Geothermal paradise of Yellowstone National Park

Yellowstone is the crown jewel of our National Park System.  It was the first of its kind, and remains the most unique and diverse wilderness experience that you will find in this country.

It’s also an extremely cool place for kids.

But with almost 3500 square miles of lakes, geysers, canyons, and hot springs, there’s too much to see in one short stay.  So, after three visits to Yellowstone, and consultation with my own children, I have compiled the following list of park sights and activities that will make your family trip an especially memorable one.

Ten Cool Things For Kids (and Grown-Ups) in Yellowstone National Park

1.  Dragon’s Mouth Spring

Dragon's Mouth Spring

How can you resist telling your kids that a dragon lives in a cave near a mud volcano?  It doesn’t take much imagination to think that this cavern, with its growls and thumps, and spitting steam, might just hold a real dragon.

2.  Fishing Cone

Fishing Cone Geyser at Yellowstone Lake

It’s probably just a tall tale, but the story goes that the early trappers and explorers would catch fish in Yellowstone Lake, swing them directly into the Fishing Cone geyser just off shore, and have a meal of boiled fish in just minutes.  “Hook and cook,” they called it.  Like the dragon cave, another cool sight that will fire up the imagination.

3.  Old Faithful Inn

Old Faithful Inn

What kid won’t love the largest log hotel in the world?  Just walk inside the 100-year-old Inn’s lobby, with its four stories of lodgepole pine balconies and 500-ton stone fireplace, and your kids might just want to sit for awhile.  Preferably in one of the many handmade wood rocking chairs.  Better yet, stay in one of the Inn’s rooms.  Prices are reasonable, and the food in the dining room is first-class.

4.  Fountain Paint Pots

Fountain Paint Pots

This is what I remember best from my own childhood memories of Yellowstone.  The short half-mile trail is the perfect primer for the various thermal features you’ll see throughout the park.  It’s a little bit of everything, with numerous geysers, bubbling mud pots, hot springs, and steaming fumaroles.  With all that activity in a small space, it’s kind of watching a three-ring circus.

Buffalo Warning

5.  Dangerous Animals

Your kids might not be impressed by the thousands of bison that roam all over the park until they see the signs warning that these animals weigh up to 2000 pounds, run over 30mph, and think nothing of skewering a camera-toting tourist on the end of its horns.  They can be extremely dangerous.  Same goes for the grizzly bears, wolves, moose, elk, and badgers.  But worry mostly about the bison (sometimes called buffalo), because they will be all around you.

6.  Junior Ranger Program

The Junior Ranger program at Yellowstone is one of the coolest of all the National Parks.  It gets the kids involved in all sorts of activities involving wildlife, ecology, geology, hiking, and education.  If they complete the program, kids get an official Junior Ranger patch.  Best of all, they learn something while having fun.

7.  Stagecoach Rides

From Roosevelt Lodge in the northern part of Yellowstone, you can take a trip to the past with a rattling, bumpy ride on an old west stagecoach, just as visitors did back at the turn of the century.  The ride lasts an hour and is quite reasonably priced at $8 for kids, $10 for adults.  A nice way to soak up the scenery.

8.  Upper Geyser Basin

Geyser watching

You want geysers?  This is where you’ll have your fill of them, as the basin contains over 150 geysers.  That’s the highest concentration of geysers in the world.  Walking through this alien landscape makes you feel like the Earth’s crust could burst open in a cataclysmic hydrothermal explosion at any moment, totally ruining your dinner reservations at the nearby Old Faithful Inn Dining Room later that night.  But seriously, this is the best place for you and your kids to see geysers going off right and left.  Many of them, such as Castle Geyser, Grand Geyser, and Riverside Geyser are highly predictable, so you can figure when and where you need to be for the show.

9.  Grand Prismatic Spring

Grand Prismatic Spring

Not everything in Yellowstone bubbles, growls, and erupts.  Grand Prismatic Spring is simply a gigantic pool of steaming water.  In fact, it’s the largest hot springs in the United States.  You have to see it for the beautiful colors, from deep blue to orange to green to red, produced by different species of bacteria living in the water.  It makes for an interesting biology lesson for everyone.

