I spent my Labor Day Weekend driving a car from Albuquerque, NM, to Snohomish, WA. Google Maps suggested a route through Colorado, Utah, Idaho, and Washington to get home, but I noticed that Yellowstone National Park sat (atop a supervolcano) just a few hours detour west through Wyoming and Montana.
Then you get to stuff like this:
And the Tetons Mountains:
It's rather cool that two incredible national parks butt up to one another: Grand Teton and Yellowstone are neighbors!
When we got into Yellowstone, things flattened out and the wildlife starts to show up a bit. The whole day all I talked about was seeing a buffalo. Turns out that we don't have buffalo in North America. We have bison. I saw a bison. I lost it. He ate grass.
My buddy Brad spent a month-ish around Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks. I hit him up to ask if I was driving through, what's the one thing I should try to see. He said to see the coolest stuff, one needs to do some hiking. He told me to just be extra basic and go see Old Faithful. Done.
As we pulled into the giant parking lot, my road trip co-pilot, Ed, cautioned me that because of all the lore surrounding this American landmark, I ought to temper my expectations. Boy, was he ever spot on!
Old Faithful spouts off every 35-90-ish minutes. Heat and pressure build-up until water shoots up into the sky. The steam constantly pouring out is pretty ominous.
Suddenly, it starts shooting water up. First, a few feet of water pop up. Then, the main blast like someone really cranked the hose up at the spigot. Someone said to expect 100 feet in the air... yeah, at our viewing, Old Faithful couldn't get it up like that.
Still pretty cool.
Our time came to an end and having spent an hour looking around at steam rising from the ground we hit the road. I can't stress enough how we needed at least one afternoon to do some walking around let alone days for hiking even a trail of two at this simply massive park (2.2 million acres). I would totally be cool with spending all my time at Grand Teton National Park, too.
