Day 20, 6th September 2011. Butte - Yellowstone National Park

I can't remember what time we left Butte this morning, but it took about 4 hours to get to Yellowstone, was a pretty borig drive. As we approached Yellowstone we stopped to take pictures with the sign

Then we went to the visitor center, as usual, to get information, which was mainly about animals because there is so much wildlife at Yellowstone.

It was very different to what we normally did in National Parks, which was go off on our own accord and hike. Yellowstone wasn't really about hiking because it is volcanic ground so it was more sightseeing. We spent the next few hours driving around parts of the park, stopping to do small walks. We saw lots of geysers, coloured pools, water and rocks. The water is super boiling and there was loads of hot steam coming off of it. A lot of it smelt really bad of sulfur so it was really stinky.

In lots of places you can't walk on the ground because the earths crust is so thin there it could break at any time

In a lot of places you had to walk along a boardwalk because the ground isn't stable

Later, we went to see the famous 'Old Faithful' geyser erupt. We had a look around the hotel while we waited, but then went and sat outside to wait, it erupts approximatley every 93 minutes, but it's not exact, so we waited about another 10 minutes for it to start. It was a really cool thing to see because it's so well known.

Then we went to our campsite to set up camp. It was really basic and not very nice at all. We had toilets and sinks near our tents (with only cold running water, I thought my hands were going to freeze off) but the showers were at least a 15 minute walk away, it was so long! The only good part about the long walk to the showers was that we saw a cute family of Elk on the way, I was gutted that I didn't have my camera with me.

 The bottle top in these pictures (on the log) and in loads of the other random photos was Gary trying to secretly hide it in pictures.

We had Salmon for dinner, which was ok, but I just didn't really enjoy it because I was tired and my back was really hurting. We had to bear proof this campsite big time, so maybe Salmon for dinner wasn't the best choice because bears love Salmon. I also really wanted to put some deep heat on my back because it was hurting so much but I couldn't, I was not a happy girly.

My team was on washing up, and there was only 1 sink for both groups to use so it took us ages, we didn't get done until after 10pm. I was so annoyed and fed up about this because we had to get up at 5.30am the next morning.

Dan washing up

After the washing up was finished, we had to make sure everything was totally bear proofed, and then we went to bed. Just as we were falling asleep I asked Gary if he had checked his rucksack for anything that needed to be bear proofed, and he hadn't. He had suncream and deep heat in there so it was lucky that I asked him. He had to get back up to go put them in the trailer.