Yellowstone National Park

From Everyone!!

(But, as usual it's me, the Youngest Daughter, who is actually taking the time to post it all!)

Photo credit goes to: The Eldest Daughter (Of course. She's a photographer, what do you expect??), plus the Mom and the Youngest Daughter.

Last week we went on an Uh-MAZING vacation to Yellowstone National Park!! We rented a cabin a few miles away from the park. One night we went to sleep with the surrounding mountains all black, the next morning we woke up to see snow on them!

This is the first stop we made in the actual park:

Isn't it beautiful? The colors and textures were amazing! And the smell too. Yuck. It smelled gross. But what do you expect from sulphur and mineral filled boiling water?

Right next to that location were a bunch of signs stating: DANGER DO NOT APPROACH ELK. But there were so many elk it was kind of impossible not to approach them. :)

Another place we stopped at was a river. Of literally boiling water. It was the weirdest thing ever.

All over the park were dead trees. And they were strangely beautiful!

This tree had fallen over, and those are it's roots. Cool, no?

These signs were everywhere!!!

But apparently some of the visitors couldn't read. Hence the hoof prints right smack in the middle of a colorful pool of sulphur water:

That's me. :)

This friendly chipmunk stole a potato chip. Right off of my shoe!!

Isn't he cute?! :-D
Almost everywhere you looked there were random holes in the ground. Some steamed. Some boiled. Some had mud that bubbled. Most stank.

This random guy had a very interesting way of keeping his son out of mischief. :)

Meet Old Faithful everybody!! This is what it looked like as we were waiting for it to blow:

All of a sudden it started making huge whooshing noises and shooting hot water!

The spray kept getting higher. It was really cool! :)

Later we visited some mud pots. It was basically mud. That bubbled. :) It was so funny! It sounded and looked a bit like if you were making cream of wheat and then let it boil. It was bubbling and burping all over the place! :-D

Aren't the next few pictures pretty?

We saw this buffalo walking along towards the boardwalk. He was very lazy, just ambling along.

When he got to the path, he stepped up onto it very slowly.

Then he looked lazily around at the tourists, posing for pictures.

And then he went on his way. It was funny. :)

More beautiful pictures:

Oh, you know how I said everything was stinky? Well, I bring before you a photo of an adult. Who is plugging her nose.

She didn't know I took this pic. And I don't know who she is. And it was NOT posed. So there you go. Smelly.

This is what the ground looked like in a few places. :)

This thing was SO cool! It was just a random hole full of super boiling water. Amazing. Again.

Geysers, water, smelliness and steam, everywhere. Everywhere. Everywhere.

Three times a buffalo walked down the road. Right past my window. See that black line on the bottom of the pic? That was the bottom of my window, so you can see how amazingly close he was!!

So close in fact, that if you zoomed the camera in, this is what you got:

Oh, and this is the view from one window in the cabin we rented:

Pretty, no?
And this whole place inside the fence was our yard for the week!

And what better thing to do with wild flowers than to stick 'em in you hair??

For the trip home we had to get up at 5. I repeat. FIVE O'clock in the MORNING (!!!!).

The beginning of the dawn was beautiful behind the mountains. :)

Well, that's it for now. I've already posted too many photos. But I have more. :) I think I'll do one more post about Yellowstone, and then be done.

The end.