Travel stories: Yellowstone - an amazing adventure!

I'm so very excited to finally get to share this breathtaking adventure with you guys! In our road trip of 2010 we got to spend two full days exploring one of Americas best kept treasures. After spending a few days with our awesome new friends in Seattle we drove westward through Idaho & Montana and I have to tell you all, WOW! The mountains are spectacular!

So our plan was to find a motel in the town of West Yellowstone and use as a base for exploring the park. We were driving down the 191 which took us through the outer edge of the park when we spotted a group of cars by the side of the road and a lot of excited people pointing at something. We didn't know that then but this is your surest sign that there is wild animals to be seen.  We pulled up and I couldn't believe it. It was a Grizzly! Even though there is probably no other beast I fear as much my excitement took the upper hand and I dashed out with my new Video camera. Hopefully it will make the video I'm editing simultaneously while working on this entry, but I was shaking pretty bad while filming it!

As you can see it is pretty far away but these guys are fast. However there has only been one fatal attack by Grizzlies in Yellowstone for 25 years so there's no need to be that afraid. I'd recommend to keep your distance and always have a good strategy to get back to your car fast. After this incredible lucky encounter we drove down to West Yellowstone to find a motel. The small town is just packed with motels and restaurants. It's quite small and has that old western feel to it. We found a decent motel and took a stroll down main street. We found a great book shop and got some really neat books on American history. We picked a up som local brew and headed back to the motel to do some resting and planning.

These motel nights kicking back with some new microbrews and just relaxing are one of my favorite parts with road tripping. We finally fell asleep and all the sudden it was up and at it again. We felt we needed to go to bed early so we could do as much of the park as possible since we were also doing the rodeo in Cody later that night which was quite the drive. I'm not gonna go into that now since I covered it in a video you can see here. So we drove into the park and it's just amazing how much there is to see.

The first thing we checked out were some of the many thermal pools. Yellowstone sits right on a huge crater of an active volcano, and all over the park there is displays of those violent forces within. Some of these displays have resulted in really beautiful works of art crafted by nature itself. There are plenty of thermal pools and these first ones are nothing in comparison with some I will show you real soon. The park is huge and i s the same size as a smaller landscape in Sweden. There is a bit of driving involved but it's not a big deal since there is so much to see from the park. All over the park we spotted people fishing in the many rivers and creeks. My father in law is quite the fly fisher so I think he would love it here!

The road in the park does kind of a big circle with a road cutting through the middle. We decided on doing the north half circle first and do the southern part the next day. We didn't see any more grizzlies so we understand that we were lucky on the drive down. The main attraction on the north part is Mammoth hot springs. A really awesome formation made by a collection of hot springs that bring minerals up to the surface. All around the park boardwalks let you get really close to the sights without risk of destroying them.

It's kinda hard to describe all what we saw in just words, luckily my wife is a great photographer. She takes almost all the pictures I use on the blog and I'll let her pictures do most of the talking. We explored the rest of the northern parts before driving down to Cody and the rodeo. As I said earlier I'm not gonna tell you about that right now but it meant we had to drive back through the park at night. Very adventurous but nothing I recommend at all. I was terrified of hitting something in the dark. Being stuck in Yellowstone with a bunch of hungry bears is not something I would like to endure. Anyways, next morning it was time for the parks big star, Old Faithfull! We bought breakfast and got ready for a long wait since it's about 90 minutes between the eruptions, however we got lucky. we arrived just when the show went down. And it's a show!

We wrapped it all up by going to the grand prismatic spring which is a huge thermal pool with an amazing variety of colors. It was the perfect ending of a new love affair. Yellowstone, I promise we will see you again!