{"id":4784,"date":"2012-07-04T00:20:00","date_gmt":"2012-07-04T06:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/whatsdavedoing.com\/?p=4784"},"modified":"2012-07-04T00:20:00","modified_gmt":"2012-07-04T06:20:00","slug":"incredible-diversity-yellowstone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/whatsdavedoing.com\/incredible-diversity-yellowstone\/","title":{"rendered":"The incredible diversity of Yellowstone"},"content":{"rendered":"
After a wonderful couple of days hiking in Grand Teton National Park<\/a>, we drove the full ten miles to its more famous cousin, Yellowstone.\u00a0 The first national park in the US – and second-largest outside Alaska – is one of the most visited in the country, and it showed.\u00a0 Tour buses, traffic jams and sky-high accommodation prices were quite a shock after the relative calm of its southern neighbour.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Despite the crowds, though,it wasn’t hard to see why Yellowstone is just so popular.\u00a0 I don’t think I’ve ever been somewhere with such incredible geographic diversity in a (relatively) small area.\u00a0 Bubbling pools, boiling mudpits and explosive geysers lay merely miles from tranquil meadows and waveless lakes.\u00a0 Deer gently grazed a few feet from steaming vents while bears hunted for fish in rivers only a few feet from the road.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I think it was the colours that amazed me the most.\u00a0 Certain kinds of bacteria and chemical reactions flourish in the extreme conditions found in thermal hotspots like Yellowstone, and with them come all manner of unusual colours and strange landscapes.<\/p>\n