Yellowstone: Day 3

The next day we woke up early to see the geysers.  As we drove south the horizon was filled with steam coming up from all of the geysers.  It was worth getting up early, it was only 50 degrees that morning so it made the steam even more impressive.  We stopped at the Lower Geyser Basin for a look around.

I think the kids were more impressed with these geysers than Old Faithful, just because they were closer and  erupted a couple of times for us.

We got to Old Faithful and waited for her to erupt.  Mackenzie had to go to a ranger talk for her badge, the children's one was right when Old Faithful was set to go off.  We still went and listened to the Ranger give lots of interesting facts.  Logan just ran around like crazy.

Old Faithful started spurting up water.  They time the eruption at the ranger station to help predict when it will go off again, they begin timing when the water is about 4 feet high and don't stop until the water has completely stopped.  Old Faithful went off for 3 and a half minutes and wasn't due again for almost 3 hours.

After we got out of there, and Mackenzie earned her junior ranger badge, we took a side road call the Firehole Lake Drive.  It goes past the Great Fountain Geyser which is actually bigger than Old Faithful but rarely erupts. (I didn't get a picture of it)

This is Firehole Lake, very hot, would not want to go swimming in that!

Lunch by Firehole River.  After Old Faithful erupts the water feeds into Firehole river making it much warmer than the other rivers.

The night before, while helping Mackenzie with her ranger work, we read about the colors of the springs.  We had only seen brown and white but her book mentioned blue, green, yellow.  I thought we must have missed that so we decided to drive back up to Mammoth Hot Springs to see the colors, surely a place called Mammoth Hot Springs would have lots of springs to see.  Lie!  All the springs there are inactive so they are without the color I was looking for.  The colorful springs are down by the geysers.  If we had to do it again we would spend the whole day down in that area.  Oh well.

Tired and grouchy children.