After a medium day of driving from Glacier to Yellowstone, we arrived at our campsite for the next 3 days – Mammoth Campground. This northwestern-most campground was one of the nicest places we stayed throughout the trip, and it was a short walk away from the bougiest national park town we’ve ever been in. Mammoth is complete with a clinic, a post office and not one, but three restaurants. More importantly, it is full of elk – on the first night, we already ran into a gaggle of elk (with the bucks affectionately named ‘The General’ and ’24’) that brought out all the tourists in the hotels to get a glimpse of the action. Thankfully, the park rangers are out in force and help us not get impaled by a raging buck by gently yelling at you via megaphone to stand further back you idiot…

After an exciting first evening, we settled down for the night and got up the next morning to drive through the entire east side of the park. Of course no drive through Yellowstone is complete without a buffalo slowing down traffic – within 15 minutes of driving, we already reached our first Buffalo Backup™. In retrospect this timing should have tipped us off that this would be a common occurrence, but maybe the coffee hadn’t kicked in just yet.

Our first destination was Tower Junction, which towers above a small waterfall (by Yellowstone standards…) There’s not much to say about this other than it’s a great place to get gas if you need it (and see one petrified tree), otherwise head on down to Canyon Village where the real fun begins. We opted for doing a day hike on the South Rim Trail and this was a great 3 hour tour of some of the least crowded thermal zones in the park, as well as incredible overlooks into Yellowstone’s grand canyon. You can add a few offshoots to this hike, but the most disappointing one was out to Point Sublime – the overlook sees less of the actual canyon than most of the rest of the trail, and it adds 2-3 miles and 1000ft of elevation for said lackluster view. Not recommended unless you didn’t get your steps in that day.

Since Yellowstone is such a driveable park, we ventured on to Yellowstone Lake after the hike and within 20 minutes we already felt like we were in a whole new park. The grade softens and suddenly you pop out in front of one of the largest lakes I’ve seen since the Great Lakes. You can opt for a few hikes here, but we just walked around the Lake Yellowstone Hotel and felt we had gotten the gist of the area.

Night two was another wildlife wonderland, with multiple buffalo herds seen on the side of the road as we drove back to the campsite. I would say this is Buffalo Backup™ number 4 or 5, but honestly I lost count by this point… At the campsite we were also greeted by a young buck who was just minding his own business, but made us think twice about starting our dinner right as we got in – eventually he got bored of us and moved on to grazing at other campsites.

The following day we had planned to do a few hikes, but we grossly underestimated how much the first hike would take out of us. We hiked the Bunsen Peak Loop which by itself is not too bad, but after the peak we descend straight down the peak and into the canyon to see Osprey Falls. The waterfall is nice enough, but after a stupendous view of the upper falls the day before, less impressive. And the climb back is… less than ideal. At least the 3-4mi back to the parking lot went by faster as we met another hiking couple (who didn’t moan about the climb up as much as Radu did…) and we chatted about the trip, must-sees in the coming days, and more.

For our final day in the park, we did the tourist loops around Norris Geyser, Prismatic Pond, and ultimately Old Faithful! It’s incredible how accessible the entire park is, especially for the more renowned destinations in the park – on the flip side, this means that you’re wading through thousands of tourists even on a Monday morning… That said, they are the tourist loops for a reason and they were well worth the short visit before we ultimately went on our merry way to another of the US’ gorgeous national parks – Grand Teton.