Yellowstone National Park - Day 2

Day 2 started at the Canyon Visitor Education Center at Canyon Village.  Read the information in these photos to be amazed.

Ok, I've been to Mount St. Helen's and seen the damage that occurred when it blew its top.

These represent the different eruptions in Yellowstone in comparison to Mt. St. Helen's.  Each little cube on these ash cubes are an equivalent to that eruption!

I've taken a close up photo of each ash block so you can see which eruption it represents.



The wall display showing the extent of the ashfall from each of the eruptions including Mt. St. Helen's.



We left the visitor center and headed south.  There was an elk jam along the road and a ranger was there making sure people didn't get too close.  I shot this photo as we drove past.

Next stop - the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone.   The canyon is way narrower than the Grand Canyon in Arizona but the cliffs are very colorful.

At Artist's Point looking upstream at the Lower Falls. 

Looking downstream.  The dark tree trunk sticking up in the middle of the photo was dead.  The bark was all gone and it looked like a huge, twisted and polished walking stick.

Nolan did a great job of getting us and the falls in the photo with just one attempt.

Then we went up to see the upper falls.

Further south we came to some thermal areas so we stopped to check out the features.

This one didn't look inviting at all.

This was my favorite thermal feature in the whole park.  Listening you could sure see how it got the name of Dragon's Mouth.

As in all the other thermal area, we walked on boardwalks.

The next stop was the West Thumb Geyser Basin.  Didn't get to see any geysers in action while we were here but the view across Yellowstone Lake at the snow-covered mountains was pretty.

This one looked like a mini-volcano.

I didn't even get the name of the spring in this photo and the next one but I was mesmerized just staring into it's depths.  Right in the center you can see a tree that has fallen into the spring.

Doesn't this one look inviting?

From West Thumb we headed west and crossed the Continental Divide - twice!

At the second crossing is a very special lake - the only one of it's kind in the world.

Ok, so it's actually a small pond.

The lake's east drainage ends up turning west so this water is headed to the Pacific Ocean. 

The lake's west drainage ends up turning east so this water is headed to the Gulf of Mexico.  How cool is that!

The Kepler Cascades on the Firehole River.

As we headed out of the park for the day we got in a bison jam.  Cars were backed up for at least a mile while the bison wandered onto the road.

I guess he thought this was his better side.

Really Ranger.. I didn't mean to get this close!  We were sitting still and they were moving.