Yellowstone is a very large national park; to be exact it is 2,221,766 acres.  At 3,472 square miles, that makes it larger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined. Yellowstone was our first National Park, established in 1872. Here is the famous Arch that stands at the park’s North Entrance.  Theodore Roosevelt actually laid the cornerstone of this arch.

We don’t really like getting up so early (around 4:30 to 5:00 am) but we know that getting an early start allows us to see sunrises and to start the day before most of the other tourists even think about getting up.  We left the Grand Tetons and thought we would be in Yellowstone by 6:30 or 7:00 but it was almost 10:00 before we reached our first stop at at Lewis Falls.

Our next stop was at Old Faithful and William and I both were very surprised to see three 30 foot Pacific Yurts here next to the visitor center.

We didn’t wait around for Old Faithful to go off as we will be staying in the Old Faithful Cabins tomorrow and will explore this area more then.

Seeing Grand Prismatic Spring was spectacular.  This Spring is the largest and most brilliant of Yellowstone’s many colorful hot springs.  After walking around the Spring we hiked up to the top of Fairy Falls to get the overlook onto Grand Prismatic.

The FireHole Lake drive was quite interesting.  We were amazed that there are geysers and hot springs everywhere you look in this area.

We also hiked out to see the Fountain Paint Pots.  Paint or mud pots are basically hot springs with limited amounts of water.  They bubble and spew mud instead of spouting out lots of water.

Our last stop of the day was at theNorris Geyser Basin.  We walked out to Steamboat Geyser but opted not to do the hike all round this Basin

This had already been a very long day for us so we continued driving to the North Entrance to our hotel in Gardiner, Montana.  After all, we will be getting up about 5:00 AM in the morning so we can get out to see the animals while they were most active.