Tuesday, July 30, 2013

High Adventure 2013 - Yellowstone Canyons Area

On the last day of our week long High Adventure to Yellowstone National Park we went to the Canyon area of Yellowstone.  The Grand Canyon of Yellowstone is a beautiful canyon with 2 beautiful waterfalls and definitely worth the visit!
Lower Falls in Yellowstone
We checked out the view from the view points along the north rim, and hiked down to the brink of the lower falls.  It was amazing to be that close to the edge as that much water went over the falls!

Then we hiked the South Rim Trail from the start, down the the Artist Point Lookout, then looped around by Clear Lake and back up to the top where we were parked.  It was a beautiful hike!  Every corner you turned gave a new, awesome view!

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

High Adventure 2013 - Yellowstone Old Faithful Area!

We got up early (4:45am) because we knew that the Old Faithful area gets busy!  We brought muffins to eat once we got there, and loaded up into the vehicles.  It took a little longer to get going than we had hoped, but were still able to get to Old Faithful just before 6am!  The drive in was so peaceful!  We saw only 1 other vehicle on the road the whole way in.  It was like we had the park to ourselves!

One of our leaders found a website that posts the latest geyser eruptions and the predicted times for the next eruption, and since there is 3G internet in the Old Faithful Area (not so much anywhere else), we were able to use a smart phone to hit all the right spots at the right times to maximize our geyser viewing enjoyment!  The site is www.geysertimes.org and it helped us a lot!

Of course we had to go see Old Faithful and watch it go off.  The window they gave us was like 6:40 plus or minus 17 minutes.  So we got there 20 minutes early, and ended up waiting almost 40 minutes for it to go.  It was impressive to watch it go off, but we enjoyed watching others more.  Our favorite was Beehive Geyser.  It's only like 25 feet off the boardwalk, and hit has a little geyser next to it that goes off a little before Beehive does.  We waited there and watched it go off, and the wind changed directions and it actually soaked us!  By the time the water goes up 150 feet and comes back down the water was cold, but it was still fun!
Beehive Geyser
We ended up getting to see quite a few geysers!  We saw:

  • Lion
  • Anenome
  • Beehive
  • Old Faithful
  • Riverside
  • Daisy
We walked all the way up to Morning Glory Pool:
Morning Glory
And we got to see our only sign of bear on the whole trip!  We saw bear tracks right alongside the boardwalk!
Bear Tracks along the Old Faithful Boardwalk
After our time in on the boardwalk, we checked out the Old Faithful Lodge - it's pretty cool to check out! It so creative how they made almost everything in there out of logs!

Then it was getting crowded and hard to find parking, so we made one stop on the way back to camp, then called it a day!

High Adventure 2013 - Yellowstone Mammoth Area!

After our 2 days of backcountry backpacking, we decided to see some of the other sights that Yellowstone is known for.  There's no way you can see everything in Yellowstone in a week, so we had to pick and choose what we would go to see.  We decided to visit:

In Mammoth, we didn't get an early start, so by the time we got to Mammoth it was already getting very busy!  With 3 vehicles trying to find a parking spot it makes it hard!  We were able to park by and walk the boardwalks over Mammoth Springs.  Mammoth Hot Springs is a huge hill of travertine left over from the sediments in springs on the hill.  They say that the sediment grows 3 feet per year in some places!  There was quite a bit of boardwalks, and we were able to see quite a lot of the spring!  It was fun to see all the different colors, but next time we need to make sure everyone has sunglasses, cause most of the hill is white, and bright!
Mammoth Springs
After Mammoth, we went into the "town" of Mammoth and had our sack lunch on the lawn.  We were able to watch the Elk that were walking around town like they owned the place, and we enjoyed the shade under the trees (it was already pretty hot!).

Then we went to the Boiling River.  It's a spot where a hot spring dumps into the river and they've created a soaking area, where the spring dumps in on one side, and the river dumps in on the other so you can pick the temperature you want to soak in - it ranges from too hot to handle, to too cold to handle!  There's a 1/2 mile hike to the soaking spot, and it's very busy and well known, but it was worth going to cool off, and soak for awhile!
Boiling River
After that it was too busy so we worked our way back to camp.  We did stop at the Artists Paint Pots and did the 1/2 mile walk there to see the boiling mud, and we stopped at another point, but we wanted to get back to camp so we could get dinner over with quickly and get to bed early.  We planned to get up at 4:45AM the next morning to hit Old Faithful!

Friday, July 19, 2013

High Adventure 2013 - Yellowstone National Park!

This year for High Adventure we went to Yellowstone National Park for a week.  We started out the week with an overnighter backpacking trip into the backcountry to Union Falls in the lower portion of the park.  This required back country permits and reservations, but it was worth it!  We backpacked in 6-7 miles to our reseved campsites, and spend the night, then did a day hike to Union Falls, the second tallest waterfall in the park!

Union Falls
After Union Falls we hiked back down and over to Scout Pool (also known as Ouzel Pool) to soak in the warm river there, sit under the waterfall, and jump off the rocks into the water.  After trying over and over again to swim upcurrent to the waterfall (you can go on the sides, holding the rocks, but we like to challenge ourselves), one of the scouts found out that you can drop down to the bottom of the river and swim along the rocks at the bottom up to the waterfall quite easily.  So we started doing that for fun and a challenge.
Scout Pool

After getting our fill with the falls there, we hiked back to our campsite, had lunch and backpacked back to the vehicles.  

So what was so amazing about this trip?  We did it with our scout with Spina Bifida, so we carried him the entire way!  We used our scout carrier to pack him up there and back, but that means that he, plus the two carriers don't have backpacks.  That meant we had to spread the weight of three people's equipment into the other packs.  Most people had their stuff plus someone else's stuff (I had all mine plus another sleeping bag for someone else).  Then as we went, we traded off on the scout carrier and with the packs.  It was an awesome experience!  It was very difficult for some of those involved, but that's what makes it amazing!  It WAS HARD, but everyone did it anyway, and nobody complained!  It was an awesome trip!