Day 55 - Yellowstone!!!

August 12th

21.3 Miles

Beach basin Campsite

Flyboxer got out early, Spins, Dan (now Raffle), and myself got out of camp around eight and had ten point eight miles to Old Faithful Village. Raffle took off hauling ass down trail Spins and I did as well but that boy was basically running. We got seven miles down into Geyser Valley and the awesomeness started. First off, Yellowstone has boatloads of tourists and low boardwalks to walk around the hot springs and geysers. To get to Old Faithful Village we had four miles of great touristy plank walking around all sorts of geysers and our timing was fantastic as far as geyser eruptions were concerned. Riverside geyser went off first as we walked up and people ran over to see. It lasted quite a few minutes and shot up real high into the air. 

We then caught a minor eruption of another interesting geyser which had mineral deposits formed all around it.

Next up was a multitude of different colored and shaped hot springs with all sorts of cleaver and fun names to describe them.

After meandering around past all of these spring we came across a geyser whose name I didn't catch but overheard it only goes off every five days or so which meant we were pretty lucky to witness it. It lasted quite a bit, way longer than Old Faithful, and everyone near flocked to it many getting sprayed with the delicious fragrance of rotten eggy sulfur water.

After this geyser we came to the village which had numerous buildings of all sorts paved and developed right next to all of these geysers and hot springs. Spins and I got some food and checked out some of the gift shops while the post office and backcountry office were closed for lunch. We got our resupply boxes and managed everything and headed over to the backcountry office to get the rest of the campsites for Yellowstone. The backcountry office was run by what looked like interns who told us the only unreserved campsite was 13 or so miles away. It was already 3pm and I wanted to see more in the village but we had to get hiking.

Hiking in the park was flat and easy but 13 miles is still 13 miles. Ontop of that our pack were heavy full of food again and I wanted to hang around Lone Star geyser which goes off every 3 hours but I wasn't able to because of this crappy itinerary. It was getting later in the day and we passed multiple campsites and ONLY ONE had people in it. Spins and I were a bit pissed the rangers seemed to just place CDT hikers on high mile sites just to rush us out of the park. It started getting dark and we were going to camp at a sight which was nonexistent except for bear boxes and huge grizzly tracks nearby so we hiked on in the moonlight past steaming geysers which looked like an alien world. We came along a camp a few miles alter and a couple was already there so we quietly set up for the night.