Family trip to Yellowstone filled with geysers, nature and wildlife

Bison and elk and campfires and fishing. And oh, that smell ... that unmistakable sulfur smell of geothermal activity. Ask my sons what they remember about our summer trip to Yellowstone National Park, and that's the answer you get.

Our five-day stay at Yellowstone, the country's first national park, was full of vibrant vistas and wildlife encounters that made for some indelible memories, memories maximized by a balance of planned activities and spontaneity.

Yellowstone National Park spans more than 2 million acres in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho and contains more than half of the world's active geothermal features from small puddles of warm, bubbling, oozing mud to the iconic Old Faithful geyser. Those features and the abundance of wildlife attracted a record 3.3 million visitors in 2009, President Barack Obama and his family among them, making it the park service's fourth most-visited site. Keeping all that in mind, I don't advise you to jump in your car and head West without some forethought.

Before you go

Spring is the best time to spot baby bison and elk; while in the fall you're likely to spy animal mating rituals. But hey, we don't call it summer vacation for nothing. The weeks from late June to early August are when most families visit the park, and we found ourselves here in late July 2009.

Reservations for tent and RV sites at seven of the park's 12 campgrounds open May 1 and are handled through Xanterra Parks and Resorts, a contracted firm that charges no service fees. Because some of the campgrounds can't handle large campers (hairpin turns and the like), if you're driving or pulling anything longer than 30 feet, advance reservations are recommended. The 300-plus sites at Fishing Bridge are exclusively for RVs and other hard-sided campers. The remaining campgrounds are first-come, first-serve.

We ended up at Bay Bridge, the largest campground at roughly 425 tent and RV sites, situated in the central part of the park at the north end of Yellowstone Lake. My Grizzly Adams-esque husband would have preferred a more intimate campground (the smallest, Slough Creek, has just 29 sites), but our plans were to meet up with my father and his wife who were pulling a camper from Northern California.

Bay Bridge had its amenities: a nice amphitheater with ranger-led evening programs and bathrooms with flush toilets (though no showers). Plus, plenty of families with kids camped here, so our sons had the opportunity to share animals stories and s'mores with their new friends.

The hum of RV generators and bustle of activity wasn't enough to deter mule deer from ambling through camp or a lone bison from making himself right at home in between two campers (more on bison later).

Bay Bridge served as our base for five days, but plenty of people stay one or two nights at the other campgrounds around the park, allowing them quicker access to features like Lewis Falls or the park's 1,100-plus miles of hiking trails.

If a soft bed and hot water is more your thing, Yellowstone has nine lodges, including the grand and historic Old Faithful Inn and Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel. Lodge reservations opened in February, but don't think a lodge room is out of the question.

When searching the website for rooms, don't plug in a block of four nights, for example. Rick Hoeninghausen, director of sales and marketing for Xanterra, says if three of those four nights are available, the search will come back as unavailable. Instead, he suggests searching for individual nights and being open to the idea of staying at more than one lodge in the park during your visit.

A Colorado family we met had a brilliant idea: two nights in a tent followed by one in a cabin then two more tent nights.

If you can be flexible, traveling in the spring and fall will give you a greater choice of lodging and camping sites.

It's big

Yellowstone's grand size - it's as big as Delaware and Rhode Island combined - means getting from Point A to Point B, or from Tower Fall in the north to the east side's Lower Geyser Basin is going to take time. Keep the kids busy by picking up a copy of "Who Pooped in the Park" by Gary D. Robson (a fun guide to identifying wildlife and their scat), or a Junior Ranger Kit ($3) at any of the visitor centers. If you've checked out nps.gov/yell before your trip, you can print out a number of coloring and activity sheets.

Of course the most interactive drive-time activity is wildlife spotting.

The famous grizzlies of Yellowstone eluded us - we apparently slept too late to catch the mama bear and her cubs in Hayden Valley, but not a day went by when we did not see bison, and a lot of them.

