Day 11 – Thursday, July 30 (Yellowstone 1 – Old Faithful, the Upper Geyser Basin, and Mystic Falls)

We slept in today after going to bed after midnight last night. After a perfunctory breakfast of yogurt and coffee, we headed north into Yellowstone, through 25 miles of road construction which allowed us to take our sweet time and get lots of pictures of the Lewis River. Our main goal for the day was to see Old Faithful, and the famous geyser (known as the Statue of Liberty of the West) did not disappoint us. After wading through the crush of people near the geyser, we hiked a mile to an observation overlook where we watched Old Faithful, Grand Geyser, and Castle Geyser erupt simultaneously.

We walked back down into the maddening crowds for a foray into a cafeteria and gift shop (where Joy spotted some nifty stickers for the pop-up) , then we drove to the Upper Geyser Basin, also known as Biscuit Basin, where Vicki had picked out a 4-mile hike to Mystic Falls for us. I was not prepared to be as fascinated as I was with the sight of water bubbling out of the earth from bottomless pools of water colored opal, turquoise, and sage. We walked on a raised boardwalk through the Biscuit Basin through a landscape unlike anything I have ever seen before, gaping at the boiling water bubbling up from the cauldron below, and then embarked on our hike to the falls.

After the unearthly landscape of Biscuit Basin, the trail to Mystic Falls through a reforestation of Ponderosa Pines (so much of Yellowstone forests are recovering from the great fire of 1988, which destroyed over a third of the park) guided us through much more familiar territory. We hiked along a river for awhile before rounding a bend that revealed the Mystic Falls – where we stopped to gape and take a bunch of pictures. The falls were beautiful and wild, but what made them unique for me was the steam vents that bordered them at intervals.

We continued to climb to the top of the falls and kept ascending to the top of a ridge that gave us a panoramic view of all of the geyser basins toward the south. Along the way, we ran into an Italian woman who was looking for her husband, who had ventured off into the scrub pines along the ridge to take a leak and then had not returned for 20 minutes. She was beginning to get worried, she told us. Just as I was beginning my search for the man, Vicki remembered seeing a fellow who was calling out a woman’s name as he hiked down the trail. She described him to the woman who was very relieved to know her husband was probably just ahead of her on the path instead of lost in the woods.

Even though we had only driven 50 miles into the park, road construction for the first 25 miles made for a 90 minute return trip, and when we got back to the van at 6 pm, we decided to return to our trailer and have supper. Vicki cooked ham on the grill (it’s bear country) and after supper, we enjoyed s’mores and songs by the fire (our first since starting this trip).