Boiling Mud, Waterfalls, and Hot Springs

We arrive in Yellowstone National Park

Summer means travel for my family. It also means that between commentary on life, social issues, and our years living in Texas, I will deliver two to three posts a month about our family’s summer travels until the end of the year.

The following post is too long for email. You will need to open the full blog post in your browser to read the whole post. You can read the previous post about our Wyoming stops before Yellowstone here.

Our family left Cody, Wyoming and our two hours at the Buffalo Bill Center and headed west, across the desert, past the Buffalo Bill Reservoir, and back up into the mountains guarding the entrance to Yellowstone National Park. When Jeff and I had traveled to Yellowstone twenty years before, we had reached the entrance with the sun still high enough in the sky we could see the park, but by the time we reached our campsite in West Yellowstone on the opposite side of the park, we were pitching our tent in the dark.

This time, we were staying at Fishing Bridge Campground, the first major stop inside the park and the only place for large RVs. And because we were arriving before mid-afternoon, we still had enough time to explore the closest locations to the campground before dinner.

After setting up in our roomy pull-through site, we packed up the truck and headed across the street to the Fishing Bridge Museum and Visitor Center.

Yellowstone Lake was everything I had remembered from my two trips to the national park. The water was clear and cold as it lapped on the shore, and the mountains across the lake still held the hint of snow, even in July.

We traveled along the lake shoreline to the West Thumb Geyser Basin. Since the 21-mile drive took us nearly 40 minutes, we knew it would be our last adventure for our first day in the park, but I was eager to show the kids mud pots and hot springs next to the cold Yellowstone Lake they had dipped their toes into nearly an hour before. We walked on the boardwalk trail above the fragile crust and deadly thermal surface. While our daughter didn’t love the smell of rising sulfur, both kids were awed by the boiling ground beneath them and the colorful deposits around each of the springs.

The next morning we had decisions to make. The road around Mammoth Hot Springs was going to be closed for the remainder of the week, so if we wanted to go, we had to spend our first day there. The problem with making Mammoth Hot Springs our ultimate destination was the reality that it was on the other side of the park, and depending on which route we took, it was nearly a 60-mile drive to get there. Because of the size of Yellowstone and natural habitat, there is no quick route to any of the major attractions. One just has to get on the road and go. I argued we should take the shorter route and head toward Tower-Roosevelt. Jeff argued we should take the other route through Norris. Either way we were going to be driving past tourist spots we wanted to see, but the route I wanted to take would take us past more.

I “won” the argument, and we ended up doing nearly half of the park in a single day. Oops!

Our first stop was Mud Volcano, a trail of various mud pots and hot springs. While our daughter once again struggled with the occasional sulfur cloud, our son couldn’t get enough of the boiling mud rising to the surface.

As we continued our drive north, we ran into one of the many infamous Yellowstone traffic jams, only this one was worth the stop. We experienced a rare daytime black wolf sighting off of the road. Since Jeff had a better zoom camera on his phone, he was able to snap a picture of the four-footed beauty, which we originally thought might be a black bear.

Then, our son and I started chasing waterfalls.

The Lower and Upper Falls of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone are on the way to Canyon Village. We took the South Rim Drive to the Lower Falls overlook, stopping for a peek at the Upper Falls along the way. Then we headed toward the North Rim Drive to Canyon Village, where we stopped for a picnic lunch in our tailgate before continuing to chase waterfall views.

There were plenty of ways to see both the Upper and Lower Falls along the North Rim Drive, but we chose to make our primary stop the hike to the brink, which would take us to the top of the Lower Falls. It is a 0.4-mile trail (and 600-foot drop) to stunning views, but after the long, steep hike, we were ready to just continue on to Canyon Village.

Unfortunately, there had been a shooting at Canyon Village only a few days before, so the visitor center was closed during the investigation, but we were still able to take a break at the gift shops and look around before we continued on our drive north and west.

Before we arrived at Tower-Roosevelt, we witnessed our second rare animal sighting on the side of the road, joining several other tourists in taking pictures of the black bear ambling in the sagebrush.

We stopped at Tower Fall, then drove around the grounds at Tower-Roosevelt, but we were now in a race against the clock. We enjoyed the beauty of Yellowstone, driving past hills and rivers as we climbed once again to the Mammoth Hot Springs region of the park.

My family stayed at the Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel when I was a kid, and while I don’t remember much about the whole park, I do remember the hotel. And Jeff and I had enjoyed our hike around the hot springs when we visited in our 20s. We had been hoping to make it to the visitor center before it closed so we could tour the Fort Yellowstone historical buildings (the US Army administered the park until the early 1900s), but all of our other siteseeing for the day slowed us down. Instead, we would have to just enjoy some ice cream at the hotel complex and then a hike around the ever changing hot springs. We ended our day of siteseeing with a drive around the Upper Terrace Area, the whole reason we had made this our first day final destination.

While I wouldn’t recommend doing everything we did in a single day in Yellowstone, it was a really good vacation day. Our kids saw every type of landmark there is to see in the national park and we got to relive early marriage memories. Most importantly, our kids started falling in love with one of our favorite national parks, just like we hoped they would.

It was time to fix a late dinner and crash into bed so we could do it all over again.

Get a copy of my planning spreadsheet below:

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