On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
PaulB
Yellowstone National Park is a truly miraculous place, with all of the wonders of nature — trees, mountains, canyons, waterfalls, lakes, rivers, wildlife — that you would expect to see in any national park but with an absolutely stunning array of colors, geysers, mud pits, hot streams and pools, most of which are fairly easy to get to. If this park isn’t on your bucket list, you really need to add it. There is nothing like it anywhere else in the world.
It’s one of those places that you really do have to see in person, as pictures just don’t do it justice. Everywhere you look, there’s something spectacular to see. I took over 600 pictures in the few days that I was there and narrowing that down to just 24 to post here, in 3 sets of 8, was torture.
Reputed to be the largest log structure in the world, the Old Faithful Inn is perhaps the best known of the U.S. National Park lodges. It is an amazing structure inside and out, with reservations required as much as a year in advance if you wish to stay.
The Old Faithful geyser, still as faithful as ever, with its eruptions still timed to the minute.
The colors mostly come from the algae that thrives in the heated water. Expert viewers can even tell something of the temperature of the water from the color of the algae.
The deeper-colored pools tend to be quite hot, and quite dangerous. Exposure to the hottest pools can parboil you in minutes.
Odd rock formations abound, as minerals brought up by the geysers accumulate into odd shapes over the years.
This is one of the saddest sites at Yellowstone, despite the stunning colors. The Morning Glory Pool was so named because of a delicate fluted edge surrounding a beautiful pool of a uniform deep blue, making it resemble a morning glory flower.
The edge was broken off, piece by piece, by souvenir hunters decades ago, and because of the literally tons of trash thrown into the pool, the pool’s vents have become partially blocked, altering the temperature of the pool and changing its color. The park service regularly vacuums out the pool and tries to remove all of the garbage but it has been unable to stop the pool’s slow decline or to restore it to its former beauty.
A static image doesn’t really do these pits justice, as you really do have to see these bubbles developing and popping to appreciate them. There is this constant low-level susurration everywhere in Yellowstone, much of it from the various geothermal features.
Buffalo are scattered throughout the park, although I’ve only seen the larger herds on the eastern side of the park. Unless the spectators are being foolish, the buffalo ignore them and think nothing of walking along the road and trails throughout the park.
Eural Joiner
WOW! Talk about memories…back in 1989 I was a young whipper snapper going to school at UT/Austin when I landed a summer job at Yellowstone working in the dinning hall/tourist shop. A young girl from Columbia, SC was there as well with her mother and we got assigned the ice cream loft right next to Old Faithful and it was love at first sight! Wednesday is our 31st anniversary :)
For our 30th we spent a year out putting together a return to the park and booking rooms in the inn…and then COVID hit, everything shut down, and that was that. We hope to make it back one day…maybe our 35th?
Great pictures, gotta little dust in my eyes :)
JPL
Wonderful pictures.
@Eural Joiner: That’s such a sweet story.
MagdaInBlack
@Eural Joiner: I love ” how we met” stories. Thank you ! ?
MikefromArlington
Renting an RV next summer and this will be one of our family stops for 4 days.
It truly is a remarkable place. Nothing like it
Steeplejack
@Eural Joiner:
Happy anniversary! ?
mardam
Been there twice, for a week each time. And never enough. Once stay was inside the park in one of the rustic cabins. And RUSTIC is the operative word, here. Woke up one morning to find a bison had slept in the area between the cabins. Just sitting there feet from the door. An animal the size of a small pickup truck.
Was enchanted and intoxicated from first minute to last. Highly…HIGHLY recommended. The distances are large if you are driving from outside the park daily. But still worth it. With some planning you can mitigate this somewhat. But even the surrounding areas are spectacular. So having to drive an hour or more every day just to get there is still a great experience.
National treasure doesn’t even start to describe it.
Another Scott
Beautiful pictures. I’ve only been there once – got sunburned on my first day! – and have some great memories. Flatlanders need to consider the altitude. ;-)
Old Faithful is sneaky. We managed to get there a few minutes before the scheduled eruption and there were people sitting on benches waiting. There were some little piddly things happening before the scheduled time, then what seemed to be the main event. People clapped and got up and left. We started walking around to get a better view and then a minute or two later it really went off – 2-3 times as high as what people thought was the big one. It pays to be patient!
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Miki
@Eural Joiner: Awwww – sweet.
I worked there in 1973 (worked in the laundry for the Lake Yellowstone Hotel). We worked 6 days/week, with a random day off during the week (mine was Tuesdays). Hard work but fun (learned a bunch of different state songs from my co-workers (FYI – Kansas’ is “Home on the Range”).
I gained a healthy respect for wildlife while there – I had a friend who worked at Fishing Bridge, a walkable distance on the lakeshore from Lake Lodge. I was advised to tie bells to my tennies to avoid surprising bears/moose on the path to visit her. The path to the employee dining hall from our dorm cabins often included a too-close view of a very large bull moose.
And yes – altitude was a thing (close to 8,000 feet), especially for this flatlander. Took a good 2 weeks to get used to it, but totally worth it because the day hikes were phenomenal.
Didn’t meet my soul mate there, but good times, good times ….
Xavier
Old Faithful Inn, like many other of those classic lodges, was built by the CCC.
mvr
@Xavier: The Old Faithful Inn was built in 1903-4 with a wing added in the twenties. The CCC was founded in the Depression – 1933 says Wikipedia.
