So, I had intended to start slowly and kind of ease into the high level of arduous physical activity that I expected to be doing while I was out there…but that isn’t what ended up happening at all. Instead, this first full day in the park turned out to be a long and exhausting one (but very, very rewarding/worthwhile!).
I spent the morning at Upper Geyser Basin (aka the Old Faithful area). Jen & I walked the boardwalks and saw the thermal features here pretty thoroughly 7 years ago (there are a bazillion of them), but I wanted to do it again. I managed to catch the eruptions of three different geysers during the morning: Daisy, Sawmill, and of course Old Faithful itself. Daisy is one that the park service posts predicted eruption times for, and I happened by at a time when a large crowd had gathered—a sure sign that a predicted eruption was imminent. So, I paused and waited with the crowd until it spectacularly went off. Sawmill I had walked past earlier (when it was doing nothing), but after Daisy went off, I chanced by it again as I looped back toward an area that I had skipped, and as I approached, it just started doing its thing! That was pretty cool. It’s a smaller geyser, but one where the boardwalk approaches closely enough that you can get wet from the spray—which I did. Finally, when it was past noon and I was good and ready for some lunch and thus heading back toward the Visitor Center (beyond which lie parking lots and my car), I gleaned from others (and from the huge crowd that had gathered) that Old Faithful itself was about to go. Perfect timing! I even captured the eruption via video with my camera.
I took a ton of pictures of the various thermal features; below is just a sampling:
At the farthest extremity of the maze of boardwalks is Morning Glory—one of the more famous hot springs in the area. It was gorgeous, of course, and I took pictures (see below).
Among the other people who were near Morning Glory at the same time that I was, there was a guy who was saying to someone he was with that it had to be “pretty much the premier hot spring to see here,” or words to that effect—spoken not in awed tones, as though he were actually deeply impressed by it, but in matter-of-fact tones, as though mostly in deference to it being something that he’d heard of before, or something. Even so, I half-agreed with the sentiment in one sense; Morning Glory is, indeed, a really pretty sight, after all—even more so than many of the others. But I also thought it a pretty sweeping and (without meaning to be overly judgmental) sort of ignorant comment, especially if by “here” he meant in the entire park (I mean, for starters, ever heard of something called Grand Prismatic Spring?). Yellowstone’s a big park, with a lot to see (even limiting ourselves just to hot springs for the moment), I thought to myself—and just because something is named, famous, and on an easily accessible boardwalk doesn’t mean it’s automatically the best. Though of course, the boardwalks and visitor centers and whatnot do tend to get built to provide access to as many of the most impressive sights as possible, so…but whatever. Point is, to my mind this guy didn’t really know what he was talking about.
So, like I said, Morning Glory is kind of at the end of the farthest boardwalk…but you can go on still further. There’s no more boardwalk, but a bone fide hiking trail begins nearby and heads into some “back country” (more or less) and past some additional (named) thermal features (and then onward to another area if you go far enough). I decided to explore this trail at least far enough to see the couple of named springs that my area map showed just down the trail. And that’s how, maybe three minutes’ walk beyond Morning Glory, I came upon what to me was an even more stunning hot spring. Morning Glory, for all its beauty, is said to be “fading” somewhat; the intense blue coloring for which it is famous is now less intense than it once was (and only covers part of the spring), due to changes resulting mainly from vandalism (people throw stuff in, it blocks the “plumbing” and prevents circulation, the temperature goes down, and different organisms that like the lower temperatures and that produce different colors take up residence). Anyway, this other spring was more stunningly, intensely blue than Morning Glory currently is, and the view of it from the peaceful and secluded trail (very different from the crowded boardwalks that I’d just left behind) was looking down from above, into its depths—with a panoramic vista of mountains and trees as a backdrop, and a waning half-moon hanging in the sky overhead. Upon taking in this scene, I suddenly experienced a second moment rather like the one that I’d had right after entering the park on the previous day: a sort of breathless-yet-calm moment of pure joy. Wow.
That, then, was the first half of my day. Leaving the Old Faithful area, I was in search of a nice picnic spot and more than ready to escape crowds (and, once I was in the car trying to thread my way out of the area, quite eager to escape traffic as well). Alas, there was a bit of a mishap here. Shortly after turning out onto the main road heading north, as I was passing the turnoff for Midway Geyser Basin (I think that was where it was, at least), a vehicle two or three cars ahead of me slammed very suddenly on the breaks, causing a chain reaction of cars lurching to a stop. Unfortunately, the driver ahead of me slammed on his break at the precise second when I had turned my head to the side, just for an instant, trying to read a sign or something. When I turned face forward again, I was careening toward a stopped car way too quickly (even though I really wasn’t going very fast at all; it was a bit of a traffic jam, with everyone basically crawling along). So, I rear-ended the vehicle in front of me. It was just a fender-bender; no one was hurt, and my car wasn’t damaged…but there was some slight damage visible to the other car’s rear bumper, and I’m afraid of what it’s going to do to my insurance premiums. But he was very understanding about it, we exchanged insurance info, and I moved on and didn’t dwell. I ended up at Whiskey Flats, the picnic area that Jen and had I stopped at multiple times on a previous Yellowstone trip, for lunch.
