Adventures of a Discoverer

A month ago I had the blessing of being able to go into a road trip to one of the natural jewels of the United States: the Yellowstone National Park (as you can see in  Yellowstone National Park (Part I - North)  and in  Yellowstone National Park (Part II - South)  as well). However, just south of Yellowstone there is a yet another fantastic piece of nature preserved for the generations to come: the Grand Teton National Park. This park is smaller than Yellowstone and therefore is not as chock full of attractions as its larger neighbor, but it has some beautiful vistas all of its own. It has a dramatic scenery: the park is mostly plains with lots of lakes and then, right in the middle of it you can see the impressive Teton mountain range. The highest peak is the Grand Teton, which lends its name to the national park. As I was spending time in the Yellowstone National Park, I decided to make a day trip to the Grand Teton and I really didn't regret it. As you drive thro...

If you haven't read yet the first part of my road trip to Yellowstone , I recommend you go there first, so you can appreciate the whole trip. So, having spent some time on the upper half of the park, I went south, to see some more of the many amazing places that Yellowstone has to offer. That also involved switching hotels: this time I stayed at the Grant Village Hotel, which is next to Yellowstone Lake (yeah, Yellowstone has lakes too - this park has everything). Among many other things, Yellowstone is famous world over for its geysers: two thirds of all the geysers in the world are in this National Park. They are all over the park, and to me the most impressive was the Norris basin. This is a basin in the middle of the park with an enormous concentrations of geysers in a terrain that is constantly changing because of them: there are old geysers, new geysers, big, small, fumaroles (they just let go steam), bubbly mud... It's the closest I've ever seen of a alien landscape ...

I always loved road trips. That feeling of freedom, just driving away and seeing the views change as you are immersed in them, stopping when you see something curious or interesting or pretty... I know that not everybody likes them, but I love them. And a couple of weeks ago I did a great one: I drove from my house here in Seattle all the way to the Yellowstone National Park, and it was awesome! Yellowstone was the first National Park and to this day it still is one of the largest. It is quite an amazing park, with so much amazing stuff crammed into it, it's hard to know where even to start. And because of that, I decided that it would make sense to split this post in two: in this one, I'll talk about what I saw in the northern half of the park, and on the next one I show what I saw on the southern part. For this part of my trip, I stayed at the Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel, a historic hotel in excellent conditions inside the park itself. It's named after the springs that are ...