5 Days in Yellowstone

Start where the rangers post the thing you'll plan the day around: the predicted time of the next eruption. Old Faithful is one of nearly 500 geysers in the park and one of six that rangers predict. Its interval is about 94 minutes after a long eruption and 68 after a short one, give or take ten, and an eruption lasts 1.5 to 5 minutes, throwing 3,700 to 8,400 gallons of water 106 to 184 feet into the air. Before the 1959 Hebgen Lake earthquake the interval averaged more than an hour, and several earthquakes since have stretched it.

Honest verdict: it isn't the tallest geyser in the park (Steamboat at Norris, on day two, beats it by a long way), and watching the first eruption from the benches with a thousand people is the least interesting way to see it. Check the board for Castle, Grand, Daisy and Riverside, then watch whichever eruption fits your walk.

Behind the geyser, boardwalks wind through at least 150 geysers in about one square mile, which is why Old Faithful is only the start. Walk the loop slowly and check the predictions. Castle erupts about every 13.5 hours, plus or minus 45 minutes, for 15 to 20 minutes, and Grand, which tops 160 feet, erupts about every 6.5 hours, give or take an hour, in bursts that last 8 to 12 minutes. Daisy and Riverside are the other two on the list. If Grand is predicted today, plan the morning around it.

Without a prediction, walk to Morning Glory Pool at the far end of the basin, a hot spring ringed in blue, green and orange, then back past Castle's cone. Marmots live in the rocks behind Grand and Riverside geysers in summer.

The Old Faithful Inn is the most famous building in the park and one of the few log hotels left in the country. The architect, Robert Reamer, wanted its lopsided shape to echo the chaos of nature, and it went up in the winter of 1903-04. The lobby has a 65-foot ceiling, a huge fireplace of local rhyolite and railings made from twisted lodgepole pine, and the whole building is nearly 700 feet long and seven stories high, with 327 rooms. You don't need a room to enjoy it: climb the gnarled staircase to the balconies, then sit on the porch and watch an eruption from above the crowd.

The trail starts near the visitor center and climbs switchbacks for half a mile to a ridge above the basin. The round trip is about 1.6 miles, short but steep, and you can add Solitary Geyser by looping back via the Geyser Hill boardwalk. The reason to go is the view: from up here you see Old Faithful go off with the whole basin spread out behind it, and the crowd shrinks to a ring of dots.

Time it so you arrive about 10 minutes before the predicted eruption, and come back for the last one of the evening, when the light is low and most day-trippers have left. If a bear has been reported on the trail, the rangers at the visitor center will tell you.

A mile or so northwest of the Inn, Black Sand Basin is a small thermal area with the active Cliff Geyser and the colorful Rainbow Pool and Sunset Lake. You can drive to its parking lot or walk there through the trail network of the Upper Geyser Basin. Treat it as an optional hour: the big colors come tomorrow at Midway.

Eat in the Inn's dining room, or grab something lighter at the Bear Paw Deli in the same building. It's park-lodge food at park-lodge prices, and the setting is the reason you're there. The Old Faithful Snow Lodge nearby has the Geyser Grill, which stayed open until 31 October in 2026.

Grand Prismatic Spring is perhaps the most photographed hot spring in the park, and you can't understand why from the boardwalk, because the rainbow of rings shows best from above. The overlook trail starts at the Fairy Falls parking lot, 1 mile south of Midway Geyser Basin, and climbs 105 feet over 0.6 miles to a platform looking down on the spring and the geyser basin. The round trip is 1.2 miles.

The parking lot is very small, so arrive early or late in the day. The trail is also the start of the hike to Fairy Falls: the falls are a 200-foot drop 1.6 miles from the trailhead, a gentle walk through young forest, and the round trip from this trailhead is 5.4 miles (3-5 hours). Skip the falls today unless you have the time.

Midway is small, but its two features are huge. Excelsior Geyser, now dormant, was erupting 300 feet into the air in the late 1800s, and today its crater, 200 by 300 feet, still pours more than 4,000 gallons of boiling water a minute into the Firehole River. Next to it is Grand Prismatic, the largest hot spring in the park, roughly 300 feet across and more than 121 feet deep. The colors come from minerals and from heat-loving bacteria, which thrive in the cooler water at the edge and can't live in the hot blue center. The boardwalk loop passes the springs close up, and steam can hide them for a moment on cold days. Come after the overlook: the view from the boardwalk makes sense once you've seen the shape from above.

Two miles north of Midway, Fountain Paint Pot is the one stop where you can see all four kinds of thermal feature in a short boardwalk loop: geysers, hot springs, fumaroles (steam vents) and mudpots. The mudpots are the point. They bubble and plop like thick pink and gray porridge, because the spring water is acidic and has eaten the rock to clay.

