Episode 46 | Yellowstone National Park to Gardiner, MT
We had come specifically to see the Grand Prismatic Spring. You’ve seen the photos. That impossible aerial view of concentric rings of color, blue and green fading out to orange and rust, one of the most photographed thermal features on earth. The kind of thing that makes you feel like you’re standing on another planet.
What we got instead was fog.
Thick, cold, impenetrable morning fog hanging over the entire basin. The spring was in there somewhere, doing its thing at nearly 200 degrees, but you couldn’t see any of it. Just steam rising out of white nothingness, the boardwalk disappearing into the mist ahead of us, and Denise and Becca looking at me with the expression of people who were not entirely sure why they were outside this early.
Here’s the thing though. There was something about it. The place still had a presence, even hidden. You could feel the heat coming up from the ground, hear the quiet gurgle of water, sense the scale of what was beneath the fog even if you couldn’t see it. Some places don’t need to perform for you. They just exist, on their own terms, and you either meet them where they are or you don’t. That morning we met Grand Prismatic in the fog, and honestly it might have been more memorable than the postcard version.
I’ll be back for the postcard version. But I’m keeping this one too.
The Snow Lodge: A Brief Honest Review
I don’t write hotel reviews. This is not something I do. I’ve stayed in places that ranged from very good to genuinely questionable and I’ve never once left a Google review. But I’m leaving this in because if you’re planning a trip to Yellowstone and considering the Old Faithful Snow Lodge, you deserve to know what we found.
The lodge is under major renovation. A tower crane, scaffolding on most of the building, construction fencing blocking a good portion of the exits, and noise levels during the day that were impressive in the wrong direction. None of this was mentioned on the booking website.
We brought this up. They gave us a discount on one night, roughly 30%, which was a reasonable gesture. Becca put it well: when your guests are already dealing with a disrupted experience, that’s exactly when you go above and beyond on service. That didn’t happen. The staff wasn’t over-accommodating. Denise didn’t like her dinner and nobody offered to fix it. When you’re charging what they charge and delivering half the experience, the math doesn’t work.
To be clear, we’d probably stay there again because the location is genuinely unbeatable. Nothing else puts you that close to the geyser basin. But go in knowing what you’re getting, and book during off-season if you can.
The Grand Canyon of Yellowstone
We headed north through the park toward Gardiner, which meant passing through some of the most varied terrain I’ve seen anywhere. Geysers, waterfalls, canyon walls, open meadows, dense forest. Yellowstone doesn’t commit to one landscape. It just keeps switching on you.
We stopped at Inspiration Point on the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone, which is one of those places where the name is entirely accurate and still somehow undersells it. The Yellowstone River has carved a canyon through layers of volcanic rock over hundreds of thousands of years, and the result is a set of overlooks that keep revealing new angles every time you round a bend along the rim trail.
The trick, which I’ll pass along: drive past the main mob of tour buses, keep going to the oversized RV parking area, and walk up from there. When we did it, there were maybe two other people. The same canyon, the same view, without the crowd. That’s the move.
Along the way we also made an unplanned stop where a ranger gave an impromptu lesson on antlers, the differences between deer and elk and pronghorn, what they’re made of, how fast they grow. It was one of those unexpected roadside moments that you don’t plan for and end up remembering.
The Traffic Situation
Somewhere on the drive north, we stopped. And kept stopping. Eventually it became clear that there was an ambulance involved, and from what we could see it appeared to be somewhat precariously positioned near the edge of the road. In a canyon. The kind of situation where a real reporter would have gotten out with a camera and I, not being a real reporter, stayed in the car and waited. We were there a good while. Everyone was fine as far as we could tell. Yellowstone keeps you on your toes.
Gardiner, and Unexpected Wildlife
We checked into a cabin just outside Gardiner at the north entrance of the park, which turned out to be a good call. After dinner, wandering back through town, we found an elk. Just standing there, in the neighborhood, going about her business with the complete indifference that large animals in small towns seem to project.
Then we drove back into the park for a quick evening pass through Mammoth Hot Springs and found dozens of elk spread across the hillside in the fading light. I got a few shots from the car. They’re not great. But seeing that many elk in one place, moving through the thermal landscape at dusk, is the kind of thing that makes you reconsider where you stay on your next Yellowstone trip.
There’s a cliffhanger for the next episode. Something was outside the cabin in the morning. I’ll leave it at that.
