Our First Day in America's First National Park

As a celebration of our anniversary/my graduation/one last week of fun before school starts for Brad, we have gone on vacation to Yellowstone National Park. Neither of us have been here in years and with how much we both love photography we thought it would be a really fun trip.

Today was our first day in the park. We did so much! And we have a lot of pictures so consider yourself warned for picture overload.

First, we went to Firehole Falls.

We then went to Fountain Paint Pot.

Then we headed to Biscuit Basin and they had a bunch of cool springs there.

We had in the book that there was an easy to moderate hike to a waterfall father up Biscuit Basin. I was thinking, "Oh, this should take us no longer than an hour. This should be fun!" Little did we know how long/hard of a hike it would be. We ended up going up to the top of a mountain on switchbacks. Once we got to the top there was this incredible view.

From this point you can see a bunch of geysers. We got to see Old Faithful go off at one point from up here.

So, we continued to walk along the top of the mountain until we came down and found ourselves on top of the waterfall. We really couldn't see how high up we were because there was a big boulder, but we could see some other cascades coming down.

We hiked down a little more and we finally able to see Mystic Falls.

Brad decided to be a billy goat, but he slid down the mountain side. Okay, maybe it was just 5 feet, but he scared me so badly. He scrapped up his hand. So, we hurried back to the car to take care of his injury, but we took a moment to look at how high we climbed.

After debating whether to end the day early or to do one last thing, we decided we would go take a look at Old Faithful.

After that we headed home, but took a detour along the way. We went on a little drive to see Firehole Lake.

We also took quite a few detours throughout the day to take pictures of the wildlife. Today we saw. . .

Lots of female elk

One male elk

A coyote

Chipmunks

And even a Bald Eagle.

Now we are back at the condo, very tired, a little sunburned, and with achy feet. But we had so much fun today seeing the beauty of Yellowstone that we'll sleep soundly tonight and have another great day in American's first national park.