Axel, Ruby, and Caroline were looking something or other up, I’m guessing Caroline has our birding book with her, but I’m not certain. Though it’s mid-May, the weather is still a bit cold, and we’ve been warned that we could see snow and that Yellowstone has had snow even in summer though it’s not that common.

About this time, the scouting and pointing-themed photos are about to get old.

Moments later, Axel was mauled by a grizzly that snuck up behind him but recognizing that it was about to try eating a sour Kraut, it retreated. We put a bandaid on the claw marks, and by morning he was miraculously healed….or none of this really happened, and I’m just trying to find something to say about Axel posing here on a rock.

We have arrived in Yellowstone National Park on the south end. Wow, we did not expect this much snow, or any snow, to be honest.

We’ve seen this photo in a hundred other locations. If we lose Ruby and nobody knows where she went, someone will volunteer that she’s likely visiting the loo.

This is our first-ever glimpse of a geyser basin; it is the West Thumb Geyser Basin on Yellowstone Lake. We are enchanted.

Close-up view of a hot spring with some boiling mud on the right. While this photo does NO justice to what this is, we are mesmerized by the colors, smells, and reality of what’s going on just below the surface of the ground we are walking on.

We are tempted to walk out to the Fishing Cone, as it’s known, and take a look, but we’ve been warned by signs here at the basin to stay on the paths due to fragile and unstable surfaces and stay out of the hot springs because they can bring death with their scalding waters.

This is the first geyser eruption we would ever witness, but certainly not the last. We are at the Old Faithful Basin.

The sun is starting to get low, which is going to force us indoors to our rather luxurious accommodations.

Coming from just watching Old Faithful geyser doing what it does best, we took a walk around and down a hill to this spot where a bison was a little too close for comfort. At least it was more concerned with foraging than paying attention to us. Our room tonight is the Old Faithful Inn; that place is a work of historic art.