10.  Old Faithful

Old Faithful Geyser

You know this would be on the list.  How could it not be?  It’s the most popular feature in Yellowstone, and is the park’s defining symbol.  The area around Old Faithful is crowded, commercial, and noisy, but it’s still very cool.  The geyser usually erupts on a predictable schedule, roughly every 90 minutes.  Up to 8,000 gallons of scalding hot water shoots upwards of 185 feet while busloads of tourists “ooh” and “ahh.”  On our last visit to the park, my kids and I made a game of running to watch Old Faithful go off.  Staying in the nearby Inn made that easy for us, and we ended up viewing eight eruptions during our weekend at Yellowstone.

Resources for Yellowstone:

Yellowstone tours are a great way to experience the Park.

Check out some other great hiking adventures at YourHikes.com. It is a member-based hiking site where you can earn points for your comments and posts  and redeem your points for cool hiking gear.

Photos courtesy of the National Park Service

A thought occurred to me while sitting at the original Islamorada Fish Company, enjoying a grilled grouper sandwich and an ice cold guava margarita, watching the boats floating lazily on the turquoise water. I could get used to this.

The view at the Islamorada Fish Company.

Our trip to Florida served a dual purpose: we were visiting my wife Beth’s grandmother for her 92nd birthday, and following that our goal was to spend a couple of days in the Keys, seeing and doing as much as possible. The birthday celebration went well; Beth’s grandmother lives in Boca Raton (Florida law does require that all elderly Florida residents live in Boca Raton), and while Boca Raton is not the place that comes to mind when one thinks of a Florida vacation (when I think of Boca, I think of Del Boca Vista, where Morty Seinfeld suffered the humiliation of impeachment), the beaches are great (and in late April, pretty empty), and the place we stayed at – a Holiday Inn, no less! - was a fantastic bargain: $149 a night for a beachfront hotel. Still, I had bigger fish to fry. Figuratively – I’d been wanting to get to the Keys for a while, ever since my days as a single beach bum (for when one is a single beach bum, one listens to a LOT of Jimmy Buffett). And literally – fried grouper, fried yellowtail snapper, fried conch…we had two full days to wring the most out of the Keys, and we managed to do just that.

Our base of operations was The Islander Resort at Islamorada. I love places that look like the set of an Elvis movie, and in this regard The Islander does not disappoint. The Islander is an old school “beachfront” (more on that beach in a second) resort that underwent a recent renovation; the rooms are bright, clean, and retain that great early 60′s look. Two pools and a lovely indoor/outdoor bar that served killer rumrunners means that one need not walk the 50 or so yards to the “beach”; just as well, since the shore is hard reef, and not a great place to swim or catch rays.

Me on the beach at the Islander Resort.

We had a lot to do and not a lot of time to do it. After grabbing lunch at the aforementioned Islamorada Fish Company, and lounging around the pool watching the tourists covered with oil (it also seemed like everyone smoked. Including mothers. We saw at least 3 moms holding a baby in one hand and a cigarette in the other) we loaded up the rental car and headed down to Key West, in the hopes of watching the sunset from Mallory Square and grabbing a cheeseburger at – where else? – Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville Cafe.

The drive down the Keys is truly breathtaking, especially the famous Seven Mile Bridge. You pass through places named Summerland, Big Pine, Big Coppitt, Cudjoe, and you really get the sense that you’re driving along the border of two worlds: the good ol’ modernized U.S.A. and the breezy, carefree Caribbean of Captain Jack Sparrow. The highway’s just two lanes, with the occasional passing lane, but we were lucky: traffic was light, and we sped down the blacktop, eyes peeled for the rare and protected Key deer. (My nightmare on many levels: running into a deer in a rental car with two young kids in the backseat.) We passed by moored sailboats and fishermen checking their lines, against an endless backdrop of water that had the hue of a bottle of Bombay Sapphire. “Idyllic” doesn’t begin to describe it.

And then we got to Key West.

Night falls on Key West.

