Lower Loop of Yellowstone

Today we spend the day on the Yellow Bus Tour of the Lower Loop of Yellowstone National Park. Jon was our driver and took awesome care of us!! He was VERY knowledgeable about the geology of Yellowstone and a joy to listen to. Thanks Jon!!!

Our first stop of the day was the Canyon Visitor Education Center where Gretchen ran into a friend from her book club, Allison, who was on another Lower Loop tour bus from the same company. What a crazy small world this is. We had a similar “small world” experience just a couple days before visiting Sioux Falls is Sioux-WEET!. From here we drove down to Artist Point to see the 308 ft tall Lower Falls.

Open

Open

They call this the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone and it is easy to see why. So beautiful.

I was hoping we would see the Upper Falls next, but Jon assured us our next day’s driver for the Upper Loop would show it to us. The bulk of the rest of the days was focused on seeing geysers. Here are some pics from Mud Springs.

From here we could hear the roar and see the steam from the Dragon’s Mouth thermal feature!

Then we stopped briefly at Yellowstone Lake before we headed for our lunch break destination and the top site of the day; Old Faithful herself!!

We actually saw Old Faithful the day before on ourHidden, Lewis and Gibbon Falls in Grand Teton and Yellowstone outing, but we missed the eruption and it was going to be another 90+ minutes to wait at the end of the long day. We knew we would be back today and we sure got lucky as we got to see it erupt twice!

Most of the rest of the was stops at various thermal features.

This included a few more geysers, too!

Sadly, we did not see much wildlife at all. Heck, the best pictures I got were from inside the bus on the way out of the park.

Jon let us know that tomorrow’s Upper Loop would prove to be much more hospitable for wildlife and even suggested we MIGHT see some bear. It was a long day and were were happy to head back to West Yellowstone.