It’s good to begin with a little information when tackling something like Yellowstone National Park.
Yellowstone is huge, the size of several small European countries or two average states in the USA, taking up three thousand, four hundred and seventy-two square miles. It was the first National Park ever created (1872) and its most famous features are the Old Faithful geyser and the Grand Prismatic Hot Springs. It has the largest concentration of geysers and hot springs in the world. Additionally, Yellowstone has five “gates” and each one goes into a hugely different area and state. Most of the park is located in Wyoming, but some areas are in Montana and Idaho.
It’s scale is hard to wrap your head around, but in practical terms, we pushed hard to reach the border of the park, only to find we had two more hours of driving once there to reach the campsite we’d reserved.
That site was roughly in the middle, near Yellowstone Lake. When planning the trip, Mike had booked us near the center of the park, which had seemed like a good idea at the time because many of the attractions would be within an hour’s drive.
Unfortunately, one of the Yellowstone’s major arteries was closed indefinitely for rebuilding when we arrived. Our location did not end up being “easy access,” it ended up adding an hour to every foray, instead of saving time. Not only that, the site was crowded and filled with RVs running generators constantly, something we abhor.
It’s best practice to research current conditions in the park when you make reservations and use Google Earth to look at the campgrounds; but this time, planning well ahead didn’t end up benefiting us due to unforeseen changes.
Because of the magnitude and variety of attractions the park offers, it’s impossible to experience Yellowstone in just a few days. Keeping dreaded backtracking to a minimum, we decided to explore a geographical area of the park each day.
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