Our first stop in Yellowstone was Old Faithful. Old Faithful is of course a famous and popular destination inside the park; but we chose it for day one because it was literally on the way to our lodging and Wifey loves and opportunity to knock out a crowded and people-filled must-see so the rest of our trip could be a bit calmer!
Knowing that, the sheer infrastructure and traffic in the Old Faithful area was a shock. We exited, yes, exited the main road, took a loop-de-do and finally found ourselves at some reasonable parking near the Old Faithful Inn. Online research ahead of our trip recommended parking there instead of directly by the Old Faithful Visitors Center. Good advice.
After parking, our first action was to check the visitors center and find out when the next predicted eruption was.
We knew we wanted to watch Old Faithful erupt from Observation Point, but also that that would take some time to make the hike. As it happened, the next eruption was imminent so we followed the crowd a few steps away to the viewing seats.
After the eruption, we started off on our hike to Observation Point so we'd be ready for the next round. Old Faithful erupts approximately every 92 minutes, so we had plenty of time for the half mile hike. There was some material elevation change, but we'd packed our lunches and plenty of water for the adventure!
As most of our National Park experiences, we met fantastic people while we hiked and waited around and enjoyed eating and chatting it up! Eventually it was time and Old Faithful dazzled us again!
Having our fill of Old Faithful, we walked back down the mini-mountain and decided to meander a bit in the upper geyser basin area. While checking out another of the area geysers, we were blessed to strike up a conversation with a geyser gazer. He shared some interesting trivia about the geysers we were watching AND shared that beehive was showing signs of relatively imminent (say in an hour or so) eruption. Now, wifey had heard of Beehive in her pre-trip research and knew this would be a special treat so we decided to stay in the area and wait it out!
Beehive erupts higher than Old Faithful, for a longer period of time, and you can stand very very close to it while it erupts. In addition, it has a neighbor geyser that tends to erupt about 15 minutes prior to Beehive giving an indication that Beehiving is about to go! How polite!
Since we're blogging in arrears, I don't recall what pool this is ... but isn't it stunning!?
After leaving the Upper Geyser Basin we continued driving through the park towards our new lodging and were lucky to see some Bison along the way!
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