This is a guest post by my friend Rohith who shares with us some great memories and experiences from his recent Yellowstone trip. Have a good read and enjoy the photographs! 🙂
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This year’s 4th of July, we chose to pay a visit to the world famous Yellowstone National Park located in the states of Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho. Sitting on an active super volcano and known for its geysers and hot springs, Yellowstone is the first national park in the U.S.
As I flew out of Portland to meet my friend who works in Helena, more friends joined us there from Seattle and Memphis. After some late night shenanigans on the day we met, we woke up the next day to start our exciting journey towards Yellowstone. While a group of our gang headed to reserve a camping place near Mammoth Springs, another group ran to Walmart to buy camping gear.
We hit the road and took I-90 towards Billings and exit 408, which lead us to the hilly road on US-212W. The views from 11000 ft above sea level were breath-taking and we were fortunate enough to spot various fauna like squirrels, racoons, bears, bisons, deers, antelopes etc all along our way. We reached Cooke city, gassed-up our cars and cruised towards Mammoth Springs exploring wonderful valleys, beautiful meandering rivers and wide vistas spotting herds of bisons here and there.
As we entered the park, cell phone signals weakend and the offline maps came handy. We stopped at Tower Falls, which though is beautiful, is just yet another waterfall. We reached Mammoth Springs by night where we met our other group that went ahead of us to reserve a camp site, and who knew this whole plan would be one of our best trips so far in the US. We cozied up by a campfire and as we gazed at the stunning starry night sky, I went on cherishing my beautiful childhood nights spent in my village back in India when I used to fall asleep looking at the countless shining stars under the vast clear night skies. The whole experience was magical and even more special as it brought back a lot of great memories.
Next day in the morning we first visited Mammoth springs. That was the first time in my life to see a hot spring and I was astonished by it. As we continued, we stopped all along our road taking in the scenic beauty around us. We loved the Turquoise colored Prismatic Springs and did not leave a single chance to take great photographs.
We then headed to Old Faithful to have our lunch and later went to the see the spectacular eruption of it. The geyser is named Old Faithful because of its consistent and predictable eruption timing through years.
Next stops were the Yellowstone lake and Mud springs. Yellowstone lake was serene and calm but Mud springs were pungent and we didn’t want to explore more. We reached upper and lower falls around 7 PM that day, but we couldn’t go closer to falls as we were short of time. On our way back, we stopped at Chico hot springs which are man-made pools filled with natural spring water. We relaxed and swam there and had a wonderful time.
We spent the last two days of our trip visiting surrounding places of Helena and had fun time playing cards, swimming, bowling and eating a lot of home-cooked food by our friend. We made some wonderful memories and had experiences of a life time.
Yellowstone is place where even after exploring it for one whole week, you will still have much of it left unseen. I suggest to make arrangements in advance if you want to stay in a motel close by, as the rooms get booked months in advance and get expensive if you are close.
I hope you enjoyed reading my experiences. So pack your bags, and get set go to Yellowstone! 🙂
Ethereal Burst 