Sonya's Blog Day 5 - Yellowstone

We decided to get out even earlier today and leave Kizmet behind in the RV so that we could do some of the hikes we missed. We headed straight for Old Faithful, but stopped at the Fountain Paint Pots first since we could actually get in the parking lot. I loved the Fountain Paint Pots, so cool. There is boardwalk that travels around them - maybe a mile long. We lucked out and came around the backside right when the Fountain Geyser decided it was time to erupt, and a magnificent eruption in was. There are two kinds of geysers, Cone Geysers - an example being Old Faithful and Fountain Geysers - like fountain geyser. Fountain Geysers are more open pools that we spew water in the air and greater volumes tend to be thrown up at once. Whereas with a cone geyser it has to be funneled through a smaller opening so there is more force and they tend to go higher. There was also Spasm Geyser, Twig Geyser and many others. It was a cool little walk around.

Pool at the Paint Pots:

Off we went to Old Faithful - saw Old Faithful erupt again.

It really is very cool and I can see why it is so popular - 3 million visitors per year! Isaac also got to take in Ranger demonstration on Animals which he was most pleased with because he was completing his Junior Ranger booklet. We saw a short show about Yellowstone and they had some cool footage at the end of people or vehicles getting too close to animals. They had Elk butting cars and a bison taking out a whole family that was trying to get a picture. Luckily no one was hurt, but the one lady got rolled a few times by the big guy. I thought the big Bull Elk taking on the cars was pretty cool, they really made there mark. We then hiked around Old Faithful after the eruption and saw some of the other geyser pools, the other geysers are not as predictable. The one geyser can go off anywhere from every 10 months to 5 years! We were not going to wait around. Even though they were not spewing their liquids into the sky, the still look pretty awesome and amazing - plus that sulphuric smell is hard to pass up:)

We then headed back towards our campground, but first stopped at the Midway Geysers - very cool as well. Some really impressive pools and one geyser that went of in the 1880’s and then to again until the 1980’s, but went on for 48 hours or something. We didn’t wait around for that one to erupt either! This pic is my favourite, because of the colours. The orange and brown are actually bacteria called thermophiles (which means heat lovers). Plus Blake loves the Panorama feature on my phone so I will showcase his photo here:

PANORAMIC PICTURE AT THE MIDWAY GEYSERS:

We decided that we wanted to take a dip in the Firehole swimming hole. It was very hot by this time +30 again and it was super busy at the swimming hole, found it tough to find parking with Sterling (the truck!). We had to loop around twice before we could park and get to the swimming. There were people cliff jumping (this is strictly forbidden!) by the time we got there so it was kind of crazy. The water was quite warm, but after walking around the geysers all morning I know why. The one pool dumps 4000 gallons of water into the Firehole river every minute - water that is around 93 degrees C. That was just one, the other one by the Midway geysers dumped 500 gallons per minute. With hundreds of geysers dumping extremely hot water into he river it is bound to be warmer. We swam up some small rapids and then body surfed down and avoided the cliff jumpers. It was a nice swim break.

After that we had to head back to the RV as Kizmet had been left long enough and we were all hungry. Isaac made us BLT’s, which he was going to make for supper the night before, but it got too late on the road so we had picked something up. They were very tasty and he did a good job. Tasha and I sat around and read our books and the boys headed out to play mini-golf. We were supposed to go horseback riding, Natasha’s choice, but a storm blew in and changed our plans instead. We decided to just have supper, watched the movie RV (we have a lot to look forward to if there is any accuracy to that show) and then called it a night. Now it is super late and I can barely keep my eyes open so I am going to call it quits. We hit the road again tomorrow, we are heading for Buffalo, WY.

Later, Sonya