The mother of all national parks, the grand old lady, the last wilderness, Yellowstone National Park is a true icon. What a dream come true to finally be able to visit this wildlife haven, a dreamlike space filled with animals brought back from the edge of extinction and the most awesome unspoilt pristine nature to be found anywhere in the world. It is the first and oldest national park in the world, established in 1872. It spans over 2,2 million acres and covers the states of mainly Wyoming but also Montana and Idaho. It is known for its diverse geothermal features, including the famous Old Faithful geyser, lots of colourful hot springs and the Grand Prismatic Spring.  The Yellowstone Caldera, a super volcano, underlies much of the park, contributing to its unique geology.

When did we visit?

We visited in mid-May, early season in Yellowstone. When we booked the flights and made arrangements for our trip, we did not realize that we had planned to visit just as the roads opened. We were super lucky that many of the roads around the park opened just the same day as we entered the park and that was on the 11^th of May.

It is important to check weather and road conditions in advance, and visiting before mid-May is a huge gamble for sure. The upside was that we had very few other tourists and cars to cope with, even though the parking lots for the thermal pools at some locations were almost full even when we visited. We cannot imagine the traffic jams in high season during summer. Should we go back, we would choose May/June to avoid the biggest crowds.

Stay updated on roads and conditions at the parks website.

How to get there and where to stay?

We flew into Salt Lake City and rented a car there, from Salt Lake City to West Yellowstone it is a 4 ½ hour drive, we stopped in Pocatello for the night since we arrived from Europe in the afternoon. We booked our accommodation in West Yellowstone village, a nice hub to explore the park with hotels and lots of restaurants and bars. The park entrance is just a few minutes’ drive from the village centre. We stayed at the ok Stage Coach Inn for 3 nights.

Bring lunch!

There are few places to get food in the park, so we did a smart thing and pre ordered lunch packs from the excellent Ernie’s Bakery. They will take pre-orders the day before, and have your lunch pack ready for you in the morning before you head into the park.

Where to drive?

There are 2 “loops” if you look at the map of Yellowstone National Park. The upper and lower loop will take one day each to drive around and have time to stop at the sights along the way. Depending of the time of year, some roads can be closed and while we visited the road from Tower Roosevelt to Canyon Village was closed.

What was our chosen itinerary?

Day 1

We drove into the park at around noon, we drove from West Yellowstone to Firehole Falls and further down south to the geyser basins that end up at Old Faithful. This gave us some of the most spectacular encounters with bison on our whole visit.

On the way we encountered one of many bison rush hour traffic jams – quite surreal to sit in the car and watch as big herds including many cute calves walked right by us and took their time – after all – this is their habitat, and we were just visitors.

It was also a grand sight to come around the corner of a bend and see a full herd of bison and calves grazing on the river plain in front of us. The geyser basins down the road were awesome. The most spectacular was Grand Prismatic Spring without a doubt, very cool to walk the walkways around the pool itself. There is a walk to elevated ground on the knoll behind the pool but that was closed due to snow when we visited, it is the most awesome place to see the colours of the pool from, and where most photos of the spring is taken.

The Yellowstone contains over half the wolrds geysers, and we ended up at the amphitheatre waiting for Old Faithful to do its thing. It was exciting sitting and waiting for perhaps the worlds most famous geyser to erupt, and it was spectacular! We then backtracked to West Yellowstone to spend the night at the hotel.

Day 2

After picking up our lunches at Ernie’s at 7am we drove back into the park. And we quickly learned that if you encounter a sudden line of cars stopping in the middle or side of the road, there is wildlife somewhere in the vicinity. We encountered such a line of cars, and sure enough, there were a couple of wolves jogging along the river at the other side.

We made a decision to jump the queue and dive up river to a spot where we could park more easily, and hoped that the wolves would continue along the river. Sure enough, they came along the river bank, and we could get some good photos and videos. We wished we had a better camera than our iphones but they sufficed.

We headed north at the first major crossroad, encountering another herd of bison relaxing on the hot ground of a nearby hot pool system. Mom nearly got run over by a young calf who wanted to cross the pathway.

We continued all the way north to the small village of Mammoth Hot Springs, know for the huge white limestone terraces more or less in the city centre.

West across the Blacktail Deer Plateau, we saw more bison, a black bear was spotted along the road and we saw a huge grizzly in the distance. Our destination was Lamar Valley, it is reckoned as a good spot for watching wildlife, and it probably is but we were a little underwhelmed. After seeing so much bison along the roads and smaller valleys, Lamar Valley is a huge expanse and the many bison here we could only watch at a distance. The valley was cool but we felt like we could just as well have stayed at the western part of the park. It was still an epic drive across the valleys, plains and wide open expanses of the park, do not get us wrong here, there are spectacular landscapes all along any road of the park.

We had to backtrack after a quick lunch in the car, since the road over Mount Washburn was closed, we had to drive all the way back to Norris and then cross over to Canyon Village.

On the way we had a huge bonus, we encountered the normal “traffic jam” although it was only a handful of cars when we arrived just outside og Mammoth Hot Springs. We spotted a black bear grazing just by the road and seconds later it was joined by the cutest little black bear cub!

We were not sure if we should even step out of the car but other people did so we figured whoever was slowest back into the cars would be bear lunch. It was so cool watching mama bear interacting with her cub but we were also glad that the lady who walked across the road with her ipad to film a little closer, did not end up as a quick bear snack. Go bears!

We stocked up on caffeine in the local gas station at Canyon Village and headed for Hayden Valley stopping at Inspiration Point to look at the awesome Yellowstone River falls and then some cool hot springs on the way.

Hayden Valley is known for its beauty and abundant wildlife but again we were a bit early in the season, the whole valley was still covered in snow and not much wildlife was to be seen by us. A bit of a disappointment and we guess that later in spring and summer this is a beautiful place to visit. 

We drove further south past the awesome Yellowstone Lake to West Thumb and turned north over Craig Pass that had just opened that day, and it was rough going in places. We drove past Old Faithful again and back to West Village via some more epic bison encounters. It was a long and eventful day but if we had known what we know now, we would maybe have explored the western parts of the park instead of driving all the way to the north east. We are sure it is spectacular later in the season but for us it was a bit of a letdown – however – we cannot blame nature, it is still spectacular.

Day 3

We drove back towards our old friend Old Faithful a 3^rd time and headed for the southern entrance, that had been opened that same weekend. The bonus of heading out of Yellowstone this way is that you get spectacular vistas towards the Grand Tetons after exiting the south entrance. It was an epic drive along Jenny Lake.

And wouldn’t you know it, we came across another animal traffic jam! This time it was a huge grizzly bear that had just woken from hibernation, and due to its radio collar everybody knew where to find this bear and photograph it.

We were more interested in the long lensed crowd than the bear to be honest, it was a rather peculiar sight. We ended up for lunch in Jackson, a nice little upper-class village it seemed like. Coffee and sandwiches at the excellent Cowboy Coffee Co.

Words of wisdom?

If we should dish out any words of wisdom, they would be to not go too early and maybe not in high season. We were extremely lucky that the roads had opened the same weekend we visited. The park is huge! It will take a lifetime to explore and hike all the trails, we only scratched the surface on our visit. Yellowstone National Park is an icon, and it should be on any bucket list, it is immense, spectacular, grand, fantastic, awesome and simply wonderful. The experiences we had in our little window of a visit will stay with us for a lifetime, what an experience!