thar she blows!

sunday, on a spur of the moment, we decided to take a drive up to yellowstone.
it was already noon when we started out and we had to be back in time for the laker game, so we figured we would drive as far as possible leaving enough time to get home.

about 40 miles into the drive, we were stopped at road construction for about 20 minutes.   we couldn't complain as we had a great view of jackson lake and the mountains behind.

the flagger advised us that a bear had been thru earlier in the day.  everytime we get in the truck i hope we will see a bear and again we missed one.

it is a nice peaceful drive and we were surprised that even tho it was a weekend in tourist season, we pretty much had the road to ourselves.  again, we did not complain a bit.  there was still quite a bit of snow also.

once we got into yellowstone park, we noticed alot of the trees are dead.  we assumed it is the bark beetle and forgot to ask once we got to the visitor's center.

the view of yellowstone lake is beautiful. 

we arrived at the old faithful area just in time to grab a horrible and expensive hamburger and to find a front row spot at faithful.  we only had to wait about 15 minutes.

when it is not spouting, it just throws out a bit of steam and every once in awhile it spits a bit of water up.  everyone oohs and aahs and grabs their cameras and then feels stupid when it all stops.

eventually, old faithful came through on schedule and sent out a lot of water and steam.  it lasted for a few minutes and then slowly stopped. 

unfortunately, even though we had a front row seat, we were on the wrong side where all we saw was the steam.  if we had moved over a bit, we would have gotten better pictures of the water also.  next time.

between the steam and the overcast skies, it's a bit hard to really see how amazing this is.

on the way home, we saw a herd of elk just hanging out on the side of the road.  the elk in the tetons are pretty jumpy, especially with the truck being so loud.  these guys in yellowstone could care less and even let people get pretty close to them.

it was a pretty good drive up and back.  we made it home by 6:00.  all that rushing just to see the lakers lose.