Yellowstone Trip Day One: Hot Springs and Waterfall, Firehole Road, and Getting Caught in the Rain

After lunch at the grill near Old Faithful, we were ready to set out again. We stopped at a place called Biscut Basin. It had a grip of beautiful hot springs, and was the trail head to a waterfall hike we wanted to visit.

The bacteria and algae growing in the water was hypnotic and beautiful. We found Mirah and even Lucas just staring at it. We visited Carlsbad Caverns in April, and we talked a lot about how much these living pools looked like the dead and dried out pools we visited there.

Another beautiful algae mat, this one with even hotter water running over it.

The junior ranger manual, had lots on interesting information about the colors in the pools. The brown colored algae meant the temperature was close to 100-110 degrees, and the hottest color was white, meaning it was nearly 200 degrees.

These fumaroles were stinky. The hot springs could be stinky too.

My boy, always running.

We found our way to the trail head. And we were off up towards the Mystic Falls.

Lucas lost steam pretty quickly, but Mirah was a champ, she did it on her own the whole way!

Eventually we found the river, then we found the falls.

It had been up hill the whole way, and so we were ready to take a breather:

Grumpy Selfies.

As we started back down the hill it started to rain. Like a lot. We were all pretty soaked by the time we were back to the hot springs.

Back in the car, we decided since the rain was still falling, we would do a driving loop. We went down the FireHole road. There were some truly beautiful things to see.