It was another early morning into the park. Unfortunately, it was cold and rainy. We headed south to all the major basins and tried to dodge the rain. Several times ineffectively. Luckily, Dad had purchased an umbrella and a few ponchos before going to the park. WeTook a short cut-off drive first to see Firehole Falls. (Go ahead, we sang the Fireball song all day substituting Firehole!)
The first stop was the Lower Basin.
Here we saw Jet Geyser and Spasm. We weren't quite as prepared for the damp, and we headed back to the car for a drive of Firehole Lake.
It seemed to be the theme of the day of just missing geysers going off right before we get there and only seeing them from a distance, the first being White Dome.
The rain had ceased for our stop at Midway Basin. We walked up the hill to the Excelsior Geyser Crater and Grand Prismatic, however it was so cold and steamy that it was almost invisible, our view was extremely obscured. What was cool, the colors were reflected into the steam.
Next we headed into Biscuit Basin where we saw Sapphire pool and Jewel Geyser.
Old Faithful had just gone off when we arrived. So, we watched two videos and looked at the exhibits. Of course, it was rainy during our morning view of the 10:53 eruption. It was still glorious and amazing.
Since we had a light breakfast and there was still rain, we visited Old Faithful Inn. The coolest thing about this lobby was everything was made of lodge pole pine and it was open all the way to the 5 story Crow Nest. We waited about 30 minutes and then had lunch in the Dining room.
After lunch the sun appeared and we set off on the 2 mile Geyser Hill hike. Some of our favorites were the Lion Group, Sawmill, Beauty pool and Grotto. Again, we just missed Daisy but saw her from a distance.
But most amazing was Morning Glory pool where we pulled out our sketch pads and colored.
On the way back Grotto was erupting like crazy and we could see the Grand going off in the distance. Castle was a cool formation but it was not scheduled to go off until 8:00 that night. The boys played on tree trunk see saws while we waited. We waited around for Old Faithful in the sunshine one more time.
We continued along the South Loop to the Mud Volcano. It was a long drive and by the time we arrived, so had the rain. Here our favorite was Dragon Mouth's Spring. He growled, smelled, hissed and pushed waves of water out of his mouth.
We rushed through the rest of the boardwalk remembering that we finished the day as it began. On our drive back to Canyon we were stuck in traffic due to bison watching. Then at the Madison junction we had more traffic. We learned not leave the park at 7. However we caught one extra waterfall at the Virginia Cascade between Canyon and Norris.
We ended up back in West Yellowstone at 8:30 and Kendrick was falling asleep over his plate of Bison nachos. 13 hours in the park and 8 walking miles later we were done.
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