Darwin

Hey there readers. Today was fairly productive. I traversed the lands of Canyon Village and took it upon myself to check out the couple of gift shops and makeshift grocery store. I also stopped by the post office to get my information set up so I can receive any snail mail that is sent my way. I was then contacted by my fellow Guest Service Agents that reside in Lake Village. I’m guessing they must’ve been worried about me since I’m up here all by my lonesome. Nice group of folks, really.

We all met down in the Old Faithful area. It was about a two hour drive to get there, but some nice scenery accompanied the lengthy time behind the wheel. I would have made a bit better time had there not been construction between Norris and Madison, but oh well. I just turned off the Vibe and put on some good tunes thanks to XM Radio.

Upon my arrival at the Old Faithful Inn I learned that I had just missed the excitement of Old Faithful itself. I met my compadres near the entrance of the Inn and we headed for the car to head about 4.5 miles north of our current location to hit up the Fairy Falls trailhead. The trail was pretty busy, but the other day we learned off a different route you can take once reaching the waterfall which is rarely traveled and you can experience the magic of Imperial Geyser without 50 of your closest friends with 2.3 megapixel cell phone cameras to capture their Yellowstone memories.

The Fairy Falls was a pleasant sight. It wasn’t a massive waterfall by any means, but enough to make you appreciate the nature that is out here. I tried to capture a couple of images with different shutter speeds and such, but nothing came out too spectacular. It was hard to review what my image looked like on the LCD screen of my camera because of the bright sun, so I was just was changing features and snapping photos in hopes that something looked decent.


Fairy Falls

Fairy Falls

Trying to navigate through geogthermal hotspots. A dangerous activity.

Next, the Imperial Geyser. It was pretty neat. You didn’t have to wait 90+ minutes to see it erupt like Old Faithful, and there weren’t huge crowds of people to fight in order to get a good view. My pictures didn’t come out too great. Many of them are way too bright, so I’ll need to practice that for the future. I know I’m just an amateur, but I’m learning that taking pictures in the heat of the day with the blazing sun directly overhead is quite a challenge.

We decided to add a bit more onto our hike and walked back on a service road that went through some open meadows and next to a lake that I unfortunately do not know the name of at this time. There were a couple times the trail seemed to disappear and we had to walk around and between a few of the thermal features which was slightly nerve-wracking, but fun nonetheless.


Imperial Geyster resting...

Imperial Geyser in action.

We ended the day with dinner at the Employee Dining Hall in Old Faithful. I finally went in to the Old Faithful Inn, and let me tell you, it is certainly a site to see. I could only think of all the times I had seen it on the Travel Channel and all the great things they had said about it. I'm sure many of you know that the Inn books up very quickly, so if you ever decide to you want to do that, make sure you do it as early as possible. Want to know which room to stay in? Contact me. Good day.