Wild, Wild West

Day 2: Yellowstone

§ Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel

§ Terraces

§ White Water Rafting

§ Swimming in the Boiling River

§ Drive to Lake Yellowstone

Our first hotel in the park was Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel, and we chose to stay in a Frontier Cabin, which is essentially a little house with a porch. It’s kind of neat and much nicer than I expected. I don’t know why, but I was thinking of something more motel like, but really this place is lovely. A little side note: everyone here has a name tag with where they are from on there and the guy who checked us in was from Turkey. His eyes lit up when he saw my name and he was so excited he gave us all our instructions in Turkish.

After breakfast, we checked out the Terraces. and they were so cool They smelled of sulfur, but it was really like nothing I’ve ever seen before.  

We got done so early, we decided to take a drive, so we went South the Norris Geyser Basin and back before heading to our white water rafting trip.

I tried to get this post out at that coffee shop in Gardiner, but we just didn’t have time because we needed to get ourselves together for the rafting trip. None of the three of us had ever been white water rafting before, but Jade still wanted to be at the front of the boat and I have to say, I was really impressed. She didn’t get scared at all. She got wet, but never scared. We even went through some level 3 rapids – one called the sleeping giant – and she just loved it.

We were so cold when we got done that we heard about a part of the Gardiner River that is fed by a hot spring, se we decided to warm up in it. It was pretty cool, or should I say hot. These hot spring waters flowed into the cold water of the river and you could put one foot in the cold and one in the hot. We walked a little further down, where the waters mixed better and just relaxed a bit in the warm waters. We spent too much time there, thought, because we had to be at Yellowstone Lake Hotel by 8:30 for dinner and didn’t have time to stop at all the sights along the way, that is, except for the bears we saw along the road! Thank goodness we have tomorrow. We’ll be making that drive again and hiking some of the trails we passed up.

We checked into Lake Yellowstone and it’s really beautiful, the lake itself is just breathtaking and the dinner at the hotel was expensive, but very good. A nice luxury in a national park. What an exhausting day! I can’t believe we did all that in one day and I didn’t even tell you about 90 ft waterfall we saw…..