Brown Family Vacation - Day 6

From Yellowstone National Park

Cody, Wy to West Yellowstone, Montana (Yellowstone NP)

Another simply amazing day!  I woke up for a quick run early and saw 3 deer walking the streets of Cody and saw the sun come up over the mountains.  After planning the day, we got up and headed out for the hour drive to the eastern entrance of Yellowstone National Park.  Yellowstone is the 1st national park in the world and covers over 2.2 million acres. To see everything in 1 day is almost impossible, but we were going to try and do as much as possible.

Our first site was the massive Yellowstone Lake, which we just drove by but it gave us a sense of the beauty we'd see the rest of the day. After stopping at the visitor's center and planning with a ranger, we stopped at Mud Volcano.  The entire area of Yellowstone has constant geothermal activity, and this gave us our first glimpse at what it could do to the area.

We then headed toward the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone, but before seeing the upper level and lower level at Artist's Point, we had to stop several times for bison crossings.  Worth the delay as we saw dozens of them.  The canyon was excellent with a variety of colors.

It started raining a little bit which almost put a damper on our picnic, but we stopped at Tower Falls for lunch and waited out the rain while driving to our next stop at Mammoth Hot Springs, a place that I personally wanted to see the most.  The water wasn't flowing as much here, but it was still pretty impressive walking the ramps.  There was a lower terrace you could walk and an upper terrace you could drive.

It was getting late, so we decided to see the Norris Geyser Basin before heading out for the day.  Again, we were able to see small geysers and pools of geothermal water of different colors along with thermophiles, little bacteria that live in the geysers.

We had to settle for a rather expensive but nice cabin room at Hibernation Station at West Yellowstone where we ate dinner at a place called Geyser Gusher before crashing for the night after a spectacular day.

Tomorrow, we'll head back into Yellowstone to see Old Faithful before heading to see the Grand Tetons and driving into Idaho.