Two days in Yellowstone National Park

We left the Glacier National Park area early in the morning, and started our drive towards Yellowstone. We ended up stopping at Lock Leven Campground, which is just North of Yellowstone National Park. It costs $18 per night and has drop toilets and a boat ramp. It was a pretty nice night, until it started raining and blowing a gale. We now know the tent stays up in strong winds! It is pretty hard to sleep through though.

We drove in to Yellowstone the next morning, and at the visitors centre it said there were sites available at the Mammoth Campgrounds, so we drove down there and grabbed a site for two nights. We were going to stay at a free campground just outside of the park, but we decided it was just so much easier to stay in the park and avoid lining up every morning to get in.

We started by going to Mammoth Hot Springs, an area with a lot of hot springs and a few little geyser areas. It was pretty interesting, but very busy. We wandered around for a bit until we got too hot, then moved on to the Norris Geyser Basin.

I'm not really sure what to say about yellowstone, because it's a lot of the same thing... Hot water laying on the ground. We also went to Gibbon Falls, which were pretty underwhelming. We also stopped at the Artist Paint Pots, which are just very small hot springs, not super exciting either really.

The next stop was the canyon, and yellowstone falls. They were quite pretty and the canyon is definitely worth a look. Most of the hiking trails were closed for some reason, unfortunately. We stopped at Tower Falls on the way back to the campgrounds, which I didn't even take a photo of...

The next morning we headed down to do the South Loop of the park. The park map is divided into a North Loop, which we did on the first day, and a South Loop. So we sat in road work for absolutely forever, before finally getting to the Fountain Paint pots, which were not terribly exciting. The next stop was the Midway Geyser Basin, which is where the Grand Prismatic Spring with all it's pretty colours is. The best part was watching everyone cover their faces so as not to breath the steam coming off the pools... Not sure why they thought they shouldn't breath it!

We then went to have a look at Old Faithful. And wow is that area massive! It's like a whole town there, with enough people to make a town! We luckily arrived just as it was about to erupt, so we were super happy with that! It usually erupts about every 90 minutes. 

We had a bit of wander around Geyser Hill, behind old Faithful. And attempted to wait for other Geysers to erupt, but soon gave up.

The final stop of the day was the Mud Volcano. Which was just a bubbling mud pool, so I'm not going to put any photos up of that.

In the morning, we slept in instead of getting up early, and headed off through the Lamar valley. There were heaps of Bison in the valley, and we also saw some Prong Horn deer!