Things To Do In Yellowstone National Park 🇺🇸

On our 2 week road trip across some of the states of central north US, one of our favorite places was Yellowstone National Park - The World’s first National Park. Click HERE to read more about our road trip. Click HERE to visit a page where you can learn more about Yellowstone.

Yellowstone is mostly in Wyoming but also covers some of Montana and Idaho. We were mainly in the West area of Yellowstone but everywhere is beautiful.

Here are some of the highlights of our 3 days in Yellowstone:

We saw Old Faithful erupt:

Old Faithful is the most famous geyser in Yellowstone. A geyser is a hot spring that producing a tall column of hot water and steam. Old Faithful is famous because it is the biggest regular geyser meaning that it is the biggest geyser that erupts regularly. It erupts every 35 to 120 minutes. It erupts for 1 to 5 minutes. The biggest it has ever gotten is 184 feet!! You can look at the daily predicted schedule at the visitors center. There are many hikes around the area, including a boardwalk that goes around Old Faithful and a hike to a viewpoint which is a bit higher up.

We took a look at the Grand Prismatic Springs:

This is the Grand Prismatic Springs from the view up top.

This is the beautiful Fairy Falls near the Grand Prismatic Springs.

The Grand Prismatic Springs is the largest hot spring in Yellowstone and the third largest in the world. The colors are natural and have most of the colors of the rainbow; red, orange, yellow, green, and blue. There is the option of walking on a boardwalk around it and the option of hiking up an easy hike to see it from above. Both views were spectacular, though I would recommend hiking up. When on the boardwalk, there is so much steam coming out of the hot spring that you can’t really see the vibrant colors. But on the hike, once you get to the top, you have a wonderful view of the Grand Prismatic Springs. From up there, you get to see all the beautiful colors that make the Springs so popular. There is many hikes in that area. You can also take a flat hike that leads you to the wonderful Fairy Falls. Going from the Grand Prismatic Springs to the Fairy Falls is around a 6 mile hike, round trip.

Seeing many Buffalo:

Buffalo are beautiful, big, brown animals. They are the same thing as Bison. We saw a really big herd with several calfs! Some were even on the road in front of us, stopping traffic for many minutes. Your best bet to see many of these in the north eastern part of the park, Lamar Valley!

Hiking:

Geysers every where!! From small to big to explosive or just bubbly!

Many people explore the park by car (it is a huge park!) and walk the boardwalks around the famous geysers and attractions. However, we decided to avoid crowds and did many hikes, and there are many hikes in the area! Some are just in the forests, some of them lead you to waterfalls, Hot Springs, Paint Pots (look at the last thing we did to learn more), geysers, and more. Some are long, others are short. We like AllTrails as a good sources for picking our hikes (not only in Yellowstone). You can pick the difficulty level, distance, area, etc

Seeing many more Hot Springs and Geysers:

Another one of the many hot springs scattered around the park!!

We saw many Hot Springs and Geysers besides Old Faithful and the Grand Prismatic Springs. One of my favorite Hot Springs was the Black Pool. It is called the Black Pool because it was black at first but then it became blue. There are many small geysers - some that are always erupting small amounts of boiling water.

This is Black Pool near Yellowstone Lake.. This is one of the biggest hot springs besides The Grand Prismatic Springs.

We also saw some cool Mud Pots and Paint Pots:

This is a mud pot. They are more active in spring and tend to dry out towards the end of the summer/fall

Paint Pots are so cool, I could watch them all day! Mud Pots are also very interesting. There is a difference between Mud Pots and Paint Pots, even though they both sound similar. Mud Pots are mud “puddles” with bubbles popping in the same spot every few seconds. Paint Pots are mud “puddles” with bubbles spewing out what-looks-like-grey-paint-but-is-actually-mud. Sometimes there is a lot of mud that comes out, other times it isn’t that much. Both are super cool!

We really enjoyed Yellowstone. Due to covid it was not extremely busy and we were able to social distance and enjoy many gorgeous hikes! And the wildlife is also abundant and you might be lucky and see some raptors! (As buffalos and elk are a certain!)