Day 3 - YellowStone National Park

Today was Yellowstone day. Yellowstone resides over a super-volcano, which has been dormant for the last 640000 years. So, almost the entire park is a caldera – the mouth of a volcano. It is the oldest national park is the world, established in 1872 – one of the most geothermally active areas in the world. Since, we were staying in Gardiner, Montana we started our day with the Mammoth Hot Springs – an entire mountain which is a geothermal area:


Most of Yellowstone is full of geysers and hot springs – as expected since the lava (molten rock) is very close to the earth’s surface. This capture of the Norris Geyser Basin gives a good idea about Yellowstone:


Yellowstone also has a variety of wildlife – bison, elf, moose, coyote, mule dear, bear etc. We were lucky enough to see a bison and a coyote from very close range – This is on the way to Old Faithful.



The roads inside Yellowstone spans almost 200 miles, the area in itself is gigantic – almost 2000 square miles. By lunchtime, we were close to Old Faithful. Old Faithful is one of the highest geysers in the world erupting after every 92 minutes for almost 2-5 minutes. We had some time so we had lunch in the Old Faithful restaurant before we were able to capture this:

After Old Faithful our trip was the drive along Yellowstone Lake – most of the roads were under construction – so the ride was pretty bumpy, but it was worth it. The scenic beauty was amazing:


One of the Park rangers tipped us to visit the northeastern part of Yellowstone to see bears. But we were not lucky enough to site one, but instead of a bear we saw a moose from very close range.

After covering the entire park we called it a day and returned to hotel quite early. We grabbed our dinner from a 45-year-old hamburger stand in Gardiner – I liked the town, it was almost like a hill-station. Tomorrow, it’s Utah.