Firehole Lake Drive, which starts next to it and passes Great Fountain Geyser and White Dome Geyser, was closed to vehicles as of October 2026. It's open to walkers and cyclists, but there's no dedicated parking. On the way to Norris, Gibbon Falls is worth ten minutes: it drops 84 feet over the rim of the great caldera, and the rock wall across the road is the inner side of that rim.

Norris is the hottest, oldest and most restless thermal area in the park. A scientific drill hole here once measured 459 degrees F just 1,087 feet down, and almost everything at the surface is at or above boiling. The water is acidic, so the basin looks different from the Upper Geyser Basin: milky blue pools, rusty orange runoff and bare white ground, with no trees. Steamboat Geyser is the tallest active geyser in the world, with major eruptions of 300 to 400 feet, but they're unpredictable and can be years apart. Its frequent minor eruptions are only 10 to 40 feet.

Two boardwalk loops cover the basin: Porcelain Basin (three-quarters of a mile, open and exposed, with the most color and sound) and Back Basin (1.5 miles through trees, with Steamboat and Echinus). Walk both if you can.

Mammoth Hot Springs is the one lodge area that stays open through the winter, and its dining room serves dinner until the hotel's short closure in March (it needs dinner reservations from 1 November). Its 2026 menu had both bison and trout. If you'd rather not sit down, the Terrace Grill is open until mid-October and the General Store is open all year.

In the fall, rutting bull elk wander the village. Stay at least 25 yards back: the park warns that they're unpredictable and can charge cars and people.

Lamar Valley is a broad, grassy valley between Tower Junction and the Northeast Entrance, and it's one of the best places in the park to see wildlife, because it's one of the main summer grounds for bison and elk, which attract their predators: wolves and grizzly bears. Wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone in 1995, and this valley is where many visitors see them, usually as small gray dots on a far hillside. Sightings are never guaranteed, so go for the bison herds and the light and treat a wolf as a bonus.

Park in a pullout and look for people with spotting scopes: they're often happy to share a view. Bring binoculars, and a lens of 300 mm or more for photos. The rules are strict: stay at least 100 yards (91 m) from wolves and bears and 25 yards from bison and elk, stay in or next to your car when a bear is close, and never block the road. The valley also holds the Lamar Buffalo Ranch, where the park's few remaining bison were built back up in the early 1900s. You can drive past it, but nothing there is open to the public.

Tower Fall drops 132 feet through a gap in a wall of volcanic pinnacles, and its overlook is a short walk from the Tower General Store. The painter Thomas Moran made Tower Fall a subject, and his paintings, shown to Congress in 1872, helped to convince politicians to set the park aside. The trail to the base is closed because of severe erosion, but you can walk 0.75 mile past the overlook to see Tower Creek meet the Yellowstone River.

A few minutes north, the Calcite Springs overlook looks down on the end of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. The rock is hydrothermally altered rhyolite, and across the river, columns of basalt mark an ancient lava flow. Bighorn sheep, osprey and red-tailed hawks live in the gorge, so look for them with binoculars.

Mammoth Hot Springs isn't a geyser basin but a staircase of white travertine terraces, formed as hot water carrying dissolved limestone cools and leaves the rock behind. It changes constantly, so visibly that the features can look different from one day to the next. Boardwalks wind above the steaming terraces, and you can also drive a loop around them. Walk the boardwalks first for the close-up, then drive the loop for the wider view.

Behind the hotel is Fort Yellowstone, a row of sturdy red-roofed buildings that the US Army built after 1886, when soldiers marched in to take charge of a park that poachers, vandals and squatters had been damaging for years. The old officers' quarters now house the Albright Visitor Center, with exhibits on wildlife and history and a stamp for your park passport. It's a short walk, and a good reminder that the first national park was a hard thing to protect.

Fifteen minutes down the road is the little town of Gardiner and the Roosevelt Arch, the stone gateway to the park. President Theodore Roosevelt laid its cornerstone in 1903, the same year the railway reached the town, and the designer was Robert Reamer, the architect of the Old Faithful Inn. The North Entrance is still the park's only year-round entrance for cars, and you can drive through the arch at any time.

Gardiner has a handful of restaurants and bars, most of them casual. The Wonderland Cafe and Lodge on Main Street is the dependable one: it's open Tuesday to Sunday from 7am to 8:30pm (closed Mondays), with local Montana beers on tap, and it doesn't serve breakfast. A bison burger, the local version of the American hamburger, is the obvious order, if the menu has one.

