A thousand miles to Yellowstone - the day we understood - pt 5.

Waking up in Yellowstone is something magical!
Waking up and having an elk right in front of your window is something beyond imagination!!!

We were there for two nights and 3 days, each day completely different to each other. It was like living in different dimensions, or something.

That day we started by walking up all around the lower terraces! They are called like that because the hot water from the spring brings calcium carbonate to the surface, and over the years it has settled creating little pools along the hillside.

This place is actually located outside the caldera, but its energy has been attributed to the same magmatic system that fuels other Yellowstone geothermal areas. (taken word by word from Wikipedia, I thought I couldn't have said it in a better way)



We then set off to visit the Canyon! Or as they call it "The Grand Canyon of Yellowstone".

Our first stop was the Upper falls. The power of that water is beyond imagination, there you feel how strong nature really is.

I don't know if you can see but at the top right corner of my picture there are little ants standing by the waterfall, those are people! With places like these you cannot really imagine the dimensions unless there is a person standing somewhere near it.

The river actually bends right before the fall, you cannot see it in the picture, but I was amazed as to how water always finds the easiest way through. I read the rock where the river bends is less hard than the one straight ahead.

Then we went to my favorite place of the trip - "The Lower Falls", and the best place to see it from is "Artist's Point". Needless to say I made a painting of it. AMAZING!

Yellowstone gets its name from this place, from the yellow stone you see there. Wonderful!

The colours in here are splendid, but once again I got this feeling of almost flatness, of not being able to tell the depth of this canyon. Some people say the same thing about Grand Canyon in Arizona. Guess we were not made with "canyon depth calculator".



We had a picnic and went over to Lamar Valley. (Remember, when doing anything outdoorsy in Yellowstone, bring your mosquito repellent with you! Pretty dumb suggestion but we managed to forget it every time!)

In Lamar Valley we went looking for bears!!! We saw lots of spots in the distance that looked like bears, we took pictures of spots in the distance with our very good zooms, but nothing that said definitely a bear. Lots of bison, lots of trees, rocks, grass...fields....and then lots of cars, what are they doing all crammed in there (and for Yellowstone crammed isn't a word one uses a lot). And when we went to investigate, there they were!!! Three black bears!!! (in the pic you only see two, my bad) One was actually a cinnamon coloured black bearess! Had no idea they could be different colours! but the nice old ranger told me all about that!




Today we hit 1500 miles, half way. And tomorrow we are heading west, but that is a different story.