Our Vacation: Scenes and Stories from Yellowstone

It turned out that the road we planned on taking into Yellowstone’s Northeast entrance was washed out from a flooding river, so we actually spent the first day we planned on being in Yellowstone driving all the way to Cody, WY and coming in the east entrance.  By the time we left Yellowstone we actually experienced every single entrance to the park except for the west entrance!  Crazy!  It was frustrating to have to spend our whole day driving to a different entrance, BUT we did get to see some amazing scenery, truly amazing, on the way.  I think we would have appreciated it more if we didn’t have a grouchy Squirmy in the car with us.  There was prolific squabbling all day from the back of the van as well.  But, the scenery really was amazing.  We ended up driving into the park in the late evening, and straight through to just outside the south entrance, where our cabin was located.  Then we crashed and slept well, preparing for a monstrously exciting day of sight seeing, which involved cram packing two days of geothermal features into one day.

On our big Yellowstone day, we started out at Old Faithful, partly because it made the most sense geographically, and also because we knew that the kidlets were going to pester us constantly with the question, “WHEN are we going to see geysers explode?”  I’ve mentioned before that Mr. SP had pretty much memorized the Yellowstone guide book.  Often on vacation he would start quoting paragraphs verbatim, chalk full of all sorts of long vocabulary words.  It was so endearing.  I just wanted to scoop him up.  He had a long list of “must see” geothermal features.  Old Faithful was one, of course, and we actually got to see it erupt twice.  The kidlets LOVED it.  In the distance behind Old Faithful the Beehive Geyser also exploded for a very, very long time, and off in another direction we saw the castle geyser spew from a distance.

Old Faithful was crowded, and exploring the visitor center to learn more about geysers and after a bit of lunch, we walked around on the boardwalks, which was a bit hair raising for me.  All the boardwalks next to any geyser in the park were a bit hair raising for me, because it’s hard to navigate four young children on a narrow boardwalk, especially through crowds and crowds of people.  I wanted to take a nap.  Seriously. It was so exhausting and I was so worked up, constantly telling my little people to move over to the edge, but not to fall off the edge.   But the kidlets LOVED walking around all the hot, seeping pools and geysers and colorful bacteria mats.

After our geyser walk, we headed into the Old Faithful Inn, which is something I really, really enjoyed, much more than I had anticipated.  I found a comfy old couch on the second floor balcony, and ended up feeding Squirmy a bottle there, watching all the people and gazing at the interesting architecture.  I loved all the National Park Lodges in Glacier too, when we visited that park with toddler YaYa.  The history of the Old Faithful Inn was so intriguing to me that I ended up buying a book about it in the gift shop, and I’ve really been enjoying reading snippets out of it when I have a chance.

While I was feeding Squirmy, the other kidlets and Dr. Peds explored the lobby and hotel and got some ice cream to share.  Then we packed them into the van and headed off to other places in the park.  Some of them napped a bit while we drove north and over to the canyon area, a place the Dr. Peds had not been before, and my very favorite part of Yellowstone, because I do love a good waterfall, of course.

We threw some sandwiches at the kidlets and had a great time exploring another terrific visitor center.  By the time we were done with that, it was evening, and we headed to do some hiking at the waterfalls.  Of course, at this point several kidlets were pretty grouchy about the prospect of hiking, but we pressed on to the precipice of the upper falls (an easy hike) to the precipice of the lower falls (a not so easy hike) and then to several easy overlooks on the rim of the canyon.  There were fewer and fewer people all the time, and the sinking sun was giving off the most magnificent light!  It was worth being there at a time that many kidlets were grouching.  By the time we got to Artist’s Point, an amazing overlook, there were only a few families still out and the sun was just sinking behind the canyon.  I really wanted to go down Uncle Tom’s trail, the route that takes 328 steep steps down the side of the cliff next to the waterfall, partly because Dr. Peds hadn’t been there and thought it looked awesome, and partly because my Dad was pretty amazing the first time I ever went to Yellowstone, and carried the three year old version of me back UP all those steps.  A trip to Yellowstone just isn’t a trip to Yellowstone without going up and down those 328 steps.

