A Journal, with Pictures

Day three and four in Yel­low­stone park was focused pri­mar­i­ly on view­ing Yel­low­stone’s incred­i­ble land­scape. There were wild life site­ings as well. We start­ed Sat­ur­day ear­ly and watched the sun­rise from Fish­er­man’s bridge, then pro­ceed­ed along the lake shore look­ing for wildlife, includ­ing a short hike to the lake. We then head­ed up through the Hay­den Val­ley, checked for wolves, saw more bison, then head­ed for Yel­low­stone’s grand canyon area. Here we hiked to view the upper falls on the Yel­low­stone riv­er, then drove to see the low­er falls and the canyon carved by the riv­er. We fin­ished the day in the Yel­low­stone geyser basin, watch­ing old faith­ful doing its thing. We stayed at Snow lodge, which is next to Old Faith­ful lodge where we had din­ner, with our guide Vickie.

Our Final day was spent com­plet­ing our view­ing of the gey­sers and geot­her­mal area. We saw all four types of geot­her­mal activ­i­ty includ­ing gey­sers, with the River­side geyser the most spec­tac­u­lar. We also see hot spring, steam vents and mud pots. The day includ­ed a hike to view Chro­mat­ic hot springs from the moun­tain side, then up close to see the incred­i­ble col­ors caused by bac­te­ria. We crossed the Fire­hole riv­er that is warmed four degrees by the hot spring run off. We stopped to pho­to­graph a pair of beau­ti­ful swans of the riv­er before head­ing for the town of West Yel­low­stone for lunch, then back to Boze­man. We say our fair well to Vick­ie our great guide and start­ed our flight plan­ning for our return trip to Dayton.

Mon­day morn­ing we were up at 5:00 AM and it looked like a chal­leng­ing flight home. Freez­ing lev­els were fore­cast from 7 to 10 thou­sand and we need­ed to fly at 11.000 thou­sand to get over ter­rain out of Boze­man. There is a frontal sys­tem stretch­ing along the Montana/South Dako­ta board­er with heavy pre­cip­i­ta­tion and some con­vec­tive activ­i­ty. We have a plan B and were in the air at sun rise, 7:15 AM MDT. We climb out of Boze­man, primed our TKS antii-ice sys­tem, the tem­per­a­ture was ‑4 degrees, we were in the clouds but no ice. So far so good and ATC took us up to 12,000 feet, which gives us a bet­ter tail­wind. We saw the pre­cip­i­ta­tion on our in cock­pit weath­er dis­play and after con­fer­ring with ATC decid­ed to devi­ate to the north. As we pen­e­trat­ed the heavy rain we could see heav­ier rain and embed­ded thun­der­storms to the south, we guessed right, and the plane got a good wash­ing. We flew into clear weath­er and land­ed in Pierre, South Dako­ta for a quick refu­el and were back in the air in less than thir­ty min­utes on our way to Cedar Rapids Iowa. Anoth­er quick turn around and we were on our way to Day­ton, our home base. We land at sun­set 7:15 PM EDT, hav­ing flown home in 10 hours elapsed time and about 9 hours in the air. It was a looooong day, to end a great trip that put 22.6 hours on the hobbs meter. We enjoyed our trav­els, but after six dif­fer­ent beds, it was great to be home in our own bed again.