Grand Prismatic Spring and Old Faithful Revisited

Sunday

Our last full day.

 We really pushed ourselves by going to the Grand Prismatic Spring, which we had missed due to bad weather when we were at Old Faithful. We set off with a packed lunch and arrived at Old Faithful just in time to find a seat and watch the geyser do its thing, I suppose that’s why it’ called Old Faithful. The weather was now warm and sunny, but there were some big clouds away in the distance. We ate our lunch and traveled on to the Midway Geyser Basin, where the Grand Prismatic Spring is. This spring is absolutely amazing, the colours produced by those little thermopiles is quite spectacular. We stood for some time taking in the scene, even though at ground level one cannot see the whole lake, oh for a helicopter. I managed to get some nice pics, probably too many, but it was very enjoyable just snapping away. We were now in a race with the weather as a huge storm cloud was approaching against the wind, so we knew it was bad news and we were quite exposed, still we saw all we wanted and returned to the car, just as the first spots of rain fell.

We continued round the southern loop road through Norris, leaving the rain behind,  and stopped at Canyon Village for just one more Prime Rib meal at the Cafeteria, where we had enjoyed talking with the staff there, who are all student summer employees from many parts of the USA and abroad. We had met young people from North and South Carolina, Delaware, Oregon, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Colorado as well as a girl from Poland. They were very interesting to talk with.

The evening was sunny as we drove down the Hayden Valley, where on looking down at a roadside lake we saw something swimming in the water, we stopped and watched – it was an otter. Lovely to see it swimming in and around the reeds at the waters edge. We also saw many bison and elk along the roadway.  We took a short ride past the campground to Pelican Creek, where I had taken some evening pictures a couple of nights back, now however the water was absolutely flat and I took some more pretty pics, a lovely one of a grebe. We returned to the trailer tired out, to find that the big storm we had seen and missed had spread snow and ice rain through other parts of the Yellowstone National Park, so we were pleased to have missed that.