Yellowstone National Park Day 1

Not sure how to feel about this, but the pandemic has stopped people from other countries to visit our national parks, so we didn’t see any tour buses, which means even Old Faithful was not that crowded.

We made sure to leave early from our hotel from Yellowstone West, a tourist town right outside the park’s west entrance. The morning temperature was about 40 F, I was so glad I did my research before coming here and we were fully prepared for 40 F morning and 85 F afternoon. What we did was: wearing a pair of long pants over our shorts, and wear a light winter jacket on top of a T-shirt. As we were walking around comfortably in our cold-resistance attire, people in shorts were shivering around us. 😉🥶

We waited about 30 minutes for the Old Faithful to erupt, but it was so worth it!! The power of nature was truly a magic sight! And then we climbed a hill next to the Old Faithful (climbing on a 8,000 feet altitude hill is no joke!), and watched it erupt again!

Can I offer another suggestion here? Go to the picnic area before noon! Since I like to do my research thoroughly before I visit anywhere, I took an excellent suggestion from an article that suggested we pack our own lunch in order to avoid crowds in the few restaurants in the park, and it worked out great! Seeing all those people waiting outside of the restaurants proved we did the right thing. However, another great thing we did was to reach a picnic area around 11:30 AM, so we were able to eat our lunch in a quiet forest settings, before the crowds showed up around noon.

After lunch, we head to Yellowstone Lake. The lake is 136 square miles, a huge body of water inside of the park. The geyser area the lake is called West Thumb, because the section of the lake looks like a thumb of the lake (and it’s on the west).

we then went to Biscuit Basin that’s also covered with many unique geysers, and 2 of them erupted right in front of us. It was awesome!! At the end of the boardwalk, was a a very lovely hiking trail to Mystic Falls. Almost the entire hike was accompanied by a crystal clear river, with beautiful wild flowers on the banks. A nice water fall at the end of the trail rewarded us even more beauty of the nature.

The best thing about going to the park early was how much crowds we had avoided. On the way out of the park, we had seen so many overflown parking lots, and the road to Old Faithful was completely jammed!

Since we have 5 days in Yellowstone National Park so we will have plenty of time doing many things, we left the park around 3:30 PM when the park was super crowded.

After a bit of rest in our hotel room, we went out for Chinese food! I’ve decided to try a restaurant called Red Lotus, and was very surprised how good the food was! Even to my very picky Chinese taste buds, the food exceeded my expectations! Highly recommended!

A successful first day!Read more