Piedra Amarilla (Yellowstone)

We spent the whole of today at Yellowstone. My Aunt Susie gave us directions on what to see and what to skip and we headed out. We stayed on the South Loop and stopped at six different attractions. First we stopped at the West Thumb geysers, which were really neat. I can only imagine being one of the first people to discover a huge hole in the ground spewing hot steam and boiling water. They're pretty amazing.

All the colors are so beautiful.

Then we went to  Mud Volcano and Dragon's Mouth, which were awesome.

There were buffalo just hanging out all over the place here.

The Mud Volcano was literally a boiling mud pit.

Buffalo everywhere. And it was very sunny. :)

This is called the Dragon's Mouth because the waves rolling out are like a tongue and the waves hitting the sides of the cavern sounded like a dragon roaring.

Next, we went to to Canyon Village to see Lower Falls which was in the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone. The Canyon is huge and beautiful with a river running through the bottom of it. 

Lower Falls is the waterfall in the center and the river from it runs all the way through the canyon.

We took an extremely strenuous hike to get closer to the actual waterfall. It included several steep switchbacks and 328 steel steps down a rocky mountain. The steepness of the stairs combined with the high altitude made for a really hard ascent back to the starting point. Even though I'm very sore, the view at the end of the hike was worth the pain.

We tromped back to the car and drove over to Firehole Falls, a smaller and shallower waterfall. 

Next, we went to the Midway Geysers, which looked very similar to the West Thumb geysers.

Last, we went to Old Faithful, which wasn't set to erupt for another 40 minutes when we arrived so we visited the gift shop and got some ice cream. 

After some delicious ice cream we headed outside and waited for the eruption to begin. There were many false alarms and after a while the show actually started. The boiling water will get up to 180 feet up in the air. 

We had a great day and got to see quite a bit of wildlife, which was exciting because I had been searching for a while to see some. We saw quite a bit of bison, some elk, two ospreys, and a few chipmunks that were too fast to catch on camera. Oh! And we saw several pelicans, which I didn't know even lived in Wyoming. You learn something new every day. We came home exhausted and my aunt had chili ready for us. I don't think I've ever been so happy to see chili in my life. I'm sure we will all sleep great tonight.