Yellowstone has been on Fabiola's list for years. Not a casual "we should go sometime" list, an actual dream. So when the odometer finally clicked past 1,833 miles from where this leg started and we parked outside the west entrance, it felt like a bigger deal than most arrivals do.
Day one had a simple plan. Beat the crowds, go straight to Old Faithful, work our way back slowly. Almost none of it survived contact with the park, and one part of it we got spectacularly wrong.
This is part one of three.
The night before: a golf course, a fake beer, and a truck alarm
We came in from Rapid City on a double travel day, which is not our normal style. The stretch between Billings and the park is beautiful and also narrow and windy, following a river with big views on both sides. Nathan drove all of it. Fabiola supervised.
We stopped overnight at a Harvest Hosts location, which is usually one of the easiest parts of a trip like this. This one was a golf course, our first, and it went sideways in small ways. You are supposed to spend a little money at the host, so we went to the bar. The kitchen had closed at 5. Fabiola ordered a Blue Moon and only worked out afterward that they had poured her the non-alcoholic version. They had Wi-Fi, and nobody working there knew the password.
Then at some point in the middle of the night, the truck alarm went off.
That has never happened before, and we have parked overnight hitched up plenty of times. We had also just read that the town we were sitting in has a high crime rate, which is exactly the kind of fact you do not want rattling around your head at 2 a.m. Nathan got as far as reaching for the bat he keeps in the rig. Fabiola talked him out of going outside, on the grounds that walking into the dark to investigate a noise is how people die in every horror movie she has ever watched.
Nobody went outside. Nothing was taken. Nobody slept much either.
The west entrance at 7:50 a.m.
We wanted to be through the gate before 9 and we made it with room to spare, and there was still traffic.
Yellowstone gets somewhere close to 4.8 million visitors a year, and you feel every one of them at the entrance station. There are multiple lanes, the prepaid lane is on the right, and there is a left lane that does not announce itself as open but is. If you are coming in from West Yellowstone, the tour buses and vans run from the hotels there, so driving yourself is not the only option.
The thing that actually saved us time was the America the Beautiful annual pass. We bought ours back at the Badlands, and it counts as prepaid here. We handed over an ID and the pass and drove straight through while the other lines barely moved. If you are hitting more than two or three parks in a year it pays for itself, and on a busy morning it buys you something better than money.
One driver in the queue did not agree with how the lines were working and swerved in front of us to skip ahead. It was 8 in the morning, at a national park. Our truck is considerably bigger than her car, which Nathan pointed out and then slowed down anyway.
We drove two hours to Old Faithful and missed it by minutes
Old Faithful has a small town built around it. Parking lot, visitor center, restaurants, restrooms, a hotel. We got there after almost two hours on park roads, walked out to the geyser, and found the boardwalk strangely empty.
That is because it had just gone off. We missed the eruption by minutes, and the crowd had already scattered.
So we did the thing you should do anyway and walked the nearby basin while we waited for the next one. The smell hits first. It is sulfur, and it smells exactly like boiling eggs, to the point where both of us admitted to being a little hungry. The springs themselves are clearer than we expected, some of them so clean you can see the water moving down into the channel that feeds the river.
We also learned something standing there. A guide nearby was explaining to someone else that the bubbling you see in a lot of these pools is not boiling at all, it is volcanic gas coming up through the water. Some of the pools really are boiling, and you can tell those by the steam coming off the surface. We had been calling everything boiling for half an hour.
The other thing nobody warns you about: the park sits around 7,000 feet. Walking the boardwalks is flat and easy and Nathan, who has asthma, still noticed he was working harder to breathe than the terrain deserved.
Then we went back, waited with everyone else, and watched it go. It is more water than you picture, and it goes on longer than you picture.
Grand Prismatic, and the international airport effect
Grand Prismatic Spring was as crowded as we expected and worth it anyway.
The part that stuck with us was the sound. Standing in that crowd you hear four or five languages in thirty seconds, which Fabiola said reminded her of an international airport more than a national park. People come from everywhere for this one.
What we watched happen over the course of the day is the parking filling up. Lot by lot, road by road, it gets tighter through the afternoon. We were there on a weekday. A weekend would be worse. Come early is not a clever tip, it is just the tip.
"Where does this road go?"
By late afternoon we were finished, tired, and headed back, and then we did the thing that always pays off: we took a road because we did not know where it went.
It was Firehole Canyon. There is a waterfall on it. There was almost nobody there. After a day of shuffling along boardwalks behind a few thousand people, a quiet canyon and a waterfall with no line for it was the best twenty minutes of the day.
Two things that made the day work
Get up earlier than feels reasonable. Nathan was up at 5:30 making breakfast and woke Fabiola at 5:50. The salad, fruit, and snacks were packed the night before. That is the only reason we were at the gate before 8 instead of sitting in the long line at 10.
Download the National Park Service app before you lose signal. Cell service inside the park is patchy at best, and Fabiola had one bar for most of the morning. The app does offline downloads of directions and facilities, and it carries eruption predictions for several of the geysers. They are close enough to plan around. If it says you have an hour before Old Faithful, you can go walk the basin and come back, which is exactly the mistake we would not have made if we had checked it first.
A hotel on a volcano
The strangest fact about Old Faithful is that you can sleep there. There is a hotel inside the park, right by the geyser, and the rates Fabiola found while researching ran into the hundreds of dollars a night.
You would be sleeping on a volcano. That is not a figure of speech. The whole basin is heated by magma sitting under it, and the reason this part of the park looks the way it does, wide and open without the mountains you would expect, is that the hotspot has been working on it for a very long time. The Snake River Plain to the west is the track it left behind.
Fabiola got to stand in a place she had been thinking about for years. Nathan got to watch her do it. We were both wrecked by 6 p.m., and we had a birthday party to get to on the phone that evening, Brazilian side of the family, for her sister's daughter.
Day one of three. We are still in the park for the next two.
If you want to see where this leg started, the drive that got us into South Dakota is in our 600 mile run to the Badlands, and the hike that ended that stretch is in the Notch Trail post. We also send a short weekly newsletter with where we are and what broke this week.