Days 4, 5, and 6: Yellowstone!

I am not sure I can appropriately sum up Yellowstone in one blog entry. Yellowstone is such a rich, diverse National Park. Showing the main highlights is my poor attempt at relaying what we did at the park. Only being there serves as a true representation of how amazing Yellowstone truly is.

We arrived at Yellowstone, after another overnight drive through Wyoming, to see the sunrise. We felt so blessed to have seen the sunrise at both Yellowstone and the Badlands.

Our first order of business was to find a campsite. I felt that we didn't need to make reservations, so we just "winged" it! We were fortunate to find a great walk-in site at Norris Campground. The campground is a little more rustic than the others; the boys loved that our campsite was up against a little stream where they could throw rocks. Every night while we cooked dinner, they would run over to the stream and throw rocks like crazy!

The other delight we quickly learned about Yellowstone was that it was COLD in the mornings. I saw a woman putting gloves on before bed and laughed at her overreaction to a "little cold." The next morning there was a frost on the ground. We were all shivering to pieces! That day I bought a Yellowstone hooded sweatshirt to wear to sleep so that I could tolerate the frigid mornings.

Each day we would take time to travel a section of Yellowstone seeing some of the tourist sites such as the following:

Old Faithful

We saw Old Faithful erupt twice. Once we watched it from the crowded platform that surrounds the geyser. The second time we were walking a path that surrounds the area. I enjoyed watching its powerful eruption more privately the second time, as I thought it felt more authentic. The absolute power in a geyser astounds me. The water is surging from the ground at such force. Truly incredible!

Sinkholes --I thought the colors of these were so beautiful! Doesn't it look bottomless?

Hot Springs --They smelled like sulfur, so the kids and I were holding our noses to show how stinky they were. The boys would always yell, "who's stinky?" or of course "Who farted?" as we went through those. They thought they were hilarious!

One of our favorite parts was a 6 mile hike we did up Mount Washburn, the second highest mountain in Yellowstone. The hike is fairly well laid out with a nice trail. The kids did put up a little fuss about the uphill. Andrew got so tired, and then he slipped near the top and had a huge bloody scrape. Chris took the hardest route as he carried Evan on his shoulders about half of the way up the mountain. The view at the top was so rewarding! This was an amazing hike.

The waterfalls there are also beautiful. There is one main waterfall area that Chris snapped this awesome picture of.

Humbly I admit that there is so much more to tell. I have scratched the surface of what we saw, but I didn't want to inundate you with all of our little details. Yellowstone was the kids' favorite part of the trip. They all want to go back someday.

Tomorrow, I will finish the summary with our two days in the Grand Tetons. Then, I plan to post pictures of all the animals we saw after that. Stay tuned. . .