Yellowstone – 2025
We spent 2 1/2 full days and three nights in Yellowstone National Park, our first time there.
We stayed just outside Yellowstone at the Yellowstone Grizzly RV park in West Yellowstone, Montana, which was very nice.
The weather was great, even though it got down to 27° one night it was still mid 70s during the day. All sunshine, no rain.
It was a lot more driving than we anticipated. We spent about nine hours on the road and sightseeing each of the two full days, plus another 5 hours on the first day that we arrived.
We saw so many amazing sites, including:
- Old Faithful (waited the full 90 minutes as we just missed the previous eruption.)
- The Norris Geyser Basin featuring this steamboat geyser which periodically shoots 300 feet into the air and can ruin the paint on the car is parked in the parking lot. Its last big eruption was April 14, 2025.
- the Monument Geyser Basin
- Mammoth, Hot Springs.
- The towns of Gardner and West Yellowstone.
- The Roosevelt Arch.
- The Lamar River Valley
- Gibbon Falls
- The Grand Canyon of Yellowstone, including the upper and lower Falls
- Hayden Valley
- Yellowstone Lake
- The West Thumb Geyser Basin.
- The Midway Geiser Basin, including The Grand Prismatic Spring
We saw lots of wild animals, including bison, antelope, elk, and bears, both grizzly and black. The bears we saw from a distance through binoculars. The black bear or a mother in two Cubs. The grizzlies appeared to be two adults and one baby. From our distance, we couldn’t tell, but it seemed like the mother was protecting her young.
The geothermal features of the park were unbelievable! You really had the sense that you were standing and driving on top of a giant volcano, a caldera, the whole time. Steam and water was bubbling up, spirting out and making weird noises in all sorts of unexpected places. It was quite something!
And some of the water features looked so inviting, ponds of clear, blue, water that were surprisingly deep, one of them we were told was 57 feet deep. But they were super-heated and deadly. I heard a Park Ranger tell a couple of stories of people who died not realizing the danger. Trust me, you don’t want the details.
Who knows if we’ll get back to Yellowstone again, but we made the most of it!
