alive by mosquitos.  Turning around, we got back on our bikes, Charlie took a bad fall, I got a hundred mosquito bites while trying to bandage him up, but made it back to the RV and back to Grant just before dark.

Our plan on Sunday was Grand Prismatic Spring. We have now driven the route from Old Faithful to Norris Basin enough times to realize that this segment of the park is by far the busiest. We are talking car to car backups for 20-25 miles. So we knew that if we wanted to get to Prismatic Spring we had to do it early. We woke up before 6am and left Grant by 6:30am to get a spot at Midway Geyser by 8am. We had breakfast in the RV and headed up the boardwalk to see the Prismatic Springs at eye level. There is another view from above that is worth doing, but it was too late in the day to try to fight for a spot as you have to drive to another parking lot to access that trailhead. So we headed to Old Faithful to spend the day.  We arrived by 10am and easily got a spot, although it quickly filled at this point and was completely packed by noon. We took our bikes again and saw Grotto erupting. It looked alot different than when we saw it yesterday. We saw Castle spewing a bit more but nothing gigantic. We did see the full eruption for Grand Geyser and Riverside and both were impressive! On our way back to the RV we hit a rain spell and got pelted with hail. Back at the RV we had lunch and then we all walked around Geyser hill once more to view Anenome which was the best geyser by far.  It fills, erupts and then drains.  This cycle repeats every 7-10 minutes.   We left around 5pm, got back to Grant at 6pm and had dinner.   Then in the evening we drove to West Thumb which was about 2 miles away and saw the geyser and hot pools there.  We saw a mule deer in the hot pool area eating and I saw a female elk race through the woods.  The coolest geyser here is the mud volcano unnamed right at the entrance way.  Weather was cold at night, low was in the upper 20s!

Monday was our last full day in Yellowstone and we had our plan set. We got up again at 6am and left by 6:30am to get a spot at Fairy Falls.  No RVs are allowed in the parking lot so we had to get there early to get a spot at the pull out right before the parking lot.  We got there around 7:30am and had breakfast with a bison (not literally).  At around 9am, we heading up to the Grand Prismatic Overlook.  Since it was morning, the steam was condensing with the cold area to produce some clouds, but we did see some pretty views. We continued on to Fairy Falls which was 4 miles more roundtrip.  This is a fantastic hike and I think it was made more spectacular as I did not watch any videos of this hike beforehand – I was completely surprised. Fairy falls was huge! Its no easy task to take kids on 6 a mile hike, but we tried to entertain them with crazy stories along the way.  We returned to the overlook and now that it was noon or just after, there was no steam blocking the view. With the sun shining down, we got great pictures.   After lunch, we drove to Fountain paint pots which was thankfully against traffic. This area had the best trail so far. We saw all 4 types of thermal features – fumeroles, hot springs, geysers, and mud pots. And we saw paint pots gurgling as well as Red Spouter spouting mud – a mud geyser!   From there we opted to drive around to Norris and Canyon (crossing the Continental Divide once more) and back through Hayden – because that was much more pleasant than sitting in the traffic jam heading back down to Old Faithful.  On our ride we checked out a trail that looks like it might transverse the lower loop – Mary Mountain Trail. That might be a neat backpacking trip someday.  We were back at Grant around 4pm and we enjoyed our last evening in the campground.

Overall, I think you get the correct impression that Yellowstone is huge. To give it justice, we gave ourselves a full week – and that was living in the park. With this itinerary, we got to see all the major features of the park, but we were also extremely exhausted. We loved the west and this probably played into our decision to eventually move out west. As for the next post? Grand Teton National Park.