Monday, June 30, 2008

I packed us a lunch for today of ham and cheese sandwiches, potato salad and cake. We ate breakfast and left out sight-seeing around 7:30 am (MT). We headed towards Old Faithful.


Along the way we stopped at some thermal pools at West Thumb Geyser Basin. The thermal pools are beautiful and fascinating to me. The pools are different colors, some spout water and some bubble.


We made it to Old Faithful. It isn't as "faithful" as it used to be. They say it used to spout its water every hour and now it is about 90 minutes in between spouts. It teased us a bit... spurting steam and just a bit of water.... and then 15 or 20 minutes after the time it was suppose to spout it began its show. It was beautiful!


Afterwards we took the cameras back to the truck. We went into the visitor's center, but there were too many people in there... so we left there and found a shade to stand in.... it was about 80 degrees and felt warmer in the sun. Frank called his folks. All was fine at home.. they had some rain.


Then we went on to the Black Sand Basin. The thermal pools there were very beautiful. One was opalescent. There was one that spouted water pretty high. I took a couple of pictures of the edges of the pools. One had some insects in it... including a moth. There were more basins, but the parking lots were full so we didn't stop at them... I think we saw the prettiest ones anyway.


We stopped and had our lunch at one of the picnic areas near Fairy Falls. Lot of dust kicked up by vehicles coming into the picnic area... hopefully we didn't eat too much of it. The mosquitoes liked Frank and not me... very unusual. At the picnic area a girl came out of the restroom (pit toilet) and said that it was the grossest restroom she had ever been in. Her younger brother hearing this went to the trees :-)


Not far past the picnic area I could smell that it had rained. None had hit us... but the smell of dirt that had been rained on was nice.


We saw more bison along the drive. We drove the Fountain Flat and Fire Hole Canyon Drives. Both nice little drives.... the latter had a waterfall. We couldn't stop.. the parking spaces were all full.


As we neared home we ran into rain. It was only a light rain. When we got back to the trailer it looked like it had came down hard there. The temperature had dropped to 56 degrees by 2:30 pm (MT)


A beautiful and fun day... but saw no bear :-(