DAY 20 – Jackson to Canyon Village, Yellowstone (116 miles driven, 5.64 miles walked)
There were only two things that I thought I knew about about Yellowstone park. Firstly the geyser (prouounced guyzer or geezer?) Old Faithful and secondly that it is a massive volcano that’s overdue a blow*. I’m was hoping to experience the first but not the second!
The drive from Jackson to Canyon Village, Yellowstone where we are stopping for the next two nights is probably the most attractive of any we have done on this tour. It was completly within two National Parks – firstly Grand Teton followed immediately by Yellowstone.
Given that the two parks abut each other it is not surprising that they are similar in that there are a lot of pine forests. However, they are so very different in other ways. Grand Teton is bounded by the beautiful Teton mountain range sweeping up one side of the park and appears to be pretty benign. Yellowstone on the other hand appears anything but. Around every corner there will be plunes of steam arising from the ground. It looks and feels very active.
We had plotted a route that took us to the Old Faithful geyser (fun fact! 60% of the worlds geyers are in Yellowstone) as we knew that we would see it erupting as it blows roughly once every 90 minutes. We arrived just after it had finished so walked around a boardwalk that takes you through some other hot springs and geyers. One, the Beehive, erupts once every 5-10 hours and it just happened to do so while we were waiting for Old Faithful so we got to see two go. Beehive is more powerful than Old Faithful and you could hear the noise of the water erupting like a bass drum even from a distance.
We sat with hundreds of other people waiting for Old Faithful to blow. It was pretty busy and this is the end of the season so I hate to think what it must be like in the summer. I overheard a woman next to me exclaim “I’ve never been this far from civilisation” which seemed pretty ironic given the number of people there.
Then just a few minutes after the predicted time off she went and a couple of minutes later it was all over.
We travelled on from Old Faithful and stopped off at the Middle Geyser Basin which has the Grand Prismatic Spring. Old Faithful may be the best known but the Grand Prismatic Spring is apparently the most photographed place and you can see why. The hot pool is shown in the header above and the colours are dazzling.
Our final stop was the Gibbon falls which on any other day would have been pretty spectacular but today were very much eclipsed by the geyers and hot springs.
*Yellowstone is not overdue for an eruption.