Travels with haRVy

Waiting for Old Faithful, which isn’t quite as regular as it used to be.

If you can only get to one National Park in your lifetime, make it Yellowstone, the world’s first national park. You will not be disappointed! The 2,219,789 acre park (larger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined) is home to one of the world’s largest calderas with over 10,000 thermal features and more than 300 geysers. It has over 290 waterfalls with the 308′ Lower Falls of the Yellowstone River as it’s showpiece. Yellowstone Lake is the largest (132 sq. mi.) high altitude (7,732′) lake in north america.

But once it blows…

Seven species of ungulates (bison, moose, elk, pronghorn), two species of bear, 67 other mammals, 322 species of birds, 16 species of fish and the gray wolf live here. There are over 1,100 species of native plants, more than 200 species of exotic plants and over 400 species of thermopholes (bet you don’t even know what those are), plus one of the world’s largest petrified forests.

Warning: Don’t go until you can stay for at least a week. That’s how long we were there and I could have easily stayed for a month, or even longer to fully explore and savor all the park has to offer.

We took so many photographs that it will take several blog posts just to feature the best. Al and I were both totally blown away every time we turned around. So, on with the show…

It is pretty impressive!

Of course everyone has to see Old Faithful, but there are MANY other interesting and equally impressive geysers to witness. Doing so requires walking many miles of boardwalks and a bit (or more) of patience.

One of our personal favorites was Riverside Geyser, which we were lucky to watch erupt for some 15 to 20 minutes.

Here are a few others…

This one was just about 12-inches tall.

Steamboat Geyser is reportedly the World’s Tallest currently active geyser, erupting up to 300 feet in the air. Unfortunately, it only does so at intervals ranging from four days to fifty years so we only got to see it spurt a bit.

Several other types of geo-thermal features will be included in my next post. Stay tuned…