11/12/07 Yellowstone National Park

yes, we made it, by accident kind of... you know how that goes. my plan was to go to Chico Hot Springs, this upscale she she place with a very high end restaurant.. but.. when i was at Norris Hot Springs a guy mentioned 'boiling water' a natural hot springs just 35 miles south of Chico, so we had the whole day.. so figured we'll just drive to "boiling water" check it out and stop at Chico on the way back to Bozeman. We passed through Granger, very cute town and the next thing i know we are at the gate entering Yellowstone, it seems boiling water is 2.5 miles inside of Yellowstone, so we paid our $25 bucks, even though 90% of the park is actually closed and headed for the hot springs. Just a 5 minute walk and we arrived, boiling water is basically a river of boiling water coming together with a river of icy water and it is pretty amazing you can feel very hot and very cold water at the same time running along your body. As far as scenery, this place is tops, i looked for elk and bison and swam around the 50 foot area checking out the little cave of steam and moving from 110 degree to maybe 50 degree water. The walk back to the RV was cold.

After our soak, we drove on 2.5 miles to the visitors center and Mammoth Hot Springs, we walked around several of the springs and drove a 1 mile loop to view 5 or 6 different types of springs, none of which you can enter as they are too hot. There were amazing colors in the rock around the springs which is tiny organisms that live there, wild. Our plan was to drive west through Yellowstone and exit at the west entrance, but a storm coming made us concerned that the pass would be icy so we drove back to Bozeman and on East to Montana's biggest town of Billings (did i mention that Montana has less than 1 million people in the whole state, and Wyoming has less than 500,000 and i think LA has 14.5 million -yep that is definately part of the appeal).IMG_0515.jpg">