Yellowstone National Park is visited by over 4 million people a year, the vast majority in summer, when a mere glipse of a critter brings gridlock in the traffic. Winter was our preference for this reason. Even in winter, when most roads are closed to all but over-snow vehicles, there were still a good number people and vehicles about, and our accommodations were surprisingly quite crowded with guests.
The hotel at Mammoth Hot Springs was closed for overnight guests, but we were able to go into the lobby areas and even buy a cappucino!
To venture more deeply into the Park, we had to travel over unploughed snow covered roads. At Mammoth Hot Springs we swapped our Mercedes buses for two huge Ford over-snow trucks, very luxurious inside, with gigantic underinflated tyres which are, apparently, more efficient than tracks. Many of the concessions within Yellowstone (and elsewhere) are operated by privately owned Xanterra as part of their Travel Collection, and these two vehicles were from their fleet of 30 or so. Xanterra provided a capable driver cum knowledgeable guide for each vehicle.
Monster trucks took us into the unploughed snow of Yellowstone.
Our Ford snowbus driver and guide was Laura, here showing a map of the park printed on a teatowel.
On our convoluted path to Old Faithful, high up on the Yellowstone Plateau, we encounted many bison, in small family sized herds. The park's bison are special and precious. The park is the only place in the USA where they have lived continuously since prehistoric times (https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/nature/bison.htm) and have not been contaminated by inbreeding with cattle. After being hunted to near extinction (for sale, for sport and to starve the Indians), the population of the Yellowstone herds now nears 5,000, supposedly something like their pre-whiteman levels. Bison come down from the highlands to the plains during winter for nutrition which they find by burrowing in the snow, but they are apparently pretty undernourished during this season, and, to save energy, are loathe to move much.
These bison are seemingly unaware of the spectactular late afternoon vista behind them, sunset plus hydrothermal steam.
The bison we saw behaved as predicted, always either lying down resting, or standing and burrowing in the snow, or moving very slowly. We had been warned to stay away from them, but on one scary occasion they approached us in a herd of maybe a dozen when a group of 6 of us were following a boardwalk in the Old Faithful geyser basin, and we couldn't back away. When he was very close, the alpha-male gave us the evil eye and communicated quite clearly which way we should go. We obeyed! The sequence of 5 photos below shows how the herd approached us, then led by the boss, trampled over the boardwalk exactly where we had been standing, and proceeded down to the Firehole River.
As we drove south into Yellowstone, we gained considerable altitude, and it got colder. Put simply, Yellowstone is mostly an elevated plateau averaging 2,400m above sea level (higher than Mount Kosciuszko) surrounded by ranges of the Rocky Mountains up to over 3,000m. It is split by the North American continental divide and is dominated by a supervolcano caldera which encloses about a quarter of the park. The last major eruption was 600,000 years ago, but the underlying heat powers what is now the world's largest field of hydrothermal activity, hotsprings, geysers (hotsprings which periodically erupt to relieve accumulated pressure), fumaroles (a steam vent which does not erupt), mudpots (hotsprings acidified by volcanic gases, like hydrogen sulphide, dissolving rock into mud, aided by micro-organisms) and travertine terraces (type of carbonate limestone precipitated by flowing mineral springs).
View of the travertine terraces at Mammoth.
Our first sighting of hydrothermal activity was before we left Mammoth Hot Springs which is home to steamy but spectacular travertine terraces, including Canary Spring and other named features, so many that we were not quite sure which one was which. But, of course, the real favourite in the hydrothermal department was to be the world-famous Old Faithful Geyser but we had a lot to see before we got there.
Boardwalks approach these steamy terraces with safety.
A terraced waterfall at Mammoth Hot Springs, the multi-colours from agae and bacteria.
Named in 1871 and long extinct, this inactive spring sits in front of Canary Terrace.
Beguiling colours in this hot spring at the top of Canary Terrace at Mammoth.
Our two Drews from National Geographic clearly knew how to get the best from this expedition into Yellowstone - Drew 1, the local resident and expert, and Drew 2, the NatGeo photographer who positioned us precisely for superb landscape shots, and the best views of wildlife like trumpeter swans - we even saw an iconic bald eagle.
Snow blowing on high as we look towards Mary Mountain from the Grand Loop Road.
Listed as endangered, the bald eagle (haliaeetus leucocephalus) raptor is the national symbol of the USA. It likes to nest near Yellowstone Lake, feeding mostly on fish and waterfowl, this one hunting in the Gibbon River.
Once nearly extinct thanks to hunting and habitat loss, the large Trumpeter Swan (Cygnus buccinator) has been saved by conservation measures with 50,000 in the Lower 48, but there are still only about 30 in Yellowstone NP which is a marginal environment for this species.
Enchanting sunset view in Yellowstone's Lower Geyser Basin.
We passed the world's tallest active geyser, Steamboat which is located in the Norris Geyser Basin and near the Gibbon River. Its eruptions are huge, up to 90m in the air, but they are extremely irregular, the intervals between successive eruptions being days (typically) or years (in 1991 and 2013 eruptions broke nine year droughts, and there were none at all between 1911 to 1961). Strange plumbing underneath, it would seem. No predictability here, and we certainly didn't see Steamboat go off, but our snowbus guide Laura said that she was camped nearby for a long period during her undergraduate study years and was lucky enough to see it go up. Steamboat's last eruptions was only a few days before our visit, at 12:35 on 25Jan2019. Images of Steamboat eruptions can surely only be got by patient or lucky photographers!
Great shot of Steamboat's eruption in August 2018 by BPNJensen (from Wikipedia)
Deep in Yellowstone, there are few public facilities and restrooms, but luckily our guides knew where they all were. Secreted in the back of our snowbuses were packed lunches that we had ordered several days previously (so what we got was a surprise), and we ate them at locations like Canyon Village and Madison, both intersections in Yellowstone's sparse road system.
This team of local characters are apparently fully occupied removing accumulated snow off YNP rooves.
Just off the Grand Loop Road, near Paintpot Hill, one of a multitude of hot springs in Yellowstone.
Near Canyon Village is the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, the river that gives its name to the National Park and is itself named for the colours of rocks in the river or sandstone in the bluffs nearby. Here, the Yellowstone River flows and falls in a spectacular gorge, and from the appropriately named Artist Point, offers a fantastic view, summer or winter. The Yellowstone River which actually starts in northwest Wyoming is, at 1107km, the longest undammed river in the "lower 48". Quite separate to the Yellowstone River but still east of the Continental Divide is the Gibbon River which runs into the Madison River, then the Missouri River near Three Forks, MT and eventually the Mississippi River near St Louis, MO.
From the aptly named Artist Point, a spectacular view of the Yellowstone River.
Not the grim reaper! Updrafts from the Yellowstone Canyon below chill visitors walking to viewing points.
The headwaters of the Yellowstone river proceding towards the falls and canyon.
We saw many snowmobile tours in Yellowstone, all were quiet and orderly no doubt as enforced by guides and rangers.
Known by 1872, the falls on the Gibbon River are upstream of its junction with the Firehole River.
At dusk on day three of our expedition we finally arrived at the Upper Geyser Basin, on the Firehole River and the site of Old Faithful. See our next blog post for that story.
Summer postcard of Old Faithful and a hot spring. Not like this for our visit! And where are the people?
More of our Yellowstone images here.
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