Don't You Mean Huge?
Mammoth Hot Springs
Visitors Center
No, we're talking more than huge here, we're talking Mammoth! Monday was our first foray into Yellowstone Park. As a general rule, getting our family to head out on safari is akin to herding cats. It's possible to do, but it takes a lot of effort. Happily, both Pattie and I can be highly directive when the situation calls for it.
Transportation is something of an issue. Ron and I can only put 1500 miles on our rental car before it gets very expensive. I think Pattie's car is the same, but she has less to travel to get back to Billings, where she flew in. We're flying out of Spokane, which is a long ways from Chico Hot Springs Resort. In any case, Ron and I wanted to be squired around in somebody else's car. We ended up in Pattie's land yacht, which is comfy, even if its transmission is about to fall out on the highway.
We had a caravan, Pattie, Ron, and me in the pace car; Katherine, Grace, and John in the middle; and Karen, Joe, and the kids ending the procession. Around 11 a.m. (after a very nice buffet breakfast) we headed out toward Gardiner, Montana, which is the northern entrance to the park. Gardiner is about 30 miles from Chico Hot Springs. Of course, I wasted no opportunity to take pictures on the way to the park. Shutterbug Man here. In fact, brothers and sisters quake with fear when they see me with the camera. The scenery is high mountain country, and every mountain has to have its picture taken.
Gardiner is a small town where every hotel and motel greets the traveler with a No Vacancy sign. Even the scrappiest hotel is full up with tourists anxious to have a room near the park (at least on Mondays). The main street winds in a big S down one side of the river, then across the bridge, and past the town's backside to the Roosevelt Arch at the park's entrance. I think the town fathers designed the road that way so that all the town businesses would have maximum exposure to all them dudded up Easterners headin' into the wilderness to see the bears and bison.
We headed into the park up to Mammoth Hot Springs, about five miles into the park. About five hundred yards into the park we ran into our first traffic jam - tourists obsessing over some elk. I knew it was going to be a long day, me wanting tourists to have a magnificent experience in the park, and my Inner Loop Beltway evil persona. I did a lot of muttering throughout the day.
Our first stop was a bio-break at the Mammoth Hot Springs Visitors Center. The center is very nice with activities for kids and some interesting exhibits about the early explorers of the park. The restrooms, though, were the big attraction. By this time, it was about 1 p.m., and time for lunch. We grabbed some fast food for the little ones (and big ones), but I opted for ice cream. After all, I'm on vacation. One restroom later, we headed up to the hot springs. They really are pretty cool.
Yellowstone Park sits on the top of a huge volcano. The center of the park is the volcano's sunken caldera after the mountain blew its big top 640,000 years ago. The area is still quite seismically and thermally active. I guess I knew all of this, but the scale of the activity seen in the park is remarkable. Everywhere you look you see some steam rising from a bubbling pool. The place is amazing (okay, I'm not on top form with my adjectives, this morning).
Mammoth Hot Springs is a huge, simply huge, formation that covers hundreds of acres. It's a series of vents, hot springs, and ponds that are heavily mineralized and have formed calcite formations. The active areas are highly colored yellows, oranges, and browns. The other areas of the springs are a dead white. The contrast is startling, and walking through the mists could seem like a vision from Dante or Milton. The scene is surreal, except that it's very real.
After Mammoth, we headed up into the park to see what we could see. We drove the north loop of the park, along the way seeing some bison and moose. Throughout our stay in the park, we've driven past a meadow that we now call moose meadow because we have seen a mother and baby moose. This is a great time of year to visit Yellowstone because so many animals are having babies, babies all over the place!
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