On the Road. An incredible Northwest excursion. From our Seattle home we first ventured to Coeur d’Alene ID. We dined at Satay and enjoyed a good meal there. The next day, we rode bikes 15 miles out and back (30 miles RT) on the Trail of the Coeur d’Alenes. Lovely paved bike trail along the lake and then upstream along the river. Saw magpies, geese, ducks, and moose on our ride and pheasant and wild turkey while we drove through the area. Overnight in Missoula - enjoyed dinner at Plonk where our burrata salad was graced with balsamic pearls - a new dining experience.
On to Yellowstone. Neither of us has visited, before. My goodness, there’s so much to this park. The entirety of the park is about 40 miles by 45 miles. The Yellowstone caldera must be about 22 to 30 miles across. There are a variety of geothermal sites scattered widely throughout the caldera and beyond. And those features are diverse, from bubbling steam vents that bring up sulphur, silica, and other minerals from below ground and that build new travertine deposits, to bubbling mud pots, to low bubbling water on muddy ground surfaces, to holes in ground that vent steam, to roiling cauldrons of muddy water and colorful steaming and gurgling pools. Some of the sites are desolate, others are fringed with new grasses and other plants. Two days of these sites, as well as grasslands, mountain meadows, pine forests, the Yellowstone River Canyon and Yellowstone Falls, plus a herd of elk at Mammoth, a couple of herds of bison, in Lamar and Hayden valleys, and a family group of pronghorn … and this is before we venture to Yellowstone Lake and on to the Old Faithful Geyser area.
We stayed at Canyon, in a cabin that was a 20 minute walk to the North Rim.
We’ve walked and hiked. The boardwalks through the Travertine formations at Mammoth, Tower Falls overlook and down the trail nearly to the Yellowstone River, out though the forest and meadows towards Cascade Lake, and along the south rim of the canyon just below Yellowstone Falls from Artist Point to Lily Pad Lake.
More hikes the next day, on the way to the Old Faithful area. Boardwalks around Mud Volcano with its numerous and diverse features, and later to Natural Bridge, a mile in from Bridge Bay on Yellowstone Lake. All have been short hikes from just over a mile RT to 3-1/2 miles, but we covered about 16 miles.
All this in our first 48 hours, before our arrival at Old Faithful Inn. Just about 48 hours into our Yellowstone visit we see Old Faithful erupt. And we have three nights - two full days - in the OF area to explore the geyser basins and more. We stopped in at the Visitor Center. Two days earlier, a ranger at Mammoth insisted that it was unsafe to ride bikes anywhere in the Park and had my wife promise we would not. Here, a couple of rangers were entirely perplexed with that advice, so my wife is willing to give it a go.
Around the upper geyser basin area, we see Old Faithful erupt again, bike two miles out and two miles back through the upper geyser basin and tack on another 2 miles hoofing it along the boardwalks past more pools, geysers and springs. Are those bison foot prints out in the dirt and grasses beyond the boardwalks? One sad sight was the sign at Morning Glory Pool with the Fading Glory headline due to damage done by people throwing objects into the pool, clogging the vent, lowering the pool temperature which allows algae to thrive and is slowly turning the water from vivid aqua blue to a murkier greenish brown. We remember how pristine Croatia’s Plitvice Lakes NP was when we were there.
Continued in my first reply, below.