Days 3-5 Yellowstone!

 

Days 3-5 were spent at Yellowstone. Soooo cool!  We stayed at the Mountainside KOA, which was pretty nice. Some great views.

We arrived around 3pm in the afternoon, just in time for a pretty good thunderstorm to roll through, but we didn't let that stop us. After setting up camp and walking the dogs, we headed back to the car and visited the National Park for the first time, driving through several areas for a couple hours, despite the rain. We saw waterfalls, and in one little loop through, we saw baby osprey in a nest close to the road. I swear he's in there, but it was hard to capture him. We saw his little head pop up several times.  It's so incredibly gorgeous!  Jackson was less than inspired and fell asleep rather than seeing the views. 

The rain even stopped early enough to do a hike through the lower geyser basin, even if we had to take turns because the dogs had to stay in the parking lot. 

 The next day, our first full day, we dropped the dogs at doggy daycare and drove into the park for the day.  The theme of our first full day was geysers and geothermal features. We started the day at Grand Prismatic geyser. We hiked the middle (Old Faithful) and Norris geyser basins.  This included Old Faithful and many of the usual geysers in this area, as well as popping into lodge and gift shops. We did see Old Faithful go off too of course.  We saw bison and elk here and there but did not see much wildlife while visiting.

The Norris geyser basin was new to us and very cool. It's a bit of a hike around, and a little elevation, but starts at an older little walk through museum and then goes in a great loop.  

26,000 steps later, we called it a day and picked up the dogs. By the way, it was 4th of July! We did not stay up for 4th of July fireworks as we were pretty tired.  Happy Fourth!

On July 5, our theme was the Canyon area of Yellowstone and then the waterfalls. We started by checking out Canyon Lodge. We then viewed the upper falls and lower falls. We hiked down (what goes down must come back up!) to the brink of the lower falls. It's only a 0.4mile hike but with 600 m of elevation change, it was a beast to climb back up. Still, it was so unique to see and so awesome that it was very worth it. After that, we went down to another viewpoint and then hiked down again, another half mile or so, this time with a 500 m elevation change to a great viewpoint to see the iconic lower falls head on.  The views were so amazing and worth it but the hikes back up such steep paths were killer and we had some stiff calves later in the day. After this we explored and hiked the Artist Paintpot area, then went back to town and wandered through the Bear and Wolf Discovery Center, a few shops in town, and got some delicious BBQ for dinner.