I know I said a couple weeks ago that posts about our Thanksgiving roadtrip to Utah were upcoming – and they are – but I’ve decided to shake things up a bit and talk about our Christmas trip to Yellowstone National Park first.
For the last few years, my family and I have repeatedly found ourselves in the same situation: a birthday or holiday is upcoming, we ask people what they want as a gift, and they really just don’t have a good answer because none of us need any more stuff. In fact, we’ve all been trying to reduce the amount of stuff we have just lying around.
And so after Christmas 2023, we floated an idea: what if, instead of gifts, we pooled our money the next year and went on a Christmas trip instead? Like, for example, a winter journey into the heart of Yellowstone National Park – something we’ve all wanted to do for years.
It took very little convincing to get everyone on board, and knowing how popular Yellowstone is, we set about making reservations in January.
(A quick glance at the website reveals last minute reservations are still available, so perhaps we didn’t need to book quite so far in advance, but we weren’t taking any chances.)
And so, a few days before Christmas, we all hopped on a plane to Montana.
I’ll be talking quite extensively about our time in Yellowstone over the next couple weeks, but first I wanted to share some photos from the plane as the next installment of my Snapshots from the sky series.
When you fly from Colorado to Montana, the typical flight path goes right over Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks and – if it’s daytime and the sky is clear and you’re sitting on the left side of the plane (when facing forward, meaning choosing seats on your right as you board) – you can actually make out quite a few of the major attractions in each park.
I wasn’t expecting clear skies in the winter, and there were some clouds over parts of Wyoming, but I snagged a window seat anyway, and there were enough breaks in the cloud cover for us to see quite a bit.
Left, wide open and covered in snow: Hayden Valley.
Lower left/center: Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone.
Above and to the right of center: thermal features, including lots of steam and an erupting geyser.
Our flight back to Colorado the following week was later in the day and much more overcast, but as we climbed through the layers of clouds, the setting sun put on quite a show.
And with that, we were back in Colorado for the last few days of 2024.
Up next: a winter adventure in Yellowstone National Park
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