Yellowstone National Park gets, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the Smelly Award for the national parks we visited. We entered from the north, so the first "attraction" that we saw was the Mammoth Hot Springs. This plateau had steaming hot, and smelly, water running down it. We did, however, see many other hot springs later in the day which smelled considerably worse. As we mentioned in our videos of Yellowstone, we wish we had smell-o-vision so we could share the wonder smell we discovered.
One of the other stops along the figure eight road through Yellowstone was a set of waterfalls, Upper and Lower falls. This is a picture of Lower Falls, the more easily photographed of the two.
The falls lead into the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, part of which is shown here. This of course isn't to be confused with the Grand Canyon, which is significantly more grand and has the Colorado River flowing through it.
Yellowstone had a major forest fire wipe out a whole lot of the trees there in 1986. It gives you a feeling of nature really happening when you see all of these new trees sprouting up around the dead remainings of the old trees.
We spent the night near Yellowstone Lake, in these kinda rickety log cabin type things, and the next day we finished the loop of Yellowstone. We saw the geysers including, of course, Old Faithful. While watching we heard a Ranger saying that the reason that there are all these hot springs and things in Yellowstone is that Yellowstone is on an active volcano. Fun. This picture that you see is an attempt to capture some of the awesome colors in the Grand Prismatic Spring in one of the geyser basins. Oh, we also crossed the continental divide (which Debbie doesn't believe in) several times while driving around that area.
Next stop, Grand Teton National Park! We got to Grand Teton about mid-day and found a short hike to do that a Park Ranger recommended to us. We spent the whole time making noise because we didn't want to startle any bears by coming up on them unexpected. We did end up seeing a bear off to the side of the trail, and it did not kill us. In fact, it was quite happy to ignore us and keep gnawing at the plant it was playing with.
After spending the night in a really sketchy excuse for a cabin that had something living in the roof, we set out to hike the other trail that the Ranger recommended to us: Cascade Canyon. The beginning of the trail was a half mile hike up to an overlook called Inspiration Point (it overlooked Jenny Lake) which was very crowded, but the rest of the trail led four miles into Cascade Canyon and was much less populated. We made noise on this trail too. Have you ever sung 99 bottles of bear on the trail? We saw another bear on this trail and it was equally uninterested in us. The picture you see here is just a shot of one side of the canyon.