My original “ease into it” plans for the day had called for “maybe some light hiking” after lunch, following my morning at the Old Faithful area (which, though it had consisted of several hours of walking around on the boardwalks and paths, and had actually been quite tiring, was nevertheless not “hiking,” per se). When the time came, though, I was feeling eager to get some serious hiking in. Also, I was keen to hike to Fairy Falls—the destination of my favorite hike from two Yellowstone trips ago (2009), which was the hike via which Jen and I had sort of “discovered” back-country hiking in the park—but via a different, longer route than the one that we had taken that time. And if I was going to do that, I really wanted to do it on this day, because I didn’t want to be making the drive around to this area of the park (which was not very close to where I was camping) a second time during my stay. But after pouring over my book of hiking trails, with all of its various options for ways to get to Fairy Falls, I’d finally settled on a loop route (“Sentinel and Imperial Meadows,” the book calls it) totaling just over 11 miles—so, yeah…not so much with the “light hiking” notion.
But that was just fine, because the hike turned out to be a pretty great one (probably my favorite of the whole trip, in fact). Parts of it went past some back country thermal features, some of which were hard to pick a path around; the trail would become unclear and seem to lead right through the runoff from a hot spring, across terrain that I would normally feel obliged to avoid (see below)—but fun!
Also, for most of this hike, I just flat-out felt like I was totally in the middle of nowhere (but surrounded by gorgeous scenery). That’s Yellowstone at its finest—and as I took a moment at one point to do a 360 and really take in how alone in the middle of beautiful nowhere I truly was, I felt, for a third time (though somewhat less intensely this time), one of those surges of joy. (This was the last such absolute stand-out moment that I noted; hereafter, I think I began to acclimate to being there, and in place of these intense individual moments, I mostly experienced more of a continuous general appreciation of where I was—though still not without occasional moments during which my consciousness of it would be heightened somewhat).
After about two hours of hiking, I got my first glimpse of Fairy Falls coming over a cliff in the distance.
A while later, I finally approached the foot of the falls, where I had to climb over a jumble of rocks and downed trees to get to the bottom-of-falls pool (and the continuation of my trail). I don’t know if anyone reading this read and remembers my account of that previous hike to this waterfall seven years ago, but at the time I jokingly called the experience “the funnest thing I didn’t do” on that trip (or something along those lines); there’s this awesome pool at the bottom of the falls, and someone else who had gotten there just ahead of us on that hike was wading out into it, but I hadn’t been able to do the same because I had not been dressed appropriately or brought appropriate footwear along, and it galled me. Well, needless to say, I had come prepared this time (in fact, with the experiences of past trips under my belt and with the benefit of the awesome hiking backpack that I got for Christmas a couple years ago, I was fully prepared for all types of eventualities on all of my hikes on this trip!). So, after a moment’s rest, I duly exchanged my tennis shoes for water shoes and waded out into the very cold water, which felt amazing (my feet were very sore, and it had been a hot, dry hike—cooled at first by a brisk wind, but that had died down after the first hour or so). I waded out and back a few times—the first couple times without my camera, for fear of dropping it in the water or losing my footing and falling in with it (the water was moving pretty fast), but finally I got bold enough to take it with me. I went almost right up to the actual falls (close enough to catch the spray on my face). I would have gone even closer, but there was quite a drop-off, and I was concerned about losing my footing and/or getting too cold (though my lower third or so—the part of me that was in the water—did acclimate to the temperature surprisingly quickly). Lingering chagrin from seven years ago: banished! 🙂
There were some other people there at the base of the falls, including a guy with whom I struck up a brief conversation while resting for a moment. He was actually some kind of guide who was leading a guided tour for the two or three others who were with him. He wanted to know where I’d hiked out from, and we just chatted about the park and about where we each were from (Bozeman, in his case) and so forth. It was pleasant.
Eventually, of course, I continued onward. The next short section of my trail was actually part of the much shorter trail that Jen and I had taken out to the falls (and back) 7 years ago, but I soon came to a junction where that trail split off from my loop route back to where I had started this hike. (As it happened, the remainder of that other trail—from the junction back to the trailhead where we had started the hike on the previous trip—was actually closed this year.) Anyway, what I had left to hike at this point was essentially the walk “back” (not the same way I’d come, since the hike was a loop, but still). It was about 6:30 by the time I got back to my car (I’d set out around 2:30). Having added a small “side trip” to the 11.1 mile base route (to see another back-country thermal feature a short ways before the falls), my hike came to almost 12 miles all told! Since I had a bit of a drive back to the campground still ahead of me at this point, I knew that I was headed for a late supper, which was not totally to my liking—but the hike had been well worth it, so I ended my day content (albeit exhausted!).