Yellowstone National Park

Hooray!! after nearly a year of busy schedule at work, I am finally free (well partly atleast). I was wondering how to best spend the lean time and decided to kick-off by going on a group trip to Yellowstone National Park. This was one of those trips that was a lot of fun from the day we left home till I got back home.

Old Faithful Geyser

I'm usually scared of animals and when I agreed to go on this trip, I really wasn't sure as to what I had gotten myself into as YNP is filled with wildlife. We didn't see much of Wildlife on the first day. It was more of Old faithful Geyser and other smaller geysers near it. Despite stinking so badly they all looked very colorful and no two geysers looked alike. Rain did play some spoil-sport in the morning...but I guess our prayers were answered with nice sunshine later in the afternoon. We walked up and down the trail to see all the smaller geysers near Old faithful.

Trail near Old Faithful

Since the temperature was close to freezing temp there was a lot of steam near the geysers, which I thought was pretty cool. We also saw some waterfalls, I personally liked the Gibbon falls more than the other waterfalls I had seen that day.

Gibbon Waterfalls

On our way back to the cabin, we got to see Bison herds walking all over the roads not caring about traffic. Bisons looked more like the cousins of Buffaloes (I guess everybody knows this already).

Bison Grazing


More Bison

Next day began with Norris Geyser basin on our way we saw some Elks just hanging around, well this was more of geysers and bacteria growing near them and stuff. These bacteria are called Thermophiles (every time I hear this, the word pedophile comes to my mind, which is pretty weird!!) and they thrive well near these hot springs and geysers.

Bacteria

We kept going and we came across more waterfalls and snow. As we proceeded north, the elevation increased and the whole place was filled with snow. It completely reminded me of Tahoe. In the afternoon, we got to see some Moose grazing, it felt so good to see something other than Bison and Elks :P.

Moose grazing

Then we drove for a while until we saw lots of people waiting with their telescopes and binoculars. We were curious too and so we stopped by to see what was going on near Tower falls. On our way to Tower falls, we got to see Black bear at a distance. We always had to maintain atleast a 100 meters distance from the bears...so, we could never get to see it like we would in a zoo. I somehow think Tower falls was more picture perfect than the other falls that we saw.

Tower Falls

After watching the bear, we drove around and finally ended up at the Grand Canyon of the yellowstone.

Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone

It was quite amazing although I was a little scared on the insides. It really, truly gives you a sound sense of proportions even if you aren't good at math. I felt so small staring at the breathtaking canyon, the waterfalls in the canyon was beautiful too. The canyon was the highlight for the first two days.

On the third day we had no real agenda in place, in order to cover the areas left out we decided to leave more than an hour earlier than our usual time. In fact all of us got ready and we were so happy that we have more time than usual and wanted to make the most of it, only to get stuck in bison traffic for more than hour. I was quite frustrated during the wait, but on seeing the bisons, I forgot it all. We went to see the yellowstone lake, it was completely frozen. I've never seen such a huge water body completely frozen before.

Frozen Yellowstone Lake

It was really beautiful. On our way, we even saw a wolf. I have to mention that despite being smaller than all the other animals that I got to see, the wolf looked the most cunning and ferocious. I guess I'll remember it for my entire lifetime as to what its really like to stare at a wolf and have it stare back at you. It was a really dull day and we went on see Mammoth springs and also visited more geysers before returning to the Cabin.
In order to keep the size of the post from being too large and lengthy, I haven't added quite a bit of beautiful photos that we took at YNP. I'll have another post exclusively for the interesting photos taken at Yellowstone.
For some reason, I felt that we weren't lucky with much of wildlife viewing, but after talking to people at work, I realized that I was a lot luckier than most people as most of them weren't even lucky enough to see the bison close by. That made me feel lot more happier ;).
Over all, this was one of the most joyful and satisfying trip I've gone on and the memories of it I'm sure will definitely linger for a long long time.