Yellowstone National Park. Everyone has been looking forward to this day for a long time. We pushed the outing back to make sure the weather would cooperate. The van was loaded by 7:15 am and we were on our way. The morning was crystal clear, but breezy and very cold. The temperature was 38 degrees when we left. It would only reach 50 degrees in Yellowstone that day. The early morning light was fantastic and we stopped along the way at famous spots in Grand Teton National Park, including Snake River Overlook, Oxbow Bend, and Jackson Lake. Our first stop in Yellowstone was West Thumb, a large tributary of the massive Yellowstone Lake. We walked along the boardwalk through a seemingly foreign landscape full of steaming thermal features, some of which were submerged below the surface of the Lake. We continued our route along the shores of Yellowstone Lake, stopping briefly to check out the beautiful Lake Hotel. At the Fishing Bridge junction we headed north along the Yellowstone River into one of my favorite parts of the park, the Hayden Valley. The scene in this valley is truly magnificent. It's like looking back through time. The brilliant green valley was spotted with bison, some very close to the road. They were the biggest, baddest looking bison I've ever seen. Next stop was Aritst's Point, overlooking the Lower Falls of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River, a spot made famous by a Thomas Moran painting. The light was really nice and we spent quite a bit of time photographing in the area. We stopped for lunch in Canyon Village and then headed west across the park to Norris Geyser Basin. At Norris, you can seen nearly every type of thermal feature in the park in less than a mile hike. The landscape is out of this world. As we made our way south towards Old Faithful, we swung through the Firehole Canyon, a beautiful display of basalt canyon walls and roaring whitewater. We arrived at Old Faithful around 4:00 pm and caught the first "show" at 4:46. The crew spit up and hiked all over the geyser basin surrounding Old Faithful. At one point there was an issue along the trail with a bison mother who had just lost her calf in one of the thermal features. The mother bison was running around wildly charging people for no apparent reason. Some of the students' witnessed this event and shared the crazy story with the rest of us. Parts of the trail were shut down quickly by park rangers and no one was injured. We had dinner in the Old Faithful area and checked out the historic and magnificent Old Faithful Inn. On our way back to Jackson, we were treated with an event straight from the Nature Channel. A bear, not sure if it was grizzly or brown, ran across the road just behind us and into the woods on the other side of the road. Soon after, we heard a shrill like nothing I've ever heard before, and on the other side of the woods several elk came running out. We're not sure what transpired in those woods, but we didn't see the bear come back out. We made one last detour on our way home to the top of Signal Mountain in Grand Teton National Park. It was after 9:00 pm by the time we reached the summit, and the light had painted the landscape in shades of pink and purple. The view from the top is probably the best view in the park. You can see the whole valley in front of you, the jagged peaks of the Tetons off to one side and the snow capped Gros Ventre (grow vont) range on the other. We finally arrived at the Cowboy Village at 10:15 pm, all feeling like we'd been away from civilization for more than just a day. Our souls were renewed with a great appreciation for the power and mystery of the natural world.