The Wandering Hart

In the morning we packed up camp and did one final hike in the Grand Tetons before heading to Yellowstone. The hike we did was xx Loop and it was a nice easy and flat 2 miles starting from Colter Bay Visitor Center, which is basically right on the way out of the park! I’d highly recommend this one because it gets you one last gorgeous view of the Tetons in the distance and is super easy to do on the way to Yellowstone.

From there it was about a 90 minute drive to Old Faithful and we were lucky enough to arrive right in an eruption window! Old Faithful tends to erupt within a 20 min window around a time the rangers list apparently. We did have to wait until the tail end of that window (with it spurting and teasing everyone for about 10 min before that) but it was indeed faithful…and incredible!

After watching that we moved the car to Yellowstone’s FREE electric vehicle chargers by Old Faithful cabins. Honestly I can’t imagine having made this work with an electric car before the park service installed these so we were so grateful and excited these exist! With the car charging we decided to do the boardwalk hike of the Old Faithful area and saw a lot more geysers, springs, and vents. My personal favorite was Solitary Geyser which you have to take a slight detour (marked Old Faithful Overlook) to get to but it’s beautiful, has a small eruption every 5-7 min, and has fewer people. We had it all to ourselves! I’d recommend for this portion to go clockwise on the overlook offshoot and even skip the Old Faithful Overlook extension if you go (the extension is decently steep and the view was meh).

I also do recommend doing a large part of the long boardwalk in the area. There are some really cool geysers a little further out like Grotto Geyser and Giant Geyser. There’s an easy shortcut back after Grotto Geyser as well if, like us, that finally has you geysered out.

Once we had enough geyser time, we drove over to see the Grand Prismatic Spring! This was one of the things I was most excited about and it really lived up to the hype – those colors aren’t edited! We started by going up the Fairy Falls trail about a mile to the Grand Prismatic Spring overlook, which is definitely worth it. From the main parking lot’s boardwalk you can’t really see the colors well except from one particular spot. Plus the Fairy Falls trail viewpoint was a little less crowded. We did, of course, also go to the boardwalk area to walk right up to the edge which was also worth doing.

Finally we closed out the day as it started getting dark at West Thumb, which is an area filled with volcanic features and views of Yellowstone Lake. We were lucky enough to also see some elk grazing right among the volcanic features. Great way to close out the day. And we fit everything from that corner of the park into one day!

Travel Log posts are my version of a travel diary so I can record what my latest adventures were and anyone interested can follow along live.