July 15 Day 15

Our plan for today is to spend time in the northern loop of Yellowstone.

Before hitting the northern loop, we realized that yesterday while investigating the southern loop, we missed what is supposed to be one of the most spectacular springs in Yellowstone, the Grand Prismatic Spring. So we started today off by backtracking a little bit.

The Grand Prismatic Spring is located in the middle geyser basin. As you traverse the middle geyser basin, you first come to this large spring. Hard to see in the photo, but the water is boiling and bubbling, and the water color is a brilliant turquoise. Also, the smoke has an awful rotten egg smell. Due to the wind direction today, we got to walk through the smoke, which left that smell on our clothes for the entire day, yuck.

As you approach the Grand Prismatic Spring you can see that the smoke coming off the spring is actually varied in color. The smoke toward the left is blue, while toward the right, it is yellow and brown.

Here you get an idea of the brilliant color variations in this spring. The spring is indeed "grand", as it is about 200 feet across.

They really need a place in the park where you can get a better overhead shot of this spring. It has been often photographed from the sky, and below is an example. Pretty unworldly looking.

One more smaller spring in this area. It's pretty, but pales in comparison to the Grand Prismatic Spring.

As we made our way northward in the park, we passed this fellow strolling along the road. I always have a hard time telling a coyote from a wolf, but my understanding is that this is a coyote because he is carrying his tail so low.

Below is a photo of the Lower Yellowstone Falls. These falls are 308 feet tall, almost twice that of Niagara, however they are obviously much narrower than Niagara. These falls plunge down into a valley called the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone.

Here is a shot of the canyon, which is roughly 1000 feet deep. If you look way up at the top of the picture, you can barely see the lower falls.

Thought this was amusing. Notice the sign says glacial boulder? Just looks like a big a$$ rock to me. I guess since it sits in the middle of a forest with no other rocks around, the reasoning is that it was deposited here by glacial action?

As I mentioned before, the park has some real contrast in scenery and landscape. The northern area is very mountainous as you can see in the couple of shots below.

We ended the day with a stop at Mammoth Hot Springs. The flow from the main spring looks like snow on the ground.

There was a driving loop around the upper spring as well. The sign at the entrance indicated no buses or RV's allowed. Wish it would have said no motorcycles too, as the road was pretty much a cow path. It was very narrow, so once in, your committed.

In the town of Mammoth Hot Springs, we stopped for some huckleberry ice cream. The town center has a little grassy area, and we found these guys out grazing and sunning themselves. They don't seem to care about the people or the cars.

We headed out of Mammoth Hot Springs via the northern park entrance. This took us into Gardiner Montana, and our hotel for the night.

Tomorrow, we will head across the Lamar Valley portion of Yellowstone, then on to Cody Wyoming.

Our stats for today indicate that we covered 116 miles, bringing our trip total to 4305 miles. Below is a map of our route from today.