Yellowstone National Park
We were lucky enough to meet up with my mom and aunt as they did a summer road trip visiting a bunch of National Parks. We got to leave our bus behind and ride with them for a couple days, which was great because parking was difficult all over the park. Yellowstone was the busiest park we’d visited since Joshua Tree, I think one night it took us an hour to drive 8 miles because we got caught in the traffic jam of people trying to leave.
Our best bison encounter happened 15 minutes after entering the park on the first day. This big guy was strolling along the road, and we managed to get a spot in a pull-off a little bit ahead of him to have a close but SAFE encounter.
The Grand Canyon of Yellowstone
My family took a road trip from Michigan to California when I was in high school, and among other things we stopped at Yellowstone, Badlands, and Redwoods. I remember a decent amount from our Yellowstone visit, but I somehow had no memory of the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone.
Mammoth Hot Springs
On our first day we did the north loop, but the weather was pretty bad so we didn’t get to make many stops. On our second day we did the south loop and had moderately better weather, so we got to see quite a few springs and geysers.
We spent most of the third day in camp, resting for a difficult hike the day after. But I made a short trip into the wilderness at sunset for some photos of the local peaks.
Sepulcher Mountain
Yellowstone isn’t a park where you need to necessarily do big hikes to see the sights, but we still wanted to get up a mountain. This was probably the most difficult hike we had done at this point on the trip (13 miles, 3300 ft of elevation gain), but the sights were worth it.
On our last full day, we re-visited a few areas and explored them a little more.