I expected to be greeted by many things upon reaching the shores of Hemingway’s isle, but a Ford dealership and a Subway weren’t among them. Whatever notion I’d had of Key West escaping the gentrification that’s sweeping over the rest of the world was tossed out the window when we passed by the Starbucks on Duval Street. That legendary Mallory Square sunset? Partially obscured by multimillion dollar yachts. And as soon as the sun dropped, the place turned into an American Tijuana, with throngs of drunken middle-aged men and women staggering up and down the streets, the smell of onion rings, cheap cigars and vomit permeating the air. We were drawing stares, and I quickly realized that it was because we’d brought a 5 year old and a 17 month old into the fray. We found an unlikely haven at the Margaritaville Cafe; despite the subject matter of the song for which it’s named, the place turned out to be very wallet- and kid-friendly (at least at 8:00) and although the children’s menu did not include a kid-sized Cheeseburger In Paradise, both Lucas and Zoe had a great time checking out the colorful decor and listening to tunes by Buffett and other local musicians. I of course sampled the grown-up sized Cheeseburger In Paradise (with, of course, Heinz 57, lettuce and tomato) and a house margarita (not bad, but it always seemed odd to me that someone so closely identified with the southeast coast and the Caribbean would name his most famous tune after a drink so closely identified with Baja. In other words, advantage: California margaritas). We grabbed a piece of Key lime pie at an ice cream shop (stupid me forgot to jot the name down); the pie wasn’t very good, so the moral of the story is, when a bunch of people tell you that you need to go to Blond Giraffe to get your Key lime pie fix, listen to them. After that we navigated our way through the drunks and back to the car; it was a long drive home, and more fun awaited us the next day.

(To be continued…)

I lived in Maine for the first nineteen years of my life, and it’s the place that I still call “home”. The deserts of Arizona are lovely, to be sure, but Maine is where my heart is. During my annual or bi-annual trips back east, I never fail to stop at my favorite place on the entire planet, the Portland Head Light.

As you can see, the place is so darned picturesque that even rank amateur photographers (read: me) can take postcard-perfect pictures.

The Head Light is located in the town of Cape Elizabeth, a mere bridge-crossing from Portland’s Old Port Waterfront District. Entrance to the complex, which includes Fort Williams Park, is free, and admission to the park’s museum (open from Memorial Day to Labor Day) is $2.00 for adults and $1.00 for children. The complex and park itself are open year-round.

Bring a picnic lunch (I suggest a local favorite, an Italian sandwich from one of the nearby Amato’s), and spend a lovely afternoon exploring Fort Williams, the green park grounds, the rocky shoreline, and the tidal pools.

I long for home, but for now I’m just going to have to content myself with pictures. Oh, and word to the wise, watch out for these guys – they’re bold and they’ll steal your lunch right out of your hands!

When the Hostas finally, after a long and cold Winter, start pushing the warming earth, that’s when I usually come out of the cave.  It’s like my very own Bat Signal.  Only it’s not trouble that calls the Great Bear out of his hibernation.

It’s water.

Kentucky, as is it written in A Canoeing & Kayaking Guide to Kentucky, can boast more moving water than any other state in the Nation.  Save for Alaska.  Now, I can’t, with accuracy, say that the afore mentioned statistic is true or not.  And to be quite honest, I’m far too lazy to do the research.  Maybe lazy is not the right word. Hmmmmmm.  Motivation.  That’s it.  I lack motivation for the research of such statistics.

At any rate, after loading the Necky kayak and fully caffinating myself, I pointed my Volvo west.  Destination?  Frankfort, Kentucky and the Elkhorn Creek.

At the put in.

What’s that you say?  You don’t have your own boat or even gear?  No worries.  My friends at Canoe Kentucky have everything you need.  Canoes, Kayaks, PFD (personal flotation device – otherwise known as Life Vests) and paddles.  Those fine gentlemen, for a modest fee, will even pick you up and schlep you back to your car.  If you are uneasy about the water all together, a guided trip can be arranged.

From towering Palisades, to rolling farmland, from class II – III whitewater to fine Smallmouth bass and bluegill fishing in deep, cool pools, Elkhorn Creek has it all.  The creek will meander about some of the prettiest country around and if you’re lucky, you’ll fall out and go for an unexpected swim.  Who doesn’t like surprises?  That being said, it’s best to leave you’re cell phones and other “damaged by water” items in your car.  No need for GPS.  The creek will take you where you need to go.

Merrily Down the Stream

Like camping?  Try the Elkhorn Campground. If that isn’t your cuppa, there are a number of fine Hotel/Motel establishment just a few miles west.  I’ll just say, the Elkhorn Campground is smack on the edge of the Elkhorn Creek and having a river/creek sing you to sleep is just about better than anything.  Save for free beer and money.

I’d like to tell you that there is a cute little Mom and Pop in the immediate vicinity that serves Kobe beef and cold beer in 50 gallon buckets, but much like my date with the very pretty French princess from Braveheart, it’s a dream.  But fear not, Downtown Frankfort has a variety of eateries that are sure to please.

So what are you waiting for?  It’s getting warm.  Why not take an un-chlorinated swim?

It’s better for your hair.

All photos by C.A. Downs III