Fairy Creek Trail

This past weekend (Thursday and Friday), Hilary and I went on our third backpacking adventure and our first outside the Canyon area.  I’ve been choosing harder trails, but the hikes have been getting easier; Hilary is quickly acclimating and on her way to becoming a mountain woman, and I’m getting back into the swing of things.  We walked ten miles on the first day (with a 1000 foot elevation gain) and seven miles on the second day, mostly on the Fairy Creek Trail.

We saw Fairy Falls, Spray Geyser, and Imperial Geyser on Thursday and spent the night in the almost oxymoronic Little Firehole Meadow (in the background of shown photo).  The grassy expanse, named after the Firehole River, has been our favorite campsite thus far.

The following day we continued on the Fairy Creek Trail, leaving the Firehole River and meeting back up with it as it spilt over Mystic Falls before sweeping round the “fireholes” of the Upper Geyser Basin.

The Fairy Creek Trail ended at Biscuit Basin, home of the clear blue Sapphire Pool.  We continued on a boardwalk through the Upper Geyser Basin, where we got to see eruptions of Grand Geyser, Beehive Geyser, and Old Faithful, amongst many other “thermal features.”

Along the way, we also encountered various wildlife.  In addition to bear tracks on the trail, there was a buffalo next to Imperial Geyser and a deer leaping across a stream next to our path.  At Fairy Falls we made a marmot friend, though we only realized his identity after the fact.

Also, many geographic features of Yellowstone are still unnamed, so as an explorer and adventurer I took it upon myself to christen the lake we encountered at the highest point on our trail "Loch James Everett Newman."

After completing our hike, we got a ride back to Canyon Village from a nice married couple who called themselves Doug and Lorraine.  The pair met when they were college students working in the park in the 1960s.  After graduating they got married; Doug worked for NASA for thirty-something years, and he is now an adjunct professor of mathematics at William and Mary.  Now that they are “semi-retired,” they have returned to Yellowstone this summer and last, working in the Mammoth dining room and gift shop.  Getting to ride with them and talk to them was a lot of fun.

As usual, Hilary took some great pictures during the hike, which I have posted on flickr (link to the right).  This new batch of photos is particularly good.