Yellowstone

How to Spend One Day in Yellowstone National Park

People may say we were doing a lot; but with us being right up the road at Grand Teton National Park we had to give America's first National Park a visit. We started by eating breakfast and prepping for the hour and a half trip through the Park. Well there's really only one main road that connects the Grand Teton and Yellowstone. All of the campsites, convenience stores and majority of attractions are along this scenic roadway. We left the Lizard Creek Campground in Grand Teton around 10am. We ran into a lot of traffic on the route into Yellowstone but lawrd this drive was scary as hell. Major twists and turns with ZERO shoulder and sheer cliff drop offs. My passenger princess pearls were clutched the entire time, but it was still very pretty. 

Our first stop was Old faithful. The parking lot was like Six Flags on a hot summer day, it was boomin! Our adventure was during the middle of the pandemic with no vaccination available (August 2020) so this was the first time we had seen or been around so many people. We were nervous about the virus. I was really concerned about the clusters of people in the tiny bits of shade. Nobody wanted to watch the geyser while in the sun. But it worked to our benefit because our skin could handle it and we did not want to risk being that close to people during covid to see some water shooting in the air. We waited about 10 mins for the geyser to spray water in the air, kinda underwhelming but still kinda cool. 

After that we walked over to the visitors center and out of the heat to talk about our next moves around the park and what we wanted to see. We decided that the geothermal pools would be the next stop. You know how  they tell you to never meet your heroes? Boy let me tell you about this here geyser. So we hopped back in the car and drove 5 mins to the Upper Geyser Basin. We hiked for about a mile on this trail to a board walk in the 90 degree heat before we decided to turn around. It was just entirely too hot. So now it was about 1pm and the sun was high in the sky. At this point I was not enjoying myself anymore and I had already seen what I felt needed to be seen. This tiny pool of iridescent "don't drink that" water could have just stayed in my science book. It was cute tho but I think the heat made it not seem worth the while. On to the next one!

We got back to the car around 2pm to head back towards the Tetons but not before stopping at Lewis Lake for a quick swim. It was so hot the air was not even cooling the car; the sun was shining hot and bright into the car. It felt like someone had put us in an airfryer and set it on "crispy"! We pulled over, stripped down to our undies and went for a swim. It was the first time I have ever done anything like this but it was so freezing! At the time that was perfect to counter the blazing heat. After eating lunch and chilling for about an hour or two, we bounced out heading back to our campsite for a well deserved reset. 

On the way out of Yellowstone  we stopped  at the famous national park sign for a photo. A funny story about this is, the park is crowded so you have to wait for a spot to take a picture with the sign. We parked about 50 feet back from the sign instead of directly in front of it because cars were already there. As we were walking up to take our picture the car in front of the sign pulled off and another car pulls in and the occupants hopped right out in front of us and ran to the sign to take photos. I was mad as hell because we had to wait even though we were already there because of course they took forever. They knew what they were doing because they kept looking over at us. Of course they were... I got over it and we took our photo but even people in the wild are weird so look out for that. We also stopped at this waterfall for a quick photo op and adventures climbing around the dam. I can't recall the name of the waterfalls but the crowds will lead you to it when you see a lot of people randomly on the side of the road. We arrived back at our campsite at around 6, ate dinner and went to bed.

*Excuse my trash photos, I had no expereince and I had no idea I would start this bloggy blog.