Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Old Faithful - Right on Time


Our day started off by having two other Rialta owners, Fay and Gene, pick us up at the KOA and treated us to a wonderful and knowledgeable tour of Yellowstone National Park. And what a day it was! We entered from West Yellowstone at about 8:30 AM and within a few miles there was a traffic jam. A female bald eagle was sitting in a tree watching over her nest and a young'un. Farther down the road was a few of the elk from the Madison Herd. Yes, I know you want animal pictures, but today I am going to focus on geysers.


Old Faithful - After showing off.


Our first geyser stop was at the Lower Geyser Basin. We walked the whole loop. Because there were so many, I will limited this to the most spectacular ones. The photos below were taken at the Excelisor Geyser. The first two are of the Grand Presmatic Spring. The colors were beautiful. There were several other ones at this location...like The Opal and The Turquoise. I wish I could post all of the pictures.

The Grand Presmatic Spring



Another shot of the Grand Presmatic Spring


Aren't the colors remarkable? The Excelsior Geyser is also exceptional. After leaving this area, we did a couple of side-road drives where we saw more geysers and a beautiful river in the Park.

When we got to "Old Faithful" we had about a 30 minute wait before "She" erupted again. And she is always on time...every 92 minutes. We enjoyed Trout Almondine in the Yellowstone Old Faithful Lodge cafeteria. Yummy! After lunch we strolled over to the Yellowstone Inn where we took an informative tour of the Inn. We even got to see one of the original guest rooms of the Inn. This one had no bath, as many of them don't. The guest share bathrooms down the hall or around the corner. Yes, some of the rooms did have the luxury of having an adjoining bath.


The afternoon found us taking a drive around the rest of the lower loop. Yellowstone is divided into basically two loops. I was so surprised to see the enormous Yellowstone Lake. We stopped at several more geyser locations and at the last one, we got to see TWO! Not ONE! Female buffalo with young'uns. Then we saw a hugh male Elk. What a rack he was supporting! After the buffalo siting, we were taken to this stunning waterfalls. I Promise: I WILL POST MORE PICTURES tomorrow.


On to Cody, WY tomorrow...


We returned to West Yellowstone about 12 hours from when we began. We enjoyed dinner together, said our goodbyes and I believe the TTT's went to bed.









1 comment:

  1. Beautiful pics, Mom. I wish you could post them all, too!

    ReplyDelete