Having camped a short distance outside the east entrance to Yellowstone, we still had to redo the climb over the mountains from the east entrance, looking down on the clouds below

and the descent back to the lake.

We did this early in the morning hoping to secure a place to camp in the park, but to no avail, so we decided we would see where we were toward the end of the day and either go to the west or the north of the park to find a campsite for the night.

After some debate, we decided to go to one of the camps only a short distance outside Yellowstone; we only had to drive to the south west of the park first where the better known geysers and hot spring are located.

The first set of hot springs were at West Thumb, which is a basin at the edge of the lake which itself is a caldera. We were really not ready for the scale or variety of these hot springs. There were probably over 20 at the West Thumb basin alone, with wooden walkways around and between them.

We then moved on towards the ‘Old Faithful’ geyser basin. On the way we stopped to photograph the continental divide sign, to find a small lily covered pool with an interesting twist. This small lake straddles the continental divide, so it empties from both ends of the lake, one end going to the Atlantic, the other to the Pacific. However it empties the wrong way, so the water emptying from the west end of the pool ends up going east to the Atlantic, while the water emptying to the east ends up going west to the Pacific!

Here is Old Faithful… it goes off about every 90 minutes or so. It can vary by up to 15 minutes either way, and lasts for typically 2 minutes each time. Large crowds all around it (at a safe distance). It was surprisingly quiet – and not amazingly impressive – a bit of a damp squib?

However there are a lot of other geysers in the basin and surrounding area. This one is called Lion Geyser, and you can get much closer…

This one (the hole near the middle, not the bubbling pool behind) is called the Anemone geyser and has a wonderful texture

This shows the Heart spring, with more geysers behind, and yet others further in the distance

This is the strangely named Belgian pool…

… and so on. There are dozens of these springs, pools and geysers in the area, again linked by wooden walkways. We walked from one to another quite taken aback by the number and the variations. The boardwalks cover about 4.6 miles!

We moved on again from the Old Faithful basin to the Grand Prismatic spring which we had previously seen in pictures, but first we had to walk past the outflows from the Excelsior geyser. You can get some idea of the scale from the people at the top right…

The Excelsior geyser pours out about 4000 gallons of boiling water every minute, and has quite a deep and steamy crater of its own.

This is the flat area with the more gentle run-off from the Grand Prismatic spring – the flow rate is much slower, so it is like the water draining down a beach as the tide goes out; but with prettier colours and it never stops.

The Grand Prismatic spring and pool is so large and steamy that it is difficult to see it properly…and we wanted a better view of the colours; colours that are due to different types of bacteria which exist at different temperatures, the pool’s slow run off creates a large area with a temperature gradient which displays these colours to dramatic effect.

We decided that the people up on the view point on the other side of the spring had a better view so we headed back to the RV, drove around to find somewhere to park and walked up the path to find the viewpoint…and yes the view was better. The steam on the far side of the Grand Prismatic is from the Excelsior.

After all that we headed out through the west entrance to the town of West Yellowstone which is right outside the park, and actually in Montana (yes, another state, but only by about 3 miles). The RV park (called ‘Rustic Wagon’) didn’t look too promising, but the owner was a real character, he could have been out of some western film set; the facilities were real good, and we got the best WiFi we have found so far this side of the Atlantic!