Still staying at Colter Bay, we drove north to Yellowstone’s South Entrance. For the area we were in, that was really the only campground with full hookups that could accommodate our 41 ft rig and had room. We toyed with the idea of driving the RV to Cody and finding a campground around there, but we weren’t comfortable driving the RV on some of those roads in Yellowstone and weren’t completely sure the road to there would be okay for something that big.
Really, we got to explore much of Yellowstone starting at the South Entrance and driving around. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t that excited about seeing Old Faithful. But when we got there, the area is pretty impressive. The Old Faithful Inn was huge. And made out of logs. We didn’t have to wait long for the geyser to do it’s thing and had front row seats. There are actually 300-500 geysers in the area, this one just being more consistent in its geysering. Amazingly, Yellowstone is home to half of the world’s total geysers.
Fun fact: Geysers occur in just 5 countries: The US, Russia, Chile, New Zealand & Iceland.
As we drove around all of the reminders that you are on a massive caldera is a little sobering. The area is full of steaming (smelly) vents, boiling water, bubbling clay and acidic pools. So crazy.
Periodically there will be people stopped on the road or slowing way down and you learn pretty quick there is probably an animal of some sort within eyesight. We were able to see majestic elk, plenty of bison and another bear.
It was actually pretty funny, we saw TONS of people stopped and we were all looking craning our necks to see what was going on. They had people with huge cameras camped out on the side of the road even. So we finally see what they are looking at: this small speck of brown on a hill far away. We finally realized it was a Grizzly Bear. At this point, we had already been up close and personal with 2. 1 driving and she was by the road bending a small tree in half and the 2nd, meandering right next to us while we were at the end of our hike.
At this point, we are good for seeing bears. The park rangers assured us when explaining how to use the bear spray that bear sightings were rare in that area. Little did they know..
~Enjoy the journey!