The Yellowstone River drops over two waterfalls into a canyon about 20 miles long. The Upper Falls is 109 feet and the Lower Falls 308 feet, and the best-known view of the Lower Falls is from Artist Point on the South Rim, at the end of a road a mile past the Upper Falls viewpoints.

Be realistic about the season. The falls carry about 63,500 gallons a second at the spring peak and only 5,000 in the fall, so a trip in late September sees less water. From the Canyon Village intersection, follow the signs for South Rim Drive. The Upper Falls viewpoints are the first left turn, and Artist Point is at the end of the road.

The North Rim Drive has four lookouts: the Brink of the Lower Falls, Inspiration Point, Grand View Point and Lookout Point. The Brink trail drops 600 feet in 0.4 mile to the top of the Lower Falls, where you stand beside the water as it goes over the edge. It's steep (0.7 mile round trip), and the climb back up is the price of the view. If you only do one walk in the canyon, make it this one, because it's where you hear and feel the falls.

Canyon Village has the Canyon Lodge Eatery, the Falls Cafe, an ice creamery and a burger diner in the General Store done up in a 1960s style. Dates vary: in 2026 the Eatery closed on 25 October, the Falls Cafe on 4 October and the General Store on 11 October. The 1960s diner is the right place for a hamburger or a milkshake, and the Eatery for a hot lunch.

South of Canyon the road runs through Hayden Valley, a wide, marshy meadow along the Yellowstone River that was once an arm of the lake. Because the soil is clay and glacial till, the water doesn't drain, so there are few trees and huge views. It's some of the best wildlife habitat in the lower 48: bison from spring through the fall rut, coyotes and foxes, pelicans, geese and ducks on the river, and bald eagles and sandhill cranes in the air. Grizzlies hunt newborn bison and elk calves here in spring and early summer, so they are more likely then than in the fall.

Pull into the turnouts, scan the slopes with binoculars and stay in your car if you see a bear. The first and last hours of light are the best. Bison jams are routine here, so stay in the vehicle until the herd moves on.

At the south end of Hayden Valley, Mud Volcano is a short boardwalk past mudpots and fumaroles. Hydrogen sulfide gas rises from deep below, bacteria turn it into sulfuric acid, and the acid breaks the rock down to clay, which is why the ground smells of rotten eggs and the mud bubbles. In 1978 a series of shallow earthquakes heated the soil to nearly 200 degrees F, and the slope known as the cooking hillside is now a barren landscape of fallen trees.

The Lake Yellowstone Hotel is the oldest operating hotel in the park and a National Historic Landmark. It has a full-service dining room and a deli, and in 2026 both were open from 15 May to 11 October. The hotel sits on the shore of Yellowstone Lake.

Fishing Bridge was built in 1937 and was the most popular fishing spot in the park until 1973, when it was closed to anglers because the native cutthroat trout had declined. Today people lean on the railing to watch fish. The bridge crosses the Yellowstone River where it leaves the lake, and the small museum beside it closed for the season on 3 October in 2026.

Yellowstone Lake is the largest high-elevation lake in the lower 48, 20 miles long and 14 miles wide, with 141 miles of shoreline and a deepest point of about 410 feet.

West Thumb is the largest geyser basin on the shore of Yellowstone Lake, with hot springs and geysers right beside the water. The bay is a caldera that formed about 174,000 years ago inside the much larger caldera of 600,000 years ago, a volcano inside a volcano. Some of the hot features run underwater, and you can see them as slicks or bulges on the surface of the lake in summer.

A short boardwalk loop takes about an hour. It's a good place to end a trip that began at Old Faithful, because it packs steam, forest and water into one view.

The road from West Thumb to Old Faithful climbs over Craig Pass, where the Rocky Mountains reach 8,262 feet and the Continental Divide splits the country into two watersheds. Near the end of the drive, Kepler Cascades is an easy waterfall, with a viewing platform at a pullout south of Old Faithful. Stop for ten minutes, and you're back at Old Faithful for one last eruption before the drive to West Yellowstone.

One block from the West Entrance, the Grizzly and Wolf Discovery Center is a not-for-profit wildlife park with grizzly bears and wolves. It's the one place where you can be sure of seeing a grizzly. The ticket is good for two days, and it's open 365 days a year.

Hours change with the season, and the site shows 9am to 4pm with last admission at 3:30 in the cold months, so check before you plan a late visit. If you reach town too late, do it the next morning.

West Yellowstone is a tourist town in the best and worst sense: a few blocks of restaurants, bars and souvenir shops. Pizza is the easy dinner, but a steak or a trout is more of the region.