Yellowstone National Park

4/28 – 5/2/2015 – We traveled from Salem Oregon to West Yellowstone MT by way of Idaho over the course of a couple days and stayed at Camp Walmart on the journey.  Always a great host with anything you might need to eat, drink or wear.  We did make one scenic stop in Idaho at “Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve” and it was an amazing sight.  The Monument and Preserve encompass three major lava fields and about 400 square miles of sagebrush steppe grasslands to cover a total area of 1,117 square miles. All three lava fields lie along the Great Rift of Idaho, with some of the best examples of open rift cracks in the world, including the deepest known on Earth at 800 feet.  We arrived in West Yellowstone which is the little town just outside the West Entrance to Yellowstone National Park around noon on 4/30 which gave us plenty of time to begin exploring the park.   Our first stop of course was Old Faithful, the only geyser that the eruptions can be predicted within 10 minutes every 90 minutes or so.  It really is a sight to behold, but it is only one of three hundred geysers,  and the park contains more than 10,000 thermal features, including the world's greatest concentration of geysers as well as hot springs, mudpots, and steam vents..  Some have many colors, others are colorless, some look like paint bubbling, some like mud, others smell like sulfur and many spill into the nearby rivers and streams.  There are an average of 1000 to 3000 earthquakes a year in Yellowstone which enable the continued eruptions of the many geysers, steam vents and hot springs as the quakes open new crevices to enable the heated water and steam to reach the surface, but most of the quakes are not even felt at the surface.  The park sits on an underground super-volcano covering an area 35 x 45 miles but scientist don’t expect any type of major eruptions for more than 10,000 years.  The 3 days spent at Yellowstone were the most amazing three days of our lives, and if this place is not on your bucket list you are CRAZY!  It is surely the greatest National Park in the continental US and there is so much to see, but I would not advise visiting in the summer as the traffic has to be horrendous.  Spring and Fall are certainly the best times as we had the park to ourselves and had no problem driving around and parking or seeing everything that was open with no delays. Here are just a sampling of the hundreds of cherished photos we took over the three days at Yellowstone.