YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK!

We were in Yellowstone several days.  Saturday afternoon we explored the thermal features around Mammoth Hot Springs, Sunday we spent all day (from 7 am until 7 pm) on the Snowcat tour.  A snowcat is a 12 passenger van outfitted with tracks and designed to go over the snow where vehicles can't.  In fact, a Snowcat is the only way to get to Old Faithful during the winter.  We had a guide and made lots of stops along the way and back.  On Monday, it was just too cold to be out snowshoeing or Xcountry skiing all day, so we drove over to Lamar Valley just to enjoy the view.  Just a few of the pictures from Yellowstone...because I have hundreds :)

This is a view from Mammouth Hot Springs:

 Sunrise on the drive from MHS to Old Faithful:

 This is the road ???  Just looks like a snow track to me...

 

 I love Bison...they are so big and look so clumsey, yet they are very agile and FAST!

 This is Fountain Geyser.  Our guide was so excited to see it erupt.  He said that he has not seen this one errupt since he'd been at the park (3 years).  Since this is one of those Geysers that is not predictable, we weren't sure if it would still be errupting by the time we hiked over to it, so I took off running (I wanted to be sure that I got to see the sight!)  However, it continued to errupt the entire time that we were at this area - over half an hour.  As we were going back to the van, the guide said to me "I just love that you were so excited that you took off running" :)  That's just the kinda gal I am - I get excited at this place!

 The Paint Pots - this is BOILING MUD!  So cool....

 This was hard to capture in a picture, and doesn't look near as pretty as it did that day, but this is a round rainbow.  The sun is behind that tree, but the rainbow went all around the sun.  It was snowing this really fine snow and I guess the light was reflecting off that??? (Obviously science is not my thing)

 This is a view of the road that we traveled into Lamar Valley.  On this day we were in our rental car (which was 4WD and had heated seats :)), and this road isn't much better that they one we traveled in our snowcat!

Another wonderful trip to Yellowstone...now off to Red Lodge!