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Posted by GA Tim (66.168.208.179) on 16:14:30 06/29/12
Day 5 June 12, 2012 Tuesday:
Another good night s sleep! Here s a tip: bring earplugs. It helped me to not notice noise from the neighbors and it helped my wife not notice my snoring (well, almost). We left the cabin at 6AM looking for the bison around Old Faithful but didn t see any wildlife. We took some sunrise photos of Old Faithful before heading out to Black Sand Basin. More photos then on to Biscuit Basin, then Midway Geyser Basin. We got some up-close photos of Grand Prismatic Spring before going over to the Fairy Falls trailhead. It was about 10AM at this time and the parking lot was already filling up. We hiked down to a small clearing I had seen from the Grand Prismatic Spring boardwalk and made our way up the hill. We got some great photos from up high the sight was so beautiful I had tears welling up in my eyes (and I am not the most emotional person). After we were satisfied with our photos we went back to the car for sandwiches. We proceeded north to Firehole Lake Drive and took in the sights there. Great Fountain Geyser did not have an updated prediction time written down so we moved on. We caught Pink Cone Geyser already in eruption as well as a White Dome Geyser eruption. We went over to Fountain Paint Pots and had fun trying to capture exploding mud bubbles in photos. I snapped several hundred photos of the same spot hoping to catch the right moment. My 5DMKII is kind of slow so it s fire off about 10 shots, wait a few seconds for the buffer to clear, fire off another 10 shots, wait, repeat. My wife s 7D was going off like a machine gun! Hmmm in addition to a longer lens now I think I need a fast 2nd camera body.
We were pretty tired at this point and headed back down to Old Faithful to relax in the cabin a bit. But we couldn t relax for long. We checked on the Grand Geyser eruption time and decided to walk down and catch the eruption predicted at 3:15PM. We were lucky today and Grand erupted almost exactly on time 3:11PM. It followed with two or three encore eruptions (can t remember now), which one of the regular geyser gazers said was rare. Castle Geyser was due to erupt soon and again we didn t have to wait long. Castle began an eruption at 3:55PM. It was a long eruption, plenty of time to move around and capture different compositions.
We walked back to the OF Lodge cafeteria and ate an early dinner at 4:30PM. I had the meatloaf and my wife had the trout. Both were not great and indicative of the food in most of the Yellowstone restaurants. The meatloaf was very dense and seasoned a bit too much. The trout was overcooked and very fishy tasting. While we were eating Old Faithful erupted again. By this time we were feeling under whelmed by OF eruptions, especially after seeing Grand go off. We got some huckleberry ice cream at the shop in the lodge and sat on the porch enjoying the nice evening. We did the tourist thing and bought some Yellowstone tee-shirts and hats and then went back to the cabin to pack & organize the car as this was our last night at Old Faithful. For just the two of us we sure can fill up an SUV with all sorts of crap. I am so glad I rented a larger vehicle, and the extra clearance underneath was great for those times when the off-road parking was rather precarious.
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