Yellowstone

When we thought about a title for this post, it was quite a challenge to find the right way to summarize our stay in Yellowstone so we decided to go for simple. We were lucky enough to be able to camp in the park for three nights and got a chance to really explore it. The different adjectives that cam to mind when we talked about the park were numerous: amazing, impressive, magical, diverse, ever-changing, rugged, unpredictable, alive and many others.

Geysers, mudpots, fumaroles and colorful pools

Yellowstone is the places on earth with the highest concentration of hydrothermal activity (now that sounded smart!). We could tell you more about the hows and whys thanks to all the great information we got from the National Park Services but we thought we would rather focus on our experience and let you read the information.

When you ride to the park, you see all these fumes raising to the sky, visible signs of all the underground activity going on. Our first stop was to meet with "Old Faithful", the most famous geyser in the world. Very predictable, it erupts every 90 minutes these days and sure enough it was on time. After attending his show, we hiked through multiple areas in the park where we saw these magical phenomenon to be seeing nowhere else: colorful pools due to the bacteria that develop in the acidic liquid, hot springs formed in terraces, bubbling mudspots. Our personal favorite was the Dragon's mouth spring: it is a dark cave that release dense white fumes while making a strong mean and scary sounds that you could imagine a dragon doing. Pretty crazy: we were expecting a dragon to come out of the cave any minute.

An incredible variety of landscape

Yellowstone is a pretty large park but it is still quite incredible to think about all the different landscapes that we got to see. Most of the park has the hydrothermal activities we just mentioned but there is so much more to it. Take our camping site: it was close to the huge Yellowstone lake that is bordered from a distance by beautiful snow caped mountains, such as the Grand Teton peeks south of the park. The lake is beautiful, deep blue and you can see a lot of pelicans on it. The water is pretty cold so forget about swimming in it.

As you travel towards the canyon in the park, you go through the beautiful and green Hayden Valley where wildlife is thriving. It is quite a challenge to keep your eyes on the road. Did I say canyon? Yes, Yellowstone also has a quite impressive canyon. It has these intense colors and as you hike trails going down the canyon, you get closer to powerful water falls and river that runs through it.

Not something we expected to see here. Finally, the north of the park is all mountains: you go up up in altitude and get to ride these twisties that we motorcycle rides love. What a blast!

A thriving wildlife

Wherever you go in Yellowstone, you are bound to meet the local wildlife. The most impressive ones are the big mammals you get to see everywhere: countless buffalos in the fields and even on the roads (pretty scary when you are on the bike and a buffalo is coming towards you on the other lane, happened a couple of times), elks, moose, grizzly bears, wolves, coyotes. We were lucky enough to see most of these guys, except the moose and wolf. The rivers and lakes are filled with rainbow and brown trouts and you can see pelicans hanging out: this is after all a world-class fishing area.

After three days in the park and despite our first not so positive impression, we are leaving our eyes still filled with the wonders we saw...and also our lungs filled with sulfur gas:)

The weather was really great with sun and warm temperature in the day, even if a little chilly at night. We were told it was still winter here about a week and a half ago so don't go too early. Not surprising then that we bumped twice into a hail storm. Thank God we missed the first one by a few minutes and the second was not that bad after all.