Yellowstone | Taryn's Mad Hatter Adventures

Category: Yellowstone

Yellowstone National Park–Mud Volcano, Upper Falls, Lower Falls, Norris Geyser Basin

Posted at 1:02 pm by taryngirl, on December 1, 2022

6/25/22

Our next stop around the loop was the Mud Volcano area. This was a small trail, and this entire area had a sulphur smell.

View from the parking lot towards Dragon’s Mouth Spring.:

Dragon’s Mouth Spring:

Mud Volcano:

Mud Caldron:

This whole area was so interesting! So many different things all in one area! You can see the Yellowstone River here.

While we were on this trail….this spectacular event happened! Walking on the trail around this area, and you could hear a rumbling coming. A bunch of bison came running! There was no time to even react or move out of the way. Kind of scary with nowhere to go. Standing still was the best option at this point.

After leaving the Mud Volcano area, we continued on to the Upper and Lower Falls.

This is just part of Hayden Valley. This is typically an area where you can see a lot of wildlife.

View of the Upper Falls:

This view was just unbelievable! The changes in terrain, they types and amount of trees…it was all just amazing! You could see hoof prints in the sides of this. I was looking the entire time for mountain goats but sadly did not see any.

View of the Lower Falls:

We really wanted to get to Grand Prismatic, but we were starting to get tired. We decided to continue on and just make a couple of stops before returning to our hotel. Here you can see the road closure due to the flood. This was going north at Norris:

We stopped at the Norris Geyser Basin to explore a little bit.

Here you can see the boardwalk that goes throughout the different geysers.

Overall, our day was great! There was so much exploring, and so much more yet to come.

Up next…Old Faithful! We couldn’t resist stopping on the way home to the hotel and dinner.

Posted in Out West, Uncategorized, Yellowstone | 0 Comments | Tagged Out West, Yellowstone National Park

Yellowstone National Park – West Thumb, Lake Village, Fishing Bridge

Posted at 2:06 pm by taryngirl, on November 1, 2022

6/25/2022

Two weeks prior to us leaving for this trip, Yellowstone National park experienced devastating flooding and was actually completely closed for a little bit. We were unsure what was going to happen for our time there, but figured there was enough all around that we could do just in case the park was totally closed. The trip was still on! The north entrance near Gardiner was heavily affected and that is where we were to spend some of our trip. We scrambled to secure different accommodations in other areas of the park, and rearrange our touring plans. Once the park did reopen, they instituted a license plate entrance system. Plates ending in odd numbers could enter on odd days and even on even. This split our group up but it ended up working out just fine.

We arrived at our lodging late the night of the 24th after leaving Jackson Hole. The drive was about an hour to get to Headwaters Lodge Flagg Ranch, which is located near the southern entrance to Yellowstone. It was dark and we couldn’t see a thing…but we eventually found our cabin through some trial and error!

Fun fact…the heat was not automatically turned on in our room, and we woke up in the morning with the temp around 46 degrees! The room was perfect for what we needed. There was no television or mini fridge. I loved the location and would definitely stay here again! Here are the girls on our cute little porch in the morning before we headed out to the park. It was COLD! High 30s I think in the morning??

We left around 7:30 a.m. Our plan for this day was to enter at the south entrance and go counter clockwise around the lower loop as far as we could get before reaching our physical limit. The lower loop was 96 miles. We were using the GyPSy Guide app for this park as well.

We couldn’t resist pulling over to catch some amazing views…and we weren’t even through the gates yet!

When we got to the entrance, they did have staff out checking license plates. There was no traffic back up for us to get in.

Our first real stop was West Thumb Geyser Basin. This area bordered Yellowstone Lake and the views were simply breathtaking! There were so many different geysers and springs.

(As a note, just recently someone died here. They found a foot floating in a shoe and that was all that was left of the body. So please take these signs seriously!)

It was COLD this morning! There were some slick spots on the boardwalk while walking around.