The Yellowstone Trip: Three Years in the Making (Part Three)

This is the third installment in a five-part series about our troop’s trip to Yellowstone in 2019.   Here are the first two posts:  Part One and Part Two.

Day Three was THE DAY OF GEYSERS and more!  Since our trip was cut short a day due to a bird accident, we had to cram in as much as possible which meant getting up at 6am to get moving.  This made for some long days, but how many times do you get to go to Yellowstone in your life?  And there’s so much to see!  Another benefit of getting up so early is that you’ll beat the crowds, especially the ones who are staying outside of the park.  It takes a while to drive in to the sights, and you risk getting caught in buffalo traffic.  And it’s not like there’s an OPEN sign that you have to wait on, so we got going as soon as we could.

So up we got, ate breakfast in the rooms, and headed first to Biscuit Basin and quickly caught a few geysers and hot springs, including the famous Sapphire Pool, which had a lot of steam coming off of it due to how crisp it was.

Next, we visited the Midway Geyser Basin before the crowds arrived.  It’s the home of the famous Grand Prismatic Spring, the largest hot spring in the United States.  It also had a lot of steam coming off of it, so we didn’t get a great picture.  But the weather was perfect while we were there, so it’s hard to complain.

We then took a side road called Firehole Lake Drive that didn’t have a lot of traffic on it.  My 30-something year old book and the Gypsy Guide app told us about it, so why not?  We caught a few neat sights including White Dome Geyser, which I’ll get back to in a future post.

The area known as the Fountain Paint Pots was our next stop!  Which featured… the Fountain Paint Pots!   Imagine that.  GLOOP!

The Fountain Paint Pots also has a geyser section.  I’m obviously not going to go through every geyser we saw on our trip, because there’s no telling how many we saw.  I’m just throwing in the the more notable ones.  I caught Clepsydra going off!

Next, we stopped at a picnic area around the Nez Perce creek.  We were starving!  Luckily, there were bathrooms (latrines) there because there are very few places to go and the crowds started coming in.  We were still staying ahead of them though, and our timing was great!

We then turned around and headed back south and dipped our feet in the Firehole swim area near the Firehole Canyon with its 800-feet black walls formed by lava flows:

We continued back toward the Old Faithful area and took a brief rest in our cabins before grabbing dinner (and huckleberry ice cream) in the complex.   Look at the inside of the Old Faithful Inn!

Earlier that day, I was checking out the map of the Upper Geyser Basin (home of Old Faithful), and one geyser’s name jumped out at me:

DAISY GEYSER

I pointed to the map and said, “Cheryl, whatever we do, we have to get our picture taken in front of Daisy Geyser.  I insist.”  Cheryl said that’s fine.  I added, “And the Morning Glory Pool.”  She said okay.

So after dinner, I said “Okay y’all, we’re headed to Daisy Geyser and Morning Glory Pool.  We can walk to it.”   The girls groaned.  “I said we can do this!  We have to!”  Then I looked at the map and saw how far it was.  It was 2.8 miles.  One way.  I told myself we have to do this.  We didn’t have a lot of time before the sun started to set, so we had to get going quickly.

The Upper Geyser Basin is HUGE!  I’m just going to cover our highlights, but it is home to many famous geysers and pools.  We finally made it to Daisy Geyser, and of course we had to do a group shot of our troop.  J-Low would be proud:

And then, we saw a geyser explode just up the way!  We took off running to try to catch it at its height.   By the time we got to Grotto Geyser, it had already died down some, much like I had after running all that way.  After watching the video I took of it (with my heavy breathing in the background), I’m not sure why I recorded it.  But you can see it here plus hear how out of shape I was.

We kept going and reached the end of the paved path which leads you to the Morning Glory Pool.  Now when I visited Yellowstone in 1987 with Troop 20, I was absolutely blown away by it, and it was the one thing I wanted to see more than anything when we returned.  So I ran up in anticipation of it, looked, and thought, what happened??  The Morning Glory I remembered when I was 13 didn’t look the same.  Unfortunately due to humans (yep, surprise!), Morning Glory is starting to lose its vibrant color.  I looked it up online, and turns out it was originally all blue!  But it’s still gorgeous:

We turned around to make the trek back and took the boardwalk to see the multitude of geysers (there’s a LOT!).   We saw a marmot from afar (at least I think that’s what we saw) and plenty of sights on our way back to the cabins.  Here’s a shot looking back toward the sunset:

I came upon two of our girls giggling who said, “Mrs. Amy, you have to see the toilet geyser!”  I asked what they meant, and they explained that there’s a geyser that erupts every few minutes and flushes like a toilet.  I’m never too old for toilet humor, so I told them they had to take me back to see it.  And here it is.  By the way, its real name is Anemone Geyser, not Toilet Geyser.

Keep in mind we were so tired by that point we were giddy.  Cheryl totaled up the miles based on her FitBit (at least I think it was her and I think she had one), and we had walked 11 miles that day.  That’s my laugh you hear and some random boy who says, “It didn’t take the buffalo poop!”  That phrase became a running joke for the rest of the trip.  There wasn’t really any buffalo poop, in case you were wondering.  We got back to our cabins just in time after losing the last light of the day:

I think this was my favorite day even though we were slap worn out by the end of it.  Stay tuned for Part Four of our Yellowstone trek where we almost witnessed something very scary!