You can’t do a tour of America’s National Parks and skip out Yellowstone. It’s a classic! The fact that’s its foundation is an epic, bubbling supervolcano used to freak me out, but I’m over it. Definitely a cool place to visit!

We were already determined to camp for free at Yellowstone; the park itself forced us into it, as every last one of its 12 campgrounds was full when we got there. You’ve got to either book way in advance or turn up super early in the morning to get a space!

Yellowstone National Park is astoundingly vast. Most of it is in Wyoming, but Idaho and Montana manage to claim a good chunk of the land there too. When you end up crossing state border lines while in a park, you know it’s big. Still, those nifty guys at the NPS have built a pretty efficient road network to quickly get you between all the points of interest. And there’s also a brilliant app, which was a first for the national parks we’d been to.

The landscape here ranges from grassy hillocks to modest mountains, with rivers snaking in between, and occasionally you’d be forgiven for thinking you’re somewhere in Scotland.

What is extraordinary about Yellowstone, though, is the sporadic evidence of subterranean volcanic activity which pops up all over the place. A steaming pool of azure blue water here, bubbling puddles of clay there, a geyser spouting away in the distance. It’s mind-boggling imagining that all of earth once looked like this!

We knew that Yellowstone was famous for its volcanic activity, but we had no idea that so many Americans were specifically visiting to check out the wildlife there. As we ventured deeper into the park, fairly empty looking meadows gradually became populated, first by elk, then by grazing herds of buffalo, bluebirds, snakes and even brown bears. Not bad for a stretch of land mottled with patches of boiling hot volcanic steam…

We rounded off our Yellowstone trip with a pilgrimage to the park’s signature geyser, Old Faithful, which mysteriously blows at very predictable intervals. Here’s the old chap in action.

If you’re in doubt as to whether to bother to make the long journey to Yellowstone, don’t be. If this enormous place somehow doesn’t seem like enough to be worth the journey, you can always pair it up with the park next door, Grand Tetons National Park: our next post!