Yellowstone: Mammoth Hot Springs

If you are following along and missed my first 2 posts about Yellowstone, you can find them here: Yellowstone: Geysers and Hot Springs and Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone.

After our stay in West Yellowstone, we moved up to the little town of Gardiner, Montana which is at the north entrance to Yellowstone.  Yellowstone is a huge park and it seemed to work out best for us to move to different sections of the park rather than driving for several hours each day.

My parents were still with us for the first couple of days in Gardiner.  We stayed at Rocky Mountain RV Park.  They had a cute little mini golf course that the kids enjoyed playing with Gramma and Grampa.

Gardiner was a really cute town just like West Yellowstone.  We enjoyed walking around town, checking out souvenir shops and eating great pizza.

The Roosevelt Arch was cool.

Also the beautiful Yellowstone River runs through town.

Gardiner is very close to the Mammoth Hot Springs section of Yellowstone.  We enjoyed visiting there with Mom and Dad.  We walked through the lower and upper terraces.  These terraces are so interesting and unique.  It’s hard to see in the picture, but there is hot water running down this terrace.  It’s amazing to see this and wonder how these steps/terraces were formed.  It was so pretty!

This section looked like snow!  But it wasn’t snow; it actually had very hot water running down it.

My cute parents enjoying their last day at Yellowstone.  We had so much fun with them visiting with us!  I sure wish they would sell their house and join us on the road. 🙂

I can’t even explain how amazing this place is.  You just have to see it for yourself.  I mean here we are in the middle of all these mountains, and smack in the middle of it all is this small section of hot springs creating the most unusual landscape.

No, that is not snow.  It sure looks like it, but it’s actually very hot!

During the week after Mom and Dad left we visited the Boiling River. That was really fun!  You can sit in this river where the water is cold and hot at the same time.  Boiling water from the hot springs flows down into the cold Yellowstone River.  It felt really weird.  Sometimes I would feel a rush of cold river water and the next steaming hot spring water.  You had to be careful not to get too close to the hot spring water because it really was boiling.

Another evening we drove down to Lamar Valley to try to see some wildlife.  We were surprised that so far we haven’t seen very much wildlife around Yellowstone besides lots of elk.  We heard Lamar Valley would be the place to see some bison and that was the truth!  They were everywhere, even in the road!  I was so excited to be first in line at this bison traffic stop.  What a show!

The boys earned their Junior Ranger badges at the Mammoth Hot Springs Visitor Center.  This is their 20th national park badge!

On our last day in the Gardiner area we hiked up Mt. Washburn, but I will save that for another post as this one has gotten too long.