Firehole Lake Drive

Its always been our philosophy to take the road less traveled, to stay off the Interstates and major highways of sameness with a McD’s and Walmart on every corner and experience the Real America along the back roads.  So of course on our first day in the park we made a bee-line for some of  the smaller sideroads within Yellowstone mentioned by our fabulous Frommer’s Yellowstone and Grand Teton Guide.

The spectacular Firehole Lake Drive is a small one way loop down the road from Old Faithful and the Midway Geyser Basin.  If you want to escape the crowds and have some beautiful scenery mostly to yourself check it out, its not on the way to any of the major tourist spots and the enterance is easily passed by and missed by those hurridly rushing around to get to the next thing on their must see list.  Like I said earlier, take your time to enjoy and see places in Yellowstone or in your haste to quickly see as much as possible you’ll end up missing everything.

In-fact I was looking for the road and still ended up missing it and had to turn around and go back 😉

White Dome Geyser is one of the imposing features you’ll see on this road.  The other geyser mounds we’d seen up to this point were more like a pitchers mound, one can only imagine how many eons this thing has been erupting to build up such an impressive formation and how spectacular they must be.  When its not erupting theres not much to see but steam escaping from the top but there are other thermal features in the distance but the valley looks like a good spot for wildlife pictures.

The whole area was barren rock except for these wildflowers growing up right in the middle of a step onto the wooden walkway.  It just shows how resilient life is, even in such a harsh place of barren rock and spewing boiling acid life can take hold and flourish with just a tiny bit of shelter, and somehow despite hundreds or thousands of people stepping over these little beautiful flowers every day they’ve not been crushed or trampled.

We were putting our gear on and getting ready to go when two or three screeched into the parking lot with everyone jumping out of doors cameras flashing.  We were both a bit puzzled, what’s their problem, it wasn’t that exciting..  and then we turned around.  Haha we had no idea and would have totally missed it had those others not been there.

Even at full height White Dome Geyser doesn’t seem to match the impressiveness of its base, sad.

Further down the road is Black Warrior Lake with some very nice walkways around the area.   What a nice romantic way to spend an evening, walking around a steaming lake.

How often do you get to see steaming waterfalls like Hot Cascades?  Very cool.

There was also a “Steady Geyser” that erupts non-stop.

Black Warrior Lake had the biggest parkinglot along Firehole Drive, yet still there was only maybe a half dozen cars here and hardly any people with them spread out along the walkways.

If you’ve gone down Firehole Lake Drive, you might as well continue on down the main path to Firehole Falls down another one-way side road through the water carved canyon full of falls and cascades.

We also had to check out the little road to Imperial Geyser where I finally got a picture of this gorgeous 1978 Buick Skylark that we’d seen in passing a number of times already.   What a way to take a road trip!  The condition of this Buick was flawless, it even has the factory paper in the window from when it drove off the dealers lot.

Just a few random pictures of some of the other thermal features we saw along the paths less travelled.

Be careful where you step!  There was not boardwalks in all places, you wouldn’t want to fall into one of these and ruin your trip 😉