First day in Yellowstone National Park

I started the day at Yellowstone National Park by going to the Visitors Center and talking with a young lady park ranger who mapped out an itinerary for me for the day, while expressing her enthusiasm for all the great things I would be seeing. Unfortunately, I somehow misplaced the map she gave me so I stopped in to another Visitors Center (The park is so large that they have several Visitors Centers.) and asked a park ranger there if he could do for me what the young lady at the other Center had done. He was an older man who had obviously lost his enthusiasm for helping tourists. He just pointed to a map and said, "They built the road to follow the sights, so just follow the road and stop where you want to." At my request he finally identified a couple of "must sees" and gave me a park map; I must admit that his advice worked reasonably well, but he sure didn't leave me with the same feeling of enthusiasm that I got from the first lady! I think it still pays to ask, but sometimes it pays less, depending on whom you ask.


                                            hot spring at Yellowstone National Park


I then spent the rest of the day driving from site to site in Yellowstone. I started with a visit to "Old Faithful" ; it was impressive as advertised. It performed just a little later than scheduled after a few false starts, but was well worth the wait - a huge geyser rising perhaps a hundred feet or more into the air. This is the most impressive sight in the park but by no means the only one. The park is almost 100 miles long and perhaps 50 miles wide and contains bubbling streams and hot pools and lesser geysers, all with steam coming off of them. There are deep canyons with streams running through them. There are waterfalls and rapids, open grassland and heavy stands of pine and rocky cliffs. Along the way I stopped to see an elk on the other side of a wide creek , who just stood still for a long time to give everyone a chance to get a good look at him.

Towards the end of the day I came to the plains where the bison come every evening to rut. At first there was only one lone bison, who slowly moved up to the road and then crossed to the other side of the road and eventually disappeared across the field. He may just have been an old bison who had come to the wrong place by mistake and was now slowly working his way back to wherever he came from. Even bison don't escape the aging process! Further down the road, however, there was a whole herd of bison. I didn't see a whole lot of rutting going on, but there were a fair number of young bison sticking close to their mothers, so I guess there must have been some rutting going on somewhere. At one point most of the bison came up from the plain, crossed the road right in front of where I was stopped, and then disappeared into the woods.

By that time it was well after 8:00, and I was pretty tired from a lot of driving and also some long walks to look at particular sights, so I went back to my campsite for a light supper and then called it a day. It was warmer than the previous night, and I could have slept in the tent, but since it was so cold the night before I hadn't even bothered to set up the air mattress and the sleeping bag so I just went to sleep in the car again.