Yellowstone–Part 2

Our second day at Yellowstone started at the Norris Geyser Basin.  And some of these geysers didn’t smell so great…like the steamboat geyser.We broke into two groups for this hike too…some of us taking the longer route, some the shorter.  Here’s the longer route group.I just loved the name of this geyser – “puff n’ stuff.”  And had Karina come with us she really wouldn’t have like the way it smelled.Here’s some of the scenery…this was on the other side of the walkway from the puff n’ stuff geyser.This is the Green Dragon Spring… it was so colorful.This is the Blue Mud Steam Vent.  It’s kind of fun to watch mud bubble.And some pretty run off…This name also had us laughing… the Fearless Geyser… as if geysers had something to be afraid of.The group on the shorter walk finished before us (you are surprised right?) and so they left us a note to where they headed next.  We never did catch up to them, but that’s ok we saw each other at the end of the day and everyone had a good time, so that’s what counts.  We headed west over to Canyon Village and guess what…on our drive we saw another buffalo.  It was laying down and there were a bunch of other cars already stopped, so we just carried on.  At the parking lot for the Upper and Lower Falls we ran into Jessie and Grandma’s group just leaving.  And when we started on the trail there was another buffalo napping in the trees – cool!We had heard about Uncle Tom’s trail from one of Becca’s YW leaders and were dying to try out the trail, I mean stairs….Here’s our first glimpse of the Lower Falls.  It was so beautiful!And here are those stairs…Going down them was the easy part, as long as you stopped on a step to take your pictures.  Here’s us at the bottom.  The water was so green coming over the top of the falls.The thing I love about hiking is that coming back along the same trail looks so different than going that each way is a new experience.  Some cool tree roots on the way back up.Conrad and I took it nice and easy on the way up.  It wasn’t hard work, but continuous.  We did count the stairs and there were over 100.  It just made me glad there were stairs and I wasn’t on ropes and pulleys like they used to do.  The view was so beautiful I’d definitely do it again.  When we got back to the top the buffalo woke up and started wondering.  The kids loved this!!!  We had to keep an eye on Spencer so he didn’t get to close.That poor buffalo had quite the itch he was trying to cure…like Baloo in Jungle Book.  He rubbed and rubbed his head on this tree until he snapped it right in half.The day was almost over so we skipped the next trail and just saw the Upper Falls from the look out point.Neil, Abbie and Spencer had a grand time balancing on the logs along the edge of the trail.And when we got back to the car….we found it had been decorated!!

Our very last stop of the day was the Artist Paintpots.  And I think this was about my favorite… or maybe it was the lighting…getting there are just the perfect time of day.  Here’s Mark hiding from the camera behind Conrad.We saw this cute little chipmunk just chowing on this little seed.  Do you love the piece of shell flying through the air?We were snacking on string cheese, but Neil decided that some rocks looked good too, so he tried them.  He was surprised they didn’t taste good and desperately tried to get them back out of his mouth.These tree trunks are white from sucking up some of the minerals from the geysers.  Don’t they look neat?

This is the view from above as the trail starts to circle the around to the other side.More boiling mud, only this mud was white.  Abbie, Uncle Mark, Mark and I snuck under a roped off part of the trail (don’t tell) so we could see it, because we weren’t quite tall enough to see over the piles of rocks.  It had a sign that said Caution: HOT MUD, and you could see that mud had in fact been splattered across the bridge, but the mud wasn’t all that intense while we were there.And we got to see one more animal!Isn’t this beautiful!It was a great day.  Uncle Mark put up with our silly music selections and we got to listen to some of his favorite classical pieces, which we enjoyed too.  Especially as he told about why he like them and what cool “moves” were in them.We made it back to the cabin after dark, ate as many Porcupine Meatballs as our tummies could hold and headed for bed.  And the great thing is that there’s still so much of Yellowstone that we didn’t see that it’ll be fun to go back.