Yellowstone

I've always wanted to go to Yellowstone but never really looked at a map to see where it is. Its like crazy close to BYU-I (a place I also have yet to visit).
As we were driving out of town, Monday morning, Ethan was like "Wanna go to Yellowstone?" and I was like "Yes. Yes I do." So for the first time we went somewhere fun without any planning. Zero planning on this one and it worked really well. It was about a 2 hour detour which got long in the end, but Yellowstone was beautiful.
We got to Yellowstone around 3 pm and were there until sun down. We knew that we wouldn't be able to see everything so we basically just drove around to the main spots on the Idaho side of the park.

We were driving down the road thinking that it looked beautiful when Ethan hit the brakes HARD! On the side of the road was a big ol bison. We parked, got out of the car and tried to get close without getting too close. It was so exciting, but little did we know how common it was soon going to be.

On our way to one of the geysers, there was a herd of about 50 bison. After that, there were maybe 10 more herds of that size. Maybe they were all one herd and just really spread out, I don't know. Point is, they were EVERYWHERE!! The girls had so much fun especially since we could get pretty close to them. Some people were idiots and like petting them and Kelsey was mad that we wouldn't let her do that but I thought it was risky enough getting within 20 feet of a live, wild animals who could trample us to death in a matter of seconds.

After the bison tour, we stopped at the Rainbow Hot Springs. I don't know what it is really called, but its the one that you see on all of the billboards in Utah promoting Wyoming. Its beautiful. From eye levle its hard to really see all the colors, but the hot springs were just fun anyway.

Obviously we had to stop at Old Faithful and we planned it perfectly. We had to wait about 6 minutes and then it started going. My favorite thing about it, that I didn't know before, was that the ground rumbles as the water is shooting up and out. You can literally hear the water bubbling. Its a little spooky.

 By this point, the sun was going down and we had to get going on our drive home. We were going to drive out of the park north pass "The Grand Canyon of Yellowstone" and I was DYING to see it but the road was closed. Luckily I have seen the Grand Canyon of Grand Canyons so I should get over it, but this one has a waterfall!! There is so much to see in this world. I go crazy trying to plan it all!!

We ate at the Ol' Faithful lodge which was really fun and then we made the drive out. As the sun was setting the scenery got even more gorgeous because the temperature dropped creating very cool steam around the hot springs. 

About a mile into the drive, we came to a halt and were there for like 20 minutes. We were afraid it was just really bad traffic and then we saw a giant herd of bison coming towards us. The reason the traffic was so bad was because no one could drive :) It made for a fun exit as bison walked pass our car. Madison got a little freaked but the rest of us sort of loved it.

Another herd of bison we were trying to avoid