July 19th - Hot Geyser Action

July 19 – Hot Geyser Action

Our first full day at Yellowstone saw us getting up really really early to grab a spot at the Norris Campground, a first-come-first-served campground right in the thick of some hot geyser action.

Max woke us up at 5:59am on the dot, freezing cold. The temperature had dropped to 42 degrees overnight and he didn’t have much of a ground pad under his sleeping bag. We got ourselves ready and hightailed it out of Bridge Bay campground.

Driving through Yellowstone at 6:15 in the morning was magical. Awesome photos. Some elk. Misty rivers. It looked like the Shire, but without hobbits or background music.

We got to Norris campground in time to find a site on what may have been the busiest camping day of the year in Yellowstone. Wired from our arrival, we decided to get a 9:30am ranger guided tour of the Norris Geyser basin, only 1 mile away from the campground. In fact, you could smell the sulfur in the air at the campground when the wind blew the right direction.

Danny chose to do a Young Ranger badge project while Audrey opted to wait for the Young Scientist badge at Old Faithful tomorrow.

Our hike was 1 ½ hours through the back trails of Norris Geyser Basin.  The trails were most boardwalk. 

We saw spurting geysers, brilliant blue hot springs and a bubbling mud pot.  We learned that Yellowstone sits on an active volcano that blew its top 640,000 years ago and is likely to blow again whenever it feels like it since scientists aren’t all that clever after all.

We also saw some cool sites of other tourists violating the rules and stepping off the boardwalk. Unfortunately, they didn't break through the crust and fall into pools of boiling water. But you can't have everything.

Exhausted from our morning adventures we returned to the campsite, ate a quick lunch and promptly fell into major nap mode – the kids in the hammocks.  We didn’t do anything for the rest of the day, simply enjoying our campsite, the perfect weather and the fact that we made it to Yellowstone.

In the evening we went to a boring ranger talk on the reintroduction of the grey wolf to Yellowstone. I really love the environmental stuff, but yawn...time for marshmellows and chocolate and graham crackers and sleep.