Yellowstone National Park is one of the places I have wished to visit since I was a little girl. I have seen tons of photos and video about this iconic place, and dreamed to see it with my own eyes one day. In collaboration with Tourism Board of Wyoming, we finally made this trip for real.

Grand Prismatic, Yellowstone National Park - Madeline Lu

Since there aren’t any direct flights from San Francisco to Jackson Hole (the closest airport to Yellowstone National Park), we decided to drive there instead. It took us 16 hours on the road (not including overnight on the way) to get to the Montana side of Yellowstone National Park. 16 HOURS!!! We are still getting used to the fact that U.S. is just so huge. Back in Europe, this trip would have been something similar to drive from Southern Germany to Sweden, which we would have never done. But here we are, driving across the desert of Nevada (which alone takes almost 6 hours to cross) to visit a national park. During the road trip, we passed five different states California, Nevada, Idaho, Wyoming and Monata. Absoloutely crazy, but fun at the same time.

For this road trip, we set ourselves five days to explore the Yellowstone, Grand Teton and Jackson Hole regions. We started from the west side of Yellowstone and then moved ourselves way down to Jackson.

Here was our iternary:

Night one - Under Canvas - Stargazer tent (near West Entrance of Yellowstone)

Night two - Cabin in Bar & Ranch (near West Entrance of Yellowstone)

Night three and four - Old Faithful Inn (Yellowstone National Park)

Night five - Hotel Jackson (Jackson Hole)

Now, let's talk about Yellowstone! I mean, no wonder this place was one of the must-visit places before you die. The whole place is just magical and is like on a different planet. I think if you really want to explore this national parks properly, you need to stay for about a week. But if you were a bit short of time like we did, you can easily explore most the famous sights within three days too. During our stay, we saw such a variety of natural wonders and wild animals (elk, bison, grizzly bear, black bear, moose, and more. There were so much to see and talk about, I have decided to spread our journey into several posts to show you in details what we have seen and where have we stayed.

A lot of the time during our visit, we hiked to see what made Yellowstone so famous - its geysers and hot springs. The vibrant colors of the hot springs were just unbelievable. They are so inviting and make you want to soak yourself in it (but please don't!!! They are extremely hot and toxic to our human bodies!!!) I ended up taking a collection of photos just to document the intense colors. We also took a short hike to see the lower fall of Grand Canyon of Yellowstone. To see such a powerful water force dropping into the river was just breathtaking! But the highlight of our trip was taking the plane ride with FlyJacksonhole . This was truly once in a lifetime experience that I shall remember for the rest of my life. When you are up in the air, you really get a good idea just how vast this national park is, which you don't normally get when you are on the ground. Also to see Grand Prismatic from above was really a dream comes true moment for me. I don't think I can even find the right words to describe this amazing hot spring.

Well, thought the best way to show you maybe are through my pictures. Although they don't really justify the real beauty of the places, hopefully, they give a sense of how amazing this national park really is.