But it was LATE!  Way past everyone’s bedtime and getting dark.  We decided not to attempt it for the sake of harmony, and then at the last minute, after I needed to stop at the trailhead to use the restroom, we decided we WOULD do it.  And it really didn’t take too much convincing to get the three big kidlets on board.  In fact, they had tremendously great attitudes and trooped right up and down those steps like it was nothing.  We met three people coming up the trail as we were going down, but everyone else had long before left, and by the time we got to the bottom, we were actually all alone, next to an enormous waterfall shimmering in the very last drops of daylight.  It was incredible.

I took a lot of pictures of the waterfall because the light was so amazing, but I will mostly spare you and only post a few.

It was really fun for both Dr. Peds and I to recall our previous family vacations to Yellowstone when we were kids.  Dr. Peds was there when he was 10 or 11, and I was there when I was three and when I was 11.  I have vivid memories from both trips, but especially from the time when I was three.  Yellowstone was such a spectacular event in my little life, and many of my first long ago memories are from my Yellowstone trip.  As we experienced the features of the park again, I could remember all sorts of details from when I was three.  They weren’t just details from looking at pictures either, they were memories with feelings and conversations and all sorts of things.  I knew they were from when I was three and not 11, too, because some of them were from places we simply just didn’t go when I was 11.  Some of my most vivid memories were of me sitting on rocks in various places so that my mom could take a picture of me.  I knew exactly where the rocks were when we passed by them in several different places, and I could so vividly remember sitting there in my red cardigan sweater AND being completely terrified that I was going to fall over the edge into a canyon or down a mountain.  I’d often grab YaYa and make her sit on various special rocks I could remember to take her picture.  She’d just giggle at me.  She, of course, wasn’t terrified at all.  This is one place, but it it isn’t a good example of one of the places that I was worried about falling off.

All day long YaYa and Mr. SP had been persistently asking if we were going to the mud volcanos next.  It nearly drove me crazy, and I knew that the mud volcanos were on our way back to the cabin, but I didn’t know if we would get to them before dark.  Everyone fell asleep in the car when we left the waterfalls, but we stopped at the mud volcanos in the dark anyway.  We were, of course the only people there, which is the best way to do any geothermal sight with a boardwalk.  Dr. Peds had very vivid memories of the mud volcanos from his childhood Yellowstone visit.  In fact, he hated them.  They smelled so terrible of “hydrogen sulfide” (as Mr. SP correctly referred to the prevalent rotten egg smell of Yellowstone) that they made him sick when he was a boy.  It was traumatic, but he bravely offered to take YaYa and Mr. SP along the boardwalk in the dark with a flashlight anyway.  He’s a good dad.  We shined the bright car lights in the direction of the oozing mud pits, and off they went.  I stayed with The Banana, who didn’t want to venture out after the stories of her daddy nearly passing out.  She was sleepy anyway, and Squirmy was dead out in his car seat.  While the big kidlets were enjoying the plopping and gurgling sounds, I decided to get out and take a picture with my camera.  It was really, really dark, nearly completely black at this point, but I put my camera on the ground and put into use some technical information I’d read about night time photography recently, and ended up with these 30 second exposures.  The orange light you see illuminating things are van’s headlights.  Fun stuff!

On our way out of Yellowstone, after we had visited the Grand Tetons, we stopped at a few places along the way we missed out on during our big sightseeing day, like the artist paint pots and the Grand Prismatic Spring, places that were really neat and that the kidlets really wanted to see.  However, they were quick, rushed stops because we were working on keeping Squirmy reasonably happy for the upcoming enormously long ride back to North Dakota that day, and I didn’t take many pictures.  In fact, in general, I didn’t take many pictures in Yellowstone.  This was in part because each place we stopped involved a lot of crowd control for my crew, and also because at most of the places, other than the canyon, there were just a lot of people, who were all taking pictures of everything, and it isn’t exciting for me to take pictures of something everyone else is taking a picture of because I can’t be creative about it.  So I bought postcards instead!  And that was just fine!