Week Three: Yellowstone

This weekend I have been to Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. I've went with three other students; Melike from Finland, Aurelie from France and Ross from North Ireland. Friday early in the morning we embarked on our trip and we drove our rented car for many hours through Idaho and Wyoming. While going to the park we were invited taking a tour through a LDS church which was pretty nice. Afterwards I had even received a book of Mormon, and go figure, they had even one in Dutch!

Next to Yellowstone there is Titon National Park, which is mainly beautiful due to its impressive scenery. High mountains accompanied by an intensive blue lake made for a great place to rest and there was also a place for some shopping. The shop was quite internationally oriented and I was very happy to find some Hoegaarden and Ross even much so with their selection of Guinness.

We arrived at Yellowstone near dark. We had met some French travelers with whom we shared a campsite in order to cut down on the costs. After starting up a fire and enjoying some of our beers we went to diner, where Ross was brave enough to try the Bison Burger, although he told me he didn't think to much of it. Since Yellowstone is situated quite high it got very cold at night, in fact freezing. This made us all very happy with or zero degrees sleeping bags and we all got a good night's sleep.

Saturday, our second day, we really started to explore the park. We started off with some geysers. Nice fact; Yellowstone holds 80% of all the world's geysers. The first ones were particularly special to look at. After that I must have seen another hundred and I believe if you have seen one, you've seen them all. However the most known one was certainly impressive. It is called the Old Faithful, since you can quite accurately predict when it is going to erupt. And when it does it is certainly impressive, easily reaching a two story height. The rest of the day we just cruised around and enjoying the wildlife and scenery which leaves you amazed though every minute of the drive. In the evening we decided to camp outside of the park, going into Montana. Here we found a cheap yet nice campsite and the best thing was that we didn't have to be careful with bears.

Our last day began with breakfast at a typical American bar with no tourists what so ever. The rest of the day we again drove around, focusing on the park's canyons and trying to spot a bear.
The park's canyons were easy to find, since they were everywhere however the bears proved to be a challenge. But then, finally!, we spotted a bear not to far away from the road. It was a black bear which stayed nearby for almost half an hour. It also represented a great ending of our trip since some hours later we started our 6 hour trip back to Logan. All in all a very nice weekend, certainly worth remembering.