Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming – Day 1

When entering Yellowstone National Park, Aleksey and I crossed borders quickly. Within a day we crossed from Washington to Idaho, to Montana, and finally to Wyoming where the large majority of the park exists. Yellowstone is a completely unique part of the world, at least to me. It is constantly changing due to one of the largest volcanoes in the world existing underneath its surface. In addition, the wildlife is really abundant compared to everywhere Aleksey and I have been so far. Within two days we saw 5 herds of mule deer, 2 Grizzly bears, a Pronghorn, and 8 or 9 huge Bison. When I say we saw them, I don’t mean at a distance, I mean we were right next to the animals (except the grizzly bears, they were about 60 – 80 feet from us). You will see in the pictures and the video just how close the Bison was – it was incredible(from the 2nd day)!! What a HUGE animal.

Our first stop in the park was the Mammoth Hot Springs, a place with a lot of terraces made from travertine – calcium carbonate, which is brought up to the surface by hot water from beds of limestone underground. As it is in the majority of the park, the travertine here was multi-colored due to the bacteria, Archaea, chlorophyll (green), sulfur (stinky, I mean yellow) and other thermophiles thriving in the hot water. We hiked around for about an hour and returned to our car. It was now getting late so we decided to call it a night and go to sleep.