Madison Campground, Wyoming, United States
Yellowstone National Park is very crowded during the summer
months, which is one reason I haven’t been there since I moved to Montana,
except for two days in February. So my
new plan was to get away from most of the crowds with a hike up Mount Washburn,
one of the highest peaks in the park but an only moderately difficult climb. Upon checking the little park newspaper they
give you upon entry, I realized there was a problem. The park’s road system is like a figure eight
with five roads from outside the park connecting to the loops. According to the newspaper, the top right
part of the eight of the park loop road is closed for the season for
construction. Hmmm, that creates a
problem, because the access to Mount Washburn is from that stretch of
road. Everything seems to be going wrong
on this trip!
So I decided to spend a day visiting some of the lesser-known
sights along the park loop road, essentially those along the upper half of the
lower circle of the figure eight. I
first went to Yellowstone in 1988 on my epic road trip to the West and Alaska
with my mom.
Back then my sightseeing involved a lot of driving and short stops
at major sights. Four years later, in
summer while in grad school in 1992, I spent a few days exploring Yellowstone
in greater depth, followed by a short visit with my brother in 1995, and again
some sightseeing on my way to and from Bozeman in 2010. My sightseeing on those trips probably
consisted mostly of the major tourist nodes in the park – Old Faithful &
the Upper Geyser Basin, Biscuit Basin, Midway Geyser Bason, Norris Geyser
Basin, Mammoth Hot Springs, Tower Falls, and the Canyon Falls. But there’s so much more to Yellowstone – so many
more thermal features and many other waterfalls and activities on Yellowstone
Lake. I decided to hit many of these
lesser features I hadn’t seen before. The
day did not disappoint!
Yellowstone is probably best known for Old Faithful and
other somewhat less consistent geysers.
The geysers, though, are only one type of thermal feature caused by the
super-heated ground not far below the surface in the volcanic region of Yellowstone.
Geology isn’t my strength, so I can’t explain
what all is behind it, but I do know that if Yellowstone goes boom big time
again, where I live now I’ll be among the first to die. These features includes
places where hot water oozes peacefully out of the ground in springs, where it
shoots out periodically in explosive geysers, where it bubbles out consistently
in small geysers, in pools that bubble and belch, vents that roar discharges of
sulphurous air, acidic pools, bubbling mud paint pots, and pools all colors of
the rainbow causes by microscopic organisms that thrive at various hot
temperatures.
I have good recollections of the biggest waterfalls in the
park, but the nature of such a high mountainous plateau where many rivers get
their start is of multiple falls throughout the park, some of which like
Virginia Cascade and Firehole Falls through Firehole Canyon are on narrow single-lane,
one-way roads off the main park loops. Busy Gibbon Falls on the Gibbon River is
right on the loop.
In completing the circle, I also stopped at Lake Village
along the shores of Yellowstone Lake.
At a surface elevation of 7,733 feet,
Yellowstone Lake is the largest lake at such a high elevation in North America,
but it’s a part of the park I haven’t explored much. I don’t think I had ever been into Lake
Village before, a significant lodging center in the park with the Lake Hotel
and Lake Lodge and their adjacent cabins on a beautiful location on the
lakeshore. Maybe some day I’ll come back
to the park and splurge on a stay in one of the grand park lodges instead of
car camping or semi-slumming it in a basic motel room in West Yellowstone. I realize there’s a lot more to explore.
One things about the park was very different this year,
though. There were lots of passenger
vehicles but virtually no big tour buses and given current international travel
restrictions, no foreign tourists. Tour
buses, nowadays often full of rude mainland Chinese, have become a feature at
major sights like Yellowstone. So in
that respect, travel this year somewhat resembled the olden days of my youth.
2025-05-22