But I do believe the CCC worked on roads in Yellowstone and other National Parks. And there are a bunch of WPA buildings in older parks around the country.
Wag
Great photos.. I am always blown away when I look into the depths of the hot springs. The spectrum of colors in the springs are amazing. I love your shot of Morning Glory Spring.
mvr
Thanks for these pictures, PaulB! Yellowstone is probably my favorite place in the world. I first wound up there in 1984 on my way to grad school and have been back at least a dozen times since. I’m especially fond of your picture of the Old Faithful Inn, just because that building is such a hoot – kind of a fantasy of the West writ very large.
Like Eural Joiner we had reservations for 2020 but it all got cancelled due to Covid. They offered a rebooking discount for June of 2021 and we again booked a trip, with planned stays at the old house at the Old Faithful Inn, and Mammoth as well as a stay at Grand Teton. All of the reservations for Old Faithful were cancelled since they were not opening up the old part for stays. So we cobbled together a revised itinerary with several nights at the Old Faithful Snow Lodge, a night at Lake Hotel, and camping a couple of other nights. It was still a nice trip but there was some stress because their reservation system didn’t let me lot in to check some of the reservations and we had to spend time on the phone (w spotty service) securing lodging a couple of nights.
So now we have plans for next year splitting the trip between Old Faithful and Roosevelt (the primative cabins mardam mentioned above) in the Northeast part of the park, in mid-summer. Once the Spring runoff tapers off that is one of the best places to catch-and-release fish for native Cutthroat Trout, and the wildlife watching is amazing. You can generally plan to see wolves on the road through the Lamar valley.
Anyway, thanks for this and looking forward to the next two installments!
joel hanes
Morning Glory Pool
Miss Bianca
I remember my one and only (so far) solo trip to Yellowstone. It was the first time I ever felt that “patriotism” might mean a deep, visceral love and appreciation for one’s country as a *countryside*.
joel hanes
Yellowstone is unique and fascinating.
But for heart-rendingly gorgeous scenery, give me Glacier every time.
CaseyL
Been there twice. Would go every year if I could.
My first trip was as part of an student group looking at geology and “extremophiles” – life forms that thrive in extreme environments, of which Yellowstone has an abundance. Microorganisms live in all those beautiful boiling pools, mud baths, and geysers. Those long red-brown reeds you see rippling in the hot streams are colonies of them.
The geology was just as fascinating. Yellowstone is a supervolcano, and its turbulent eruption history can be seen anywhere in the rocks. The Obsidian Hills was my favorite geologic site: enormous boulders and entire hills made of obsidian. Everything is covered in dirt and dust, but when you wipe it away there’s the black glass – and it’s just stunning to see how huge the pieces are.
The second time I went with my aunt. I remembered from my first trip how much better it is to stay at different lodges inside the park rather than stay at one spot outside the park and spend most of the day driving, so that’s what we did. I found a tour company that arranged the stays at the lodges and assigned you a local guide. Ours was a retired Park Ranger. I absolutely recommend doing it this way, especially if you want to see wildlife, because the Rangers know the best places to see the more elusive critters like bear, wolf and moose. They also have wonderful stories about Yellowstone history, and of course from their own time working in the park.
My Aunt and I discovered, among other things, that you can take the guy out of the Park Service, but you can’t take the Park Service out of the guy. Any time we saw a large group of animals – bison, elk – there were sure to be other tourists getting too close to them, trying to pet them or photograph them. And our guide would absolutely go off on those idiots, charging over to just about smack them away from the animals. (Vicki and I, who might normally have been one of those idiots trying to give a bison some scritches, knew better than to even try when he was around.)
Yellowstone is just magical. There is no other word for it.
YY_Sima Qian
Yellow is truly a unique wonder in the world! My only time there (& the Tetons) was back in 2003, far too short a trip & far too long ago. I would love to take my wife & daughter there for a visit when the pandemic dies downs. Yosemite & the Grand Canyon, too!
Kelly
I visited in 1989 after the 1988 Yellowstone fire. The park service already had displays up explaining the role of fire in the landscape. Park service took a lot of criticism for their light touch fire fighting. I think time has proved the park service correct.
One of these winters we’re gonna stay in the lodge and xc ski the park in winter.
StringOnAStick
@CaseyL: My one time there (1986) I saw cars careening into barely parked positions so everyone could bail out and run over to the passing Bison herd. I stayed in my car but couldn’t drive away because of how people “parked”, and I could hear and see the bison grunting and snorting their anger at the people crowding towards them. I was sure I was about to see some tourists get stomped or gored. I’ve been around places with bison herds since I was a kid and I was shocked at how insane people were being, running towards a herd of very large, horned wild animals!
Bill Dunlap
Old Faithful Lodge is pretty rustic itself. Was passing through just as the park opened some years ago and got a room without a reservation. A nice evening with a good meal and some friendly bar time. Almost too dark in the room to read in bed. If you’re staying pack a 100W equivalent LED bulb (don’t want to overheat any fixture.)
PaulB
One of the nicest things about the park is how much of it is accessible to the elderly and disabled. Not everything, of course, but a substantial number of the major attractions are wheelchair accessible or are accessible to those with limited mobility.
This was my 4th visit to the park and I fully expect to go back again in a couple of years. My only regret about this trip was that the smoke haze was severe enough that I was unable to get any decent photographs in a day trip to the Grand Tetons.