Posts Tagged With: grand canyon of yellowstone

Yellowstone National Park

In my last post about Grand Teton National Park, I mentioned that it snowed the last day we were there. As we drove to Yellowstone the next day we noticed a lot more snow on the drive and saw that Yellowstone got even more snow than we did the day before. It’s amazing that this was June!

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Driving to Yellowstone from Grand Teton

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Amazing snow in June!

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Okay, so I guess I went overboard on taking pictures of the snow on our drive, but it was so beautiful, and after our winter in Breckenridge I just can’t get enough of snow.

Anyway, enough about that, let’s talk about Yellowstone. This is another park that we are repeating this year because it’s just so awesome and definitely worth repeating.

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Old Faithful

This time of the year it’s so nice that it stays light so late at night because we can easily go for a hike in the evenings after work. The night we went to Old Faithful we hiked the trail from there to see several other geysers.

One of my favorites is Artemesia Geyser. We saw this one erupting last time we were there, which was good timing since it doesn’t erupt as regularly as Old Faithful. We didn’t see it erupting this time, but it was still beautiful.

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Artemesia Geyser

Another favorite is Morning Glory. Even though the colors in this one are beautiful, sadly the colors are the result of visitors throwing items into the geyser. That’s just not a good thing to do.

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Morning Glory

The river walk was beautiful with little spots of steam coming up everywhere.

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I forget what this one was called, but it started erupting just as we walked by. That was pretty cool!

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Another view of Old Faithful erupting again as we finished up our hike.

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I couldn’t believe how many bison we saw this time. It was weird when we were there 3 years ago with my parents, we hardly saw any bison. This time they were everywhere! Several times blocking traffic.

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Another night we went to Grand Prismatic Spring, another one of my favorites. On the hike to the overlook we saw this aggressive bison. We know he was aggressive because we saw him chase 2 ladies that had just walked by. We stood back and waited until he was well off the path before we continued on.

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Grumpy bison

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Grand Prismatic Spring from the overlook

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Grand Prismatic Spring up close

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Hiking along the boardwalk next to Grand Prismatic Spring

A few more pictures from the Grand Prismatic area.

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Another evening we went to the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. This area is so beautiful and the hike along the canyon offers some amazing views.

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Artist Point

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I see that Jake is now taller than me 😉

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Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River

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Lower Falls

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I was disappointed to find that Uncle Tom’s trail that takes you down over 300 steps to get a closer view of Lower Falls was closed. That turned out to be a blessing though because we went around to the other side and went down a trail to see it from the other side. This is something we didn’t do last time so it was cool to see it from a different perspective.

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Top of Lower Falls

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Another view of the canyon

Lastly we went to see the Artist’s Paint Pots. This is something we did not get a chance to see last time.

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We stayed at the Yellowstone Grizzly RV Park in West Yellowstone, MT again. We love that park and the little town of West Yellowstone is so much fun. We also got to spend some time with 2 other Fulltime Families that were there.

Now that we’ve been to Yellowstone twice, would I go there again? Most definitely! This is one of those places I could visit over and over again.

Categories: Montana, National Parks, Wyoming | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 8 Comments

Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone

This is the second post of several about Yellowstone National Park.  If you missed the first one you can find it here: Yellowstone: Geysers and Hot Springs.

While visiting the Old Faithful and Canyon Village areas of Yellowstone we stayed at Yellowstone Grizzly RV Park in West Yellowstone, Montana.  This was a really nice RV park.  It was expensive, but so is everything else anywhere near Yellowstone.  We enjoyed relaxing outside with Mom and Dad after hiking in the park all day.

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The boys loved the playground.

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And we enjoyed this shelter one evening to play a game of Mexican Train dominoes.

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The town of West Yellowstone is super cute.  Everything is western themed.

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Jake even got into the western theme and bought himself a cowboy hat!

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We visited the Grizzly & Wolf Discovery Center where we saw several grizzlies actively playing.  The wolves were all asleep, and usually when we go to zoos the bears are usually sleeping too.  But at this place the bears were so active which made it lots of fun to watch them.

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Anyway let’s talk about the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River.  We parked at the Artist Point parking lot.  Artist Point is a beautiful viewpoint looking down the canyon toward Lower Falls.

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Artist Point

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After enjoying the view for a little while, we headed down the Rim Trail to get closer and better views of the falls.  This hike had some beautiful view points.

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We went down Uncle Tom’s Trail which is a staircase with 328 steps.  Going down is easy, coming back up — not so much!  But it’s worth it because going down gives you even closer views of the canyon and falls.

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After climbing back up the stairs we continued on down the Rim Trail a little further to see the Upper Falls.

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This was a really nice hike and not too crowded.  Most of the crowd only comes to see the viewpoint from the Artist Point parking lot.  Hiking the trail gives you many more beautiful views without the crowds.

 

Categories: Montana, National Parks, Wyoming | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

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