Yellowstone Park

Yellowstone Park from my Eyes

Physical Characteristics

Summit Elevation: 2805 m
Latitude: 44.43°N
Longitude: 110.67°W

Volcano Type: Calderas
Volcano Location: Wyoming State

For more information see
Smithsonian GVP and
Yellowstone Volcano Observatory

Old Faithful web cam

It is Thanksgiving Morning 2002 and I am sitting here scanning photographs from my fall vacation trip to Yellowstone NP. This was a strange trip for me. I planned my visit. I had a room 2 weeks before I left for West Yellowstone. I knew that I had to get up early in the morning because the road from Madison Junction to Norris was only open from 6 am to 10 am. At 6 am, the car windows were frosted over on some of the days. The view of the park was considerably different as you can see in the following photos.

Note: All full size images are either 800 pixels wide or 600 pixels high. Clicking the thumbnail will open a new window with a full size image. Clicking the full size image will close the window.

When you like to stay up until early morning like I do, getting up and being on the road between 6 am and 7 am was a real problem. I have been visiting Yellowstone since I was 8 or 9 years old. That means I have been seeing the park change for 55 years at this point. I don't remember ever seeing a sunrise. The left face of Mt Haynes has always been in the shade.

You had a different view regardless of which way you turned at Madison Junction. For the 1st time, I couldn't take photographs of Norris Geyser Basin. It was invisible in the early morning fog. You could walk up on an irritated animal and never see it before you heard it coming your way.

I had seen views of the Lower Geyser Basin that looked similar to this but it was always on a cloudy day. The Lower Falls also looked very different. Most of the time when I got to the falls, the partially lighted rock on the left had started to shade the falls. Finding the Lower Falls in good light was a battle. You have approximately 2-3 hours of good light and the falls is in the shade for the rest of the day. A view that is only of interest to people that have never seen the falls in bright sunlight.

I walked around the Geyser hill and watched Plume erupt. When I headed back to Old Faithful, everyone walking down the trail towards the Old Faithful Lodge had to be careful because a bison was slowly eating its way to the NE and was right beside the trail. The trail to the view point on the ridge wasn't too far in front of him and so I had to be careful twice. He handled the situation well and ignored everyone.

I took the time and walked around more this year. I got to see a number of different things. I had never seen the Upper Geyser Basin, which includes Old Faithful from the view point on the ridge. The view was spectacular no matter what else was going on. If you time it right, the first view of the geyser basin is the following.

We had to wait longer than usual for Old Faithful to erupt. The rangers claim an accuracy of ±10 minutes but we had to wait much longer than10 minutes for it to start erupting. The White Dome geyser had its share of fame this year. In 2001, the park replaced the Firehole Loop road but when the temperature got hot during the summer, the road began to buckle and get really hot. They measured the temperature of the asphalt and found it was 175° Farenheit. When I got there in September 2002, there was a section of gravel road about 150 feet long.

On one of the trips from Old Faithful, I saw something I had never seen before. There were parking spots in the area where you park your vehicles and walk into see Fairy falls. Fairy Falls is similar to a lot of water falls I have seen. The big difference was it was relatively small but it was in Yellowstone Park and that makes it interesting. It is a 2.6 mile (4.16 km) hike each way and when you get there, you see something like the following images. The sun was bright enough to expose the gap between these two shots. It also confused the scanner into thinking they were one photograph.

What you don't want to see when you are hiking in grizzly country is a pile of bison calf remains on the side of the trail. The reason why there was parking space available was because of the bison calf. There was not much left to eat and while the grizzilies were consuming the calf, it would not have been a good idea to hike by them. Even an adult grizzly would have demonstrated higher intelligence.

There were 2 adult grizzilies in the area and one of them was a sow with 2 cubs. This was unusual because they are normally at a higher altitude this early in the fall. This year the drouth forced them to come down much earlier than usual. Their presence caused the Park Rangers to hang a bear warning sign on the barrier stopping vehicle traffic from using the trail to Fairy Falls. In order to walk over the bridge, you had to walk past the warning sign. I have never been bothered by bears and walked across the bridge. I did not walk very far until there was a second sign in the trail telling you to be alert and travel in groups. Now this tells me the Rangers think the situation is serious and for the first time in my life, I didn't walk were there was bear sign. Fortunately, there were 2 couples right behind me and they let me tag along. That reduced the chance of a bear getting one of them from 1 in 4 to 1 in 5. That was only a small improvement for them but going from 1 in 1 to 1 in 5 was a big gain for me.

The older man also had an equalizer of sorts, which was grizzly grade pepper spray. Some people think the pepper spray will keep a grizzily from charging but what they don't understand is that the bear has to be somewhere between 10-20 feet from you for the spray to be effective. If the grizzily was charging at full speed and close enough for you to spray him, he could not stop before he hit you. When an 700-800 pound animal traveling around 45-50 feet per second hits you, it is going to hurt. The pepper spray may just convience him that getting away from it is more important than venting his anger on you because of your intrustion into his space. At least, this is how a Ranger answered my question about using pepper spray.

We hiked back in and saw the falls and the younger couple hiked over to see 2 geysers just up the trail. On the way back, is when we saw the remains of the mostly eaten bison calf very close to where we had joined up. If a grizzly had been eating what was left of the calf, he would have been around 100 feet (30 m) from where I stopped. I was upwind and would have been just over 2 seconds away from an animal I couldn't see.