Day 10 - Staycation Saga - Part 1 - Old Faithful

Day 10 – Wednesday June 3, 2009 – Old Faithful, Mud Volcano, and Yellowstone Canyon.

Wow! Today was a wonderfully long day. I think that we left about 10am for Yellowstone as the day seemed to be nice. Yes, this looked to us like a nice day to spend at Yellowstone.

As on day at, we ran into some bison, only this time it was not just a few stragglers on the road, but entire herds.

We were actually parked on the road for 20 minutes at one point because someone ahead of us did not know how to take advantage of small windows between members of the herd and we had to wait for the entire herd of Buffalo to cross the street. See the video for the hold up.

This mom and her calf probably kept things tide up for a good 10 minutes. They were fun to watch but traffic and other impatient drivers didn't allow us to capture some of the things this crazy calf was doing on camera.

It was cool though to see all of the calves with their mothers running about. The little ones seem to have so much energy compared with the adults.

These are some of the local and visiting fishermen that are sharing the river with the buffalo in the above pictures.


This is the Upper Geyser basin where we stopped and made some of the below videos (Old Faithful is part of the Lower Geyser Basin).

These are some of the bubbling mud pots that are a part of the Upper Geyser Basin. By August they are usually dried up and at that point are just steam vents where got gasses can escape from below. The bubbling mud kind of helps you to visualize the tar pits that supposedly existed when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

Mud Pots

Steam Vents

This is a cool mud pot.

The Clepsydra Geyser

We arrived at Old Faithful and found that we had time to go to the gift shops before Old Faithful went off again, so we went and picked up a few thing by which to remember our trip. We finished our shopping and put everything back in the car and then went over and got a front Boardwalk seat for the show. We waited about 20 minutes before Old Faithful actually went off, but when she did it was a great view.

While we were waiting for Old Faithful, we had a blue jay come by and entertain us for a few minutes. Can you find the blue jay?

How about now? Hint: The blue jay is left of the two black rocks in this picture.

This is our blue jay.

We learned from the Park Ranger during our 20 minute wait that each time Old Faithful goes off she spews between 4000 and 8000 gallons of water in 2 to 5 minutes. Incredible! Nature is so awesome! Enjoy the shots of Old Faithful as she went about 4 minutes for us.

This is some pre-explosion video.

Here are some photos of Old Faithful in action.

I would post some video of old faithful going off, but Shari was so excited by Old Faithful that she forgot that you can't rotate a video like you do a photo and so all our video clips of Old Faithful are tipped on their side.

Then we ate lunch in the parking lot and continued our journey to Yellowstone Lake and the Mud Volcano.