National Parks Road Trip 5: Central Yellowstone

After getting back from the park Tuesday night, we drove into downtown Livingston to try on cowboy hats and get takeout dinner at a healthy local food buffet place, then hit up the luxuriously hot hotel hot tub one last time.

Wednesday morning, we ate a quick breakfast and waited for a bit more sunlight before hitting the road. We were planning to blow by Mammoth Hot Springs, having visited the day before, but spotted an enormous antlered bull elk lumbering up the boardwalk and had to stop. He ran straight up the side of the thermal pools, followed by a young one. A female elk across the street started making a crazy noise, somewhere between a bleat, a bray, and a scream, and a few minutes later, the young elk came running nervously back around the corner making a more plaintive version of the same call, hesitated before crossing the road in front of an SUV, and then rejoined his mother.

The young lodgepole pines along the trail to Sheepeater Cliff were full of a frenzy of little birds - mostly nuthatches, finches, and robins. The cliffs themselves were small but cool, composed of more of the basalt columns we'd seen the day before.

Norris Basin is a large area completely covered in thermal pools, geysers, and vents. We walked along kilometers of looping boardwalks and admired them all. Each was different from the last - rainbow deposits along the edges, milky blue-white pools, clay-coloured bubbling mud ponds, clear deep teal waters - and all of them making different sounds - hisses, gulps, quiet simmering, deep-throated underground gurgles... The last one was Steamboat Geyser, a.k.a. "Old Unpredictable", which took out a swatch of nearby trees two months ago. Now it was only sending up short sprays of water a few feet high, but the viewing platform was unnervingly close, so we didn't tarry.

We took a scenic detour past Virginia Cascade, then ate a sandwich lunch on a picnic table before heading to Canyon Village for a walk along the south rim of Yellowstone Grand Canyon, with views of two big waterfalls and multicoloured pastel cliffs at Artist Point. The whole thing was unreal, like an Ansel Adams photo come to life with vibrant colours, and we couldn't resist stopping every few feet to stare at it from another angle.

We hiked the long way back to our car, through woods and grassy fields and past more hydrothermal phenomena (these things are everywhere, and the whole park smells vaguely of sulphur, but not in a bad way), then drove past more bison and out the east gate.

Our lodging for two nights is one of a handful of cabins built in the early 1900s, nestled in a high-walled canyon. Our host handed us a can of bear spray along with the key, we ate dinner in the little lodge, and the whole thing is unbelievably charming. We fell asleep to a rainstorm, with thunder rumbling outside.