Yellowstone National Park Tour Day 1

We just returned from a great trip to Yellowstone National Park over Memorial day weekend. We decided to take the camper to Buffalo Bill State Park and leave it there for our base camp. We ended up driving around the park for 2 different days. On the morning of Day 1, we got up at 5 AM and headed up the road to Yellowstone. North Fork Campground is about 40 miles from the East Entrance of the park. Traveling early in the morning is the best way to see wildlife and avoid traffic. It seems like traffic in the park usually starts picking up around 10 AM and gets progressively more busy in the afternoon. We saw lots of cool wildlife on the way up to Sylvan Pass including deer, elk, moose, and bighorn sheep. On the other side of Sylvan Pass, we started seeing buffalo and spotted our first bear.

We skirted around Yellowstone Lake to the West Thumb Geyser Basin. There is a really neat boardwalk here that takes you around various geysers and springs right next to the lake. We also saw many cow elk hanging out in this area. They didn't seem to mind the people too much. There were also tour buses coming to this area pretty regular so this is a pretty popular spot.

We then went over the mountains to see Old Faithful. We spent a lot more time there than I had anticipated because there is so much to see there! When we arrived, the next eruption wasn't going to happen for another 40 minutes so we decided to hike up to lookout point above Old Faithful and watch it erupt from the hills above. There was a short hike, maybe half a mile, to the lookout point. It was really neat watching the eruption from up there as there were only a few other people that did the hike. After the eruption, we hiked down to Solitary Geyser. It really was Solitary, we were the only people there. It was so peaceful there and as we were leaving, it started erupting. The eruption was about 4' high.  We then walked around the boardwalk taking in other various geysers and springs and made our way back to see Old Faithful erupt again from up close. We also checked out Old Faithful Inn later that day and watched our third eruption from the 2nd floor. It was super cool to see the eruption from 3 different angles. Side note: if you enjoy a good espresso, there is a nice coffee shop on 2nd floor of the inn that serves delicious coffee!

We then wanted to see Grand Prismatic Spring. It's only about 6 miles from Old Faithful. By this time of the day, traffic was starting to really pick up. It was probably around 2 PM. I don't know the exact time, after all we were on vacation. There was a huge line of cars and tour buses trying to get to the parking lot for Grand Prismatic. We ended up parking on the road and hiking down to the springs. There was a ton of steam coming off of the springs so we couldn't get a great look at Grand Prismatic because of the cooler weather. I think it would be fun to see this in heat of summer from up above. Walking through all the steam was pretty neat however and added to the experience.

On the way back down to our camper we spotted 2 more grizzly bears on the side of a mountain. The kids (and us) were pretty tired after day 1 so we slept very well that night!