Yellowstone

On Monday we arrived at Yellowstone National Park.We were going to stay in West Yellowstone for the first half of the week, then we were going to move to Northern Yellowstone on Thursday.  After unhitching the trailer we drove in to the park and went to a geyser basin called Artist’s Paintpots. It is called Artist’s Paintpots because it has a small fumarole (a small steaming spring.) That has mud in it, making it look like a bubbling paint pot. Then we went to another basin that had the worlds largest active geyser! It goes three hundred feet in the air, but it hasn’t gone of since 2014.

The next day we went to the Old Faithful Geyser Basin and saw Old Faithful, Castle Geyser, (which only goes off every 13 hours!) and Daisy Geyser. Then we walked around the geyser basin. We then went to Prismatic Spring, which is a spring that absorbs different colors in different parts, making it very colorful.

On Wednesday, after my dad finished work, we went on our big hike at Yellowstone. We went on a 7.2 mile hike to a beautiful waterfall called Fairy Falls. The waterfall was 197 feet tall, and was very whimsical. The hike also included an areal view of Prismatic Springs. And halfway through the hike there was a geyser called Imperial Geyser, that spouted water constantly. It was our longest hike yet!!

On Thursday we moved to Northern Yellowstone, after going out to a pizza place for lunch with our friends we met at the campground in West Yellowstone. We then moved to campground in northern Yellowstone called Yellowstone’s Edge. It is a very beautiful campground, and it backs up to the Yellowstone river.

Friday was spent hanging out at the RV park and in the afternoon, going to Chico hot spring.

On Saturday we went to a place in Yellowstone that we had heard about from some people we met in West Yellowstone. Apparently it was not advertised by the national park, because it is so cool and if too many people visited it, it would be ruined. It was a natural hot spring caused by a thermal spring coming out of the ground and going in to a cold river making a nice natural hot tub. It was really cool, because in some places if you put your arms out on one side it is so hot it hurts touch it and the other hand feels like you are sticking your hand in a freezing mountain spring. You have to find the place in the river that is just the right temperature! After the natural hot tub we went to a visitor center to get our junior ranger patch and we had to complete a challenging scavenger hunt. I always laugh when I look at me badge, because there is a type-o on it making it say “unior Ranger” which is in my opinion a step ahead or a regular park ranger. But I looked up unior in the dictionary and the closest word to unior meant “producing a single offspring at birth.” Then we went back to the campground and went to a Labor Day potluck that the campground was hosting. Yellowstone was definetly a very beautiful national park.

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