Destination: Old Faithful, Grand Prismatic Hot Springs (2 hours + 1 hour for a Buffalo Jam, 80 miles)
This morning started off by rushing out of the cabin to try and catch an Old Faithful eruption ( or interuo. We were right on the edge of making it until we had a 1 hour bison jam in the road! Ironically, while tons and tons of cars were backed up on the road a different herd of Bison and their calf ran down the hill, swam across the river and crossed the road directly in front of us! While stuck in this traffic we also saw a bald eagle and Brooke (maybe) saw a massive turtle…
After the jam cleared we still headed to Old Faithful since we were so delayed that we’d just go to the next eruption. It erupts roughly ever 70-100 minutes. We grabbed a front row seat and hung out. The rangers predicted the eruption for 11:07 and it erupted at 11:08, pretty punctual and accurate! The eruption lasted for about a minute and the tall portion of the eruption on lasted for about 10 seconds. Jaclyn and I had argued about how loud it would be and it ended up being really quiet. While it was cool to see I think we’d probably skip it next time since it’s such a busy area and you have to revolve around its schedule.
After that we took a short drive to Grand Prismatic Spring (a massive rainbow colored hot spring). We hiked around the boardwalk trail looking at the different hot springs in the area. It was pretty amazing and the colors were awesome. Just not something you see anywhere else. We were trying to also hike the Grand Prismatic Overlook Trail but found out that the trailhead is about a mile up the road. So, instead of waking up Beckett just to drive 1 mile I decided to hike to the trailhead with him in the backpack. Pretty much as soon as Jaclyn and Brooke drove by in the car he woke up and defeated our plan. The funny thing about Yellowstone is that there is very little cell service so you can’t just change plans on the fly.
We all met up at Fairy Falls trailhead and hiked the .8 miles to the overlook. The overlook provided a much better and more colorful view! When standing on the boardwalk the steam from Grand Prismatic kind of blocked the view. The hike down was pretty eventful. Beckett didn’t want to get back in the backpack and Brooke was getting tired and had to go to the bathroom. So, we were trying to rush down but she wanted to stop and rest and Beckett was in love with playing in the dirt/sand of the trail. Jaclyn be I literally took turns kidnapping (picking up) Beckett and running as far as we could before he completely lost it. It was much more exhausting then the 2+ miles I’d just hiked with him in the backpack. And everyone else thought we were insane and torturing our kids to go hiking lol.
After we finished the hike we headed back towards West Yellowstone as our day was finished. We encountered heavy rain (our first of the trip!) on the drive to West Yellowstone and in the town. We stopped for some delicious BBQ and then Jaclyn bought a shirt at one of the stores. We then headed back to the AirBnB and enjoyed the view from our porch.
-Jay
I love the video of the bison crossing the stream, that was cool to see! And I’ve never even heard of Grand Prismatic – that looks really beautiful! I am loving that I’m able to live vicariously through this blog!