YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK (WAGM) – Yellowstone National Park has millions of visitors each year. Earlier this month 21 Holiday Vacation/WAGM travelers spent two days in Yellowstone. Rene Cloukey hosted the trip and has part four of his travel diary.

Yellowstone National Park is on pace to welcome nearly 5 million visitors again this year. In 2021 a record 4 million 8 hundred thousand visitors visited the area. This year according to reports on the National Park Registry nearly 3 million four hundred thousand visitors have driven through the gatesso far this year. That is an increase of 3.4 percent over last year. Yellowstone was established in 1872. The park encompasses nearly 3500 square miles and over 2 million acres. 96 percent of the park is in Wyoming. The highest point is Eagle Creek at 11,358 feet. Our second day at Yellowstone was memorable for so many reasons from the hydrothermal features with more than 500 active geysers, that is more than half of the world’s geysers. 290 waterfalls including Lower Falls over the Yellowstone river. The falls measure 308 feet. We stopped at several of the geysers for pictures, but the highlight was old faithful. Our group got soaked and pelted by hail after our arrival. The sky opened up minutes before Old Faithful erupted. The hail stopped and the rain continued as we all got soaked during the eruption. Old Faithful eruptions averaged every 92 minutes and most eruption predictions are accurate to within 10 minutes.

While that was one of the memorable parts of the day. We were also watching for wildlife, and we were not disappointed. We were in a Bison traffic jam as dozens and dozens of Bison were on the side of the road and many decided they wanted to be on the other side so that stopped traffic as people took pictures from a distance. We were there during the rutting season for the bison and that made them more active.

We also saw dozens of elk, wolves and coyotes on our visit. Two parks down and one to go. Friday on the travel diary we go to the Grand Tetons and also go for a covered wagon ride to a western cookout. I’m Rene Cloukey NewsSource 8.

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