Bison are the largest mammals in Yellowstone, the male bulls weigh in at 1,800 pounds while the females cows seem demure at 1,000 pounds. Through protection and breeding efforts, the bison population has grown from 50 in 1902 to 3,500.

Bison may look like gentle beasts, what with their big brown eyes, but posters throughout the park warn that they are the cause of more visitor injuries than bears. They also are the cause of the majority of traffic jams. During an evening ride from the west entrance, we witnessed a several-mile backup of oncoming traffic caused by a furry fellow who decided to rest in the middle of the road. And on our final day, we were quite literally caught in the middle of small herd of bison crossing the road. If we had put our windows down, we could have touched the mangy creatures.

Traffic jams are common as well as people pullovers - not always at the designated viewing spots - to snap photos of young elk resting alongside their mothers or the sun fading behind the Gallatin Range.

These slowdowns also can change your plans. Instead of heading for a picnic near Sheepeater Cliff, you might detour north toward Mammoth Hot Springs and find yourself, as we did, at the Boiling River. For these spontaneous adventures, always have your bathing suits handy. The Boiling River, near the park's north entrance in Montana, is the area where hot springs flow into the icy Gardner River creating natural hot tubs where you can soak muscles strained from a four-mile, 800-foot vertical ramble along the Elephant Back Loop Trail. Keep in mind there are no changing rooms and it's a brief, level walk to the bubbling pools.

No matter what your day's itinerary holds, keep binoculars and fishing poles close by as well. The former will help you spot a bald eagle in the Swan Lake Flats or big horn sheep ascending Little Quadrant Mountain, while the later (a three-day fishing license is required for anglers older than 15 costs $15) will allow you to tempt rainbow trout along a meandering meadow stretch of the Nez Percé Creek if the mood strikes.

Natural wonder

No trip to the park is complete without watching Old Faithful do its stuff.

In recent years, the park service had installed wooden walkways and benches along one edge to accommodate the crowds who watch the geyser expel a powerful jet of 3,700-plus gallons of steamy water some 130 feet into the air every 94 minutes or so.

The show is so impressive the boys and I stopped to see it a second day while my husband fly-fished the nearby Firehole River. The second time we viewed the eruption from a trail on the back side of Old Faithful; a perspective I found made for dramatic pictures.

Should you arrive after Old Faithful's display, take the opportunity to hike some of the nearby trails to see smaller geysers in the basin (and still within sight of Old Faithful). It's also worthwhile to stop in the visitor center and gift shop for a short, informative film about geysers or grab an ice cream cone and roam the antlered halls at Old Faithful Inn.

There are plenty of organized activities in the park: scenic cruises on Yellowstone Lake, photographic safaris and stagecoach rides through sagebrush flats, a full-day interpretive coach tour of the park's most popular vistas and geysers and ranger-led hikes.

Fight the urge to do it all in one visit to the park - better to pick a few options, and use a first trip to scout out others. For your next trip to Yellowstone, of course.

<p class="factboxtext12col"><b>If you go</b></p>

<p class="factboxtext12col"><b>Yellowstone National Park:</b> 2.2 million acres in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. $25 entrance pass good for seven days. Guide to natural features, wild life and recreation at nps.gov/yell.</p>

<p class="factboxtext12col"><b>Lodging:</b> Tent sites $19.50 a night (up to six people per site); cabins $65 to $130; lodge rooms $149 to $545. Vacation packages available. <a href="http://yellowstonenationalparklodges.com" target="new">yellowstonenationalparklodges.com</a></p>

<p class="factboxtext12col"><b>Getting there:</b> Expect a full two-day drive from the suburbs to Yellowstone's East Entrance. Commercial airlines serve Cody and Jackson, Wyo., Bozeman and Billings, Mont., and Idaho Falls, Idaho. The West Yellowstone, Mont., airport is serviced from June to early September from Salt Lake City, Utah.</p>