Today I woke up early to try and watch a Grizzly in Hayden Valley. I reached the spot at 6:30 and there already a couple of cars. They mentioned they saw one before, but nothing now. I waited for an hour and then moved on. The highlight of the day was the "Old Faithful" – you know, that's the trademark of the park. Its eruption is quite impressive, but what I learned is that it's not the biggest geyser in the park or the one which has the highest eruption…

What makes it the symbol is the fact that a) it's very accessible and b) it's quite predictable. The rangers can pretty much say when is the next eruption going to take place, and it's quite accurate! If you think about it, it's pretty amazing, I mean estimating some action that's happening a few feet underground… But over the years they learned it and they know if erupts every 80-90 minutes. The reason is that unlike other geysers, this one has its own "private" pool of hot water 🙂 .

Walking around the Old Faithful

A few minutes after I arrived there was an eruption which was quite impressive so that was a cool welcome. I left for a ranger tour lead by Jim in "Geyser Hill". There are tens of geysers over there, each one with its own prediction (but they're not as accurate). During the tour he explained about the history of the park and more specifically about that area and it took around 90 minutes which means that when we came back it was just in time to watch it once again!

Grand Prismatic

That's how the "Old Faithful" part ended, and from there I drove to "Midway Geyser Basin" which is home to another famous attraction of the park, the Grand Prismatic – a giant steam pool which makes it pretty tough to take a good picture since (stinky) steams keep coming at you, but the number of colors is just fascinating!

Besides that there are other blue pools where you can just see how the steams come out. The reason for all that is that the Earth wants to "ventilate", to cool itself so it needs to release some heat.

The way this is expressed depends on the surface – if there's solid ground with a small hole it will lead to a geyser. Otherwise if there's a pool, steams would just go out, no need to do it at once, and so on for the other features.

Here is a sample of couple of the places:

A National Geographic event

So after seeing these two icons I headed north when suddenly I see a ranger on the road. I decided to stop and check out what's going on – turns out that about 200 meters from the road there was a dead elk which was killed earlier that day. The wolf who killed it is waiting in the tress and now everybody's waiting for her to come out, really felt like National Geographic 🙂 .

I had my pair of binoculars and so, decided to stay for a while. The optimists were hoping for a Grizzly to come by… Anyway, after about an hour she finally came out! I could really see her struggling with the raw meat!! Was a bit hard to picture it but you can see something in the center of the image.

Among visitors there's this unspoken kind of hierarchy of the animal kingdom – at the top of course there's the Grizzly, which is what everyone wants to see and is quite rare. Below it there's the wolf, moose, different kind of deer and I guess the lowest would be the bison cause you can easily see them.

At some point I took a small road which turned to be a dead-end. I was driving behind another car when suddenly it stopped and I couldn't understand why… I turned my head and saw a bison crossing a river. It was something which I didn't see until this point. So, I'm about to start going again but turn my head to the other side and what do I see? Really close to me, a coyote! Looked kind of sick, but judge for yourselves.

I arrived at Lake Hotel (the northern bed in the map) and went to have dinner at the hotel's restaurant which is literally on the lake. At 8pm when there's still plenty of light I went for a short walk and met some guy who turned out to be a staff member, he was working as the cook during summers.

The next day was going to be my last day at the park. I didn't have any plans, just absorb more of this beauty as much as possible. Just before I left I saw a family of deer crossing the road…

To sum it all up I think that was the best trip I ever had. Everything just worked out perfectly – the weather, the views, the car, and wildlife, which I have seen: black bear, moose, deer, elk, wolf, coyote, and bison. Although it might be a bit of a burden to get there I highly recommend it!!