Imperial Asperations

Let me finish up writing about the hike at Yellowstone to Fairy Falls, Imperial and Spray Geysers, and Sentinel Meadows. This was on June 22nd.

By the way, I don’t usually break up hike descriptions into separate posts, but on a trip like this, some of the hikes generate so many pictures it makes sense to do so.

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Fairly Fairy

My son and I were still in Yellowstone on June 22. The day before had been our “rest” day, and we only hiked to the Virginia Cascade and then followed that up by heading down to the Yellowstone River at Tower Fall.

But the 22nd was our last day in Yellowstone, and we'd planned a pretty extensive hike for the day.

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Below the Tower

On June 21, the day we were calling our “rest day”, after we visited the Virginia Cascade, we went back to our Tower Fall Campground to relax.

But we quickly became bored.

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Yes, Virginia, There Is A Cascade

On June 21st, we decided we needed a bit of a rest. The previous day, we’d done the Sevenmile Hole hike. The day before that we’d climbed to the Petrified Forest atop Specimen Ridge. That was a lot of climbing.

So we figured we’d do the touristy thing and hit Old Faithful.

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Down and Up

I’m still writing up the trip Out West that my son and I made back in June. I’m now up to June 20.

When there is a canyon like the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, what do you do with it? Why, you have to hike down to the bottom and back up again.

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Getting Petrified

After all of the wildlife encounters on June 19, it turns out that we really hadn’t exhausted the day . . . or ourselves. By mid-afternoon, we were bored and wanted to do something else.

We’d been talking about ascending Specimen Ridge but hadn’t gotten to it yet, so off we went.

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A Grizzly Kind of Day

I’m continuing writing about my son’s and my trip out west. It’s our third full day in Yellowstone: June 19. Our plan for the day was to hike up to Grizzly Lake, which lies in the shadow of Mt. Holmes.

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Getting High

It’s now June 18. We’ve decided it’s a good day to climb Mt. Washburn, which was really pretty close to our campsite.

This is something we hadn’t managed to do when we were there 9 years ago.

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Hot Pot

We were now at our first full day at Yellowstone (June 17). Neither my son nor I are big fans of crowds of tourists, so I’d mainly planned to visit locations that were away from the standard Yellowstone locations. (You may have noticed I do something similar in my hikes around Central Ohio.) Very few people are willing to go the extra mile (literally) to see something different. So, today’s plan was to visit the Monument Geyser Basin.

But that didn’t mean that was all we had to do.

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Entering Yellowstone

Resuming writing about our trip out west, the following morning (this is now June 15) we got a fairly early start to head out to Yellowstone. However, getting a campsite in Yellowstone is a real challenge.

So we had a strategy.

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Elk! and . . .

Today I thought I’d write about (and reuse pictures from) something from about 5 years ago. My sons’ Boy Scout Troop made a trip to Yellowstone National Park, renting a bus and also hitting the South Dakota Badlands and Devil’s Tower along the way. One of the things we did was take some pretty nice hikes into some of Yellowstone’s backcounty.

On this particular hike, I wasn’t even barefoot. It was our second 10-miler in 3 days, and I was footsore from the previous one, which took us over the hoodoos around Mammoth Hot Springs. Even being footsore, I might have done OK, except that we started at Old Faithful, and I tenderized my feet on the very hot boardwalk rather early. Oh, well. Live and learn.

So instead I hiked the full 10 miles in flip-flops. Worked just fine, too, except it totally trashed the flip-flops. By the end, they had been pretty much squished down to nothing.

Anyway, we hiked from Old Faithful to Mystic Falls and on the way back we saw this elk just standing to the side of the trail, intently looking off in the distance and paying us no mind . . .

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