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| colorful spring at black sand basin |
The final destination on our third day was
Canyon Area again. As we spent the first day there, we planned not to go back
on the straight road from Lake Area to Canyon, but to take the whole day to
drive around on West (the smaller loop) from Lake to West Thumb, Old Faithful
up to Madison and Norris to reach Canyon Village. The whole drive was about
110kms, not much but we could enjoy the whole day with many stops at
interesting places.
In the morning (still not used to the
holiday) waking up early in the morning, I left for a short walk around the
lodge. It was still before 7am, and the whole area was quite (and quite cold).
As I turned in the back of our lodge (one building contained two rooms), what
do I see at the back? A bison calmly standing just next to our building!
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| morning view at Lake Lodge |
Last
evening, when I had taken the laundry to the main building of the lodge on
foot, I also saw a mule deer strolling around the lodges, and today morning a
bison! Apparently this lodge is popular among animals as well! Quietly passing
in front of the bison and following my path, I headed to the small woods near
our lodge. I found a path departing from the upper buildings to the Elephant
Back trail, but as it was 2 miles long and haven´t noticed my husband to leave,
I didn´t follow the trail. Instead took some photos of some chipmunks and
headed back to our building. The bison was still there. Now, already lying and calmly
chewing the cud – it didn´t seem he was bothered to leave soon. At this time
people started to wake up and surprised by the unexpected visitor at the lodges.
After having breakfast at the small shop at
Lake´s general store, we headed south to West Thumb and then turned to West
towards Old Faithful.
On the way we saw a smaller waterfall, the Kepler
Cascades. But the more impressive here was the Old Faithful Geyser that was
just erupting and was seen from kms even from the overlook of this waterfall. As
we had a full day later at Old Faithful, we skipped Old Faithful and visited
two geyser groups instead: the “biscuit basin” and the “black sand basin”.
These two basins are (together with Old Faithful Geyser) in the Upper Geyser
Basin. (To the north there is the area of the Middle Geyser Basin (including
the world-famous “Grand Prismatic Spring”) and the Lower Geyser Basin with the
Firehole springs.)
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| black sand basin |
First we went to see black sand basin – the view from the
boardwalk was extraterritorial; the earth was white with smaller and bigger
holes in it like craters, filled with bubbling and splashing water or mud. The
microorganism in these pods at places colored the white earth to orange, brown
and green.
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| sapphire pool at biscuit basin |
Biscuit basin was a bit bigger area with
bigger ponds of geysers. As we crossed the river crossing the way between the
geysers and the parking lot, we found the same extraterritorial scene as at
black sand basin. There were ponds with cloudy water, and beautifully
transparent skyblue and blackish-brownish water.
We´ve seen some erupting just
when we´d been there. Apparently the eruption of the geysers is due to its
underground system. A geyser is called so when the vent underground is narrow and the water is boiling hot, giving the water enough energy to erupt.
After the Upper Geyser Basin, we skipped
the Middle Geyser Basin and headed to the Lower Geyser Basin. Here there are
two driveways, one is the Firehole canyon drive, where you can stop to swim in
the quite part of the Firehole-river. It seemed to be very popular as the
sideway was full with cars and the lake with people.
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| Great Fountain Geyser |
Driving further, we found
the next driveway, the Firehole Lake drive. Here, there are smaller-bigger
geysers on the roadside and to our luck, the first geyser (Great Fountain
Geyser) just had started to erupt as we arrived there. We were lucky because
according to the sign there, this fountain was to go off every 2.5 hours. We
saw this fountain geyser (geyser that spread the water in every direction like
a fountain) erupting for over 5 minutes and maybe over 10ms height and drove
further.
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| White Dome geyser |
Just a few 100 meters from the Great Fountain, we found another one.
This looked like a huge, white ant nest. As I get off the car to take pictures
of the “White Dome” (as it was called), again – to our great luck – this geyser
went off as well. Turns out, this type is a so called cone geyser; the
characteristics of the cone geyser is that the vent inside is narrow and the
cone (made of minerals spread from the erupting water) doesn´t let the water
sprinkle around like in the case of fountain geysers, but erupts in one narrow
jet of water. Also, as in the case of the fountain geysers, the water always
came in pulses, in the case of cone geyser, the water flow was continuous. The
eruption of the White Dome was shorter (maybe 2-3 minutes), but very
impressive. (I think the majority of the geysers - or at least the most popular
ones, like Great Fountain, Old Faithful, Grand … - in Yellowstone are fountain
geysers, so it was a real joy to see this other type of geyser, too.)
After the geysers, we drove further and
turned to the left at Medison junction to the West Entrance, West Yellowstone.
The small town starts right at entrance of the park, showing that this town
lives on the tourists of Yellowstone.
The downtown is real American-cowboy
style with: wooden, one-floor houses with big, square facades and wide porches
at the front. The downtown is full with motels, hotels, restaurants and
souvenir shops. We first drove around to see the town, but finally the main
part seemed to be the closest block to the entrance of Yellowstone, so as we
found a parking space, got off and strolled around among the souvenir shops.
There were some really funny T-shirts, with such sayings: “If you see a bear
run! Bears like fast food!” or “Camping is good. Bears like a midnight snack”.
As it was lunchtime, we stopped by at an Italian restaurant: I had pizza which
was really good, but my husband didn´t have luck with his spaghetti – although
the pizza was like a real Italian one (think crust, mozzarella, many tomato
sauce), but the spaghetti was real American (too soft pasta topped with tomato
sauce which seemed to come directly from the can (so seasoning whatever)).
Entering to the park after lunch (with the
receipt, one can enter and exit anytime within 7 days – quite a bargain for
25USD) we passed Firehole falls and Gibbon falls and headed to our lodge at
Canyon for the evening.
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| the west entrance of Yellowstone Park |
For more pictures, click on the link!→Yellowstone part 3
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