Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Christina's Second Annual Birthday Yellowstone Camping Extravaganza

August is a big month for our family, it has my dad's, my sister Christina's, and my sister Lori's birthdays. So I decided to fly to Idaho to visit both my sisters for their birthdays! I loved spending time with both of them. Bonus that I got to met my newest niece Molly! For Lori's birthday we went out to breakfast and had people over for a get together. For Christina's birthday she wanted to go camping in Yellowstone National Park, which is a good two hour drive north of where they live. Here are all the beautiful pictures I took while at Yellowstone. 

We first went to West Yellowstone, a little town before you actually enter the national park, and looked around and ate at this little diner that was so awesome! Christina's friend Whitney used to work there and told Christina about it. Here we are in our 'wagon cart' aka our table.

This is our view, and you can see better what I mean by a wagon cart.
We had a beautiful mural of a scary bear, this is Christina acting scared. 
There menu has the coolest names for their food. I got the Montana Road Kill. It was so good!
Here are some more of the interesting names
The first two are my favorite names! Donner Party 1 and 2. They are ribs. Hahahaha.
Christina with her Burger, I forget what it was called.
Me with my Montana Road Kill.
Now Beautiful Yellowstone! It was so gorgeous!  
A Bench mark that we found.
Waterfall

Roaring Mountain, The whole hill emits steam and if you listen closely it sounds like it is roaring. 
This is it, Roaring Mountain, it is beautiful
While we were driving Christina's car went to 12345.6. This is the best picture we have of trying to capture it. This isn't with it having the .6, but you can see the 12345 a lot better in this one.
One of Christina's favorite features, the Sheepeater Cliff. you can see her in the background in her cute pink pants!
We had to climb them, it was actually really fun!
Christina's little friend. This squirrel was so friendly, he practically jumped on Christina!
Both of us at the base of the hill
ME :)
We saw so many buffalo. Here is Christina taking a picture of one. It is that little brown blob in the background.
This is him in my camera
the Liberty cap, we tried to guess how tall it was, but when we went to a museum in a little town we asked a cute ranger how high it really was. It is only about 32 feet tall. But we spent the rest of the time in the museum trying to come up with more things to ask him. 
The two of us in our little excursion of trying to do all of Yellowstone in one day. 
Just a cool picture of one of Yellowstone's amazing features. 
I loved the way this rock looked like it is moving and alive.
We stopped for some ice cream in this little fort town
Here we are enjoying the warmth with our ice cream.
This mountain has several different layers to it, and the way the mountain eroded it shows the different layer beautifully. 
I just think this rock looks like bat droppings. 
I loved all the waterfalls we came across. 
It the museum we went to there was a stamp to put in this museum  passport, but we didn't have one, so we stamped it on ourselves. You can't see the date very well, but it was Aug 25, 2012
One of the closest buffalo's we got to!
Lower Falls, You can walk right up to it! It was amazing!
The look from the top. You can see a rainbow being created because of the mist from the waterfall. 
You can't tell, but we were very high up! I was trying to capture it, but failed. I have a picture later for the other side of the valley to show how tall Lower Falls really is. 
Looking at the beautiful valley 
Me at Yellowstone
Christina being beautiful!
This valley is why Yellowstone got it's name, because of the yellow tint the rock take on. 
Can you kinda see the double rainbow? 
They had two balconies to see the Lower Falls. This is the upper one. You can see with the lower one you are right by the water!
This is the picture I took from the other side of the valley of Lower Falls! 
Christina and I. When we asked some guy to take this picture he told us no. He then proceeded to point to another guy and say he is better at it. It kinda shocked us.
Old Faithful! It now goes off every 88 mins. It was amazing to be there. There was a couple behind us watching it, when it was done going off the husband turns to his wife and asked if she was happy now. She said yes and they could go home now. They had driven thousands of miles just to see Old Faithful! It was an awesome realization of how amazing this earth really is, and sharing it with other people is part of that awesomeness. 
So it turned out that it was Yellowstone's Christmas. Way back when some people got snowed in in August so they celebrated Christmas on August 25th. They still hold to that tradition to this day. Here is Christina writing what she recycles, one of the things Yellowstone does as part of there Christmas celebration. 
Another one of Christina's favorite features. It's called The Castle. 
We were lucky enough to see Old Faithful and then run over to Castle to see it finish going off. 
One of the hot springs
Grand Prism. 
Here is what it is looks like from the sky.
I loved all the colors the earth produces from reacting with different minerals 
All in all this was an amazing day! we got so much done! It was awesome spending time with Christina and also Lori and her family! Great memories!