Yellowstone Day 2

Day 2 - I woke up Monday morning and opened the curtains to see what the day was looking like and to my surprise the ground was covered in snow. I immediately told Jamie he needed to come look out the window to see this. Our hotel was at about 5,500 ft and we were planning to go to Old Faithful that day which is close to 7,000ft.

We decided to start driving and see what the conditions would be like and hope that it would start melting off as the day went on. We stopped a couple miles up the road to take some pictures of the winter wonderland we encountered.

The roads weren't very icy and had been salted so we continued up to Old Faithful. The drive was beautiful and seeing the bison out in the clearings surrounded by snow was such a treat. I never thought I would see Yellowstone in quite this way.

We made a couple of stops along the way to look at different sites. This was the first one we had stopped at and we were obviously the first ones there. The snow was untouched except for a few animal tracks along the way. There were a few inches of snow to trek through but it was fun to be the first ones there. The snow was really light and powdery, the wind would just blow it gently off the trees.

With the colder weather it made all the sites even more dramatic with the steam rising off the ground. It also made it much easier to see the hot spots!

All the steam stretching up to the clouds was an amazing site!

The bison liked the hot spots because it exposed all the grass to graze on!

They also liked traveling along the roads, it's much easier than trying to go through all the snow.

We finally made our way to Old Faithful and got to see it go off around 11 am. It goes off every 90 minutes or so. Unfortunately, a lot of the trails around the other geothermal sites were closed because a dead carcass was located on part of it and had attracted a Grizzly to the area. We did see Old Faithful Inn and it was amazing, the architecture was fantastic. It was made to look like a forest inside and they used plenty of trees to create it. It's definitely a must see if you are in the area.

We did manage to see a few other sites in a different part of the area. The pictures came out better than we thought. With all the steam we couldn't see much of anything but the camera certainly captured the color.

There were plenty of boiling spots and mud pots.

The colors were really spectacular and it's amazing to think small bacteria thrive in the springs.

We made our way back to our hotel around mid-afternoon and the snow had more or less melted by then. On our way home we did see two bears in different locations. One of them was only about 20 feet from deer but they both seemed content just grazing on the grass and shoots. You can just see the bear through the trees. We weren't expecting snow but we were prepared for cold, wet weather. It actually wasn't too bad as long as the wind wasn't blowing.