Well, how do I sum up Yellowstone for you?

For one, it’s as colorful a place as you’ll ever visit. Here, let me show you what I mean.

These were taken near the Grand Prismatic Spring, and I couldn’t really tell you why the ground was so beautiful, it just was.

Okay, Yellowstone really snuck up on me. For some reason I was expecting it to be like Glacier where I had to crane my eyes to see any kind of wildlife off in the distance.

Nope.

Two minutes into entering the park I saw a wild animal. Don’t ask me what it was, because I don’t know, but it did kind of look like an antelope. I’m serious.

With that said if you’re coming here for mountains, Yellowstone isn’t the place.

It’s much bigger than that.

Yellowstone is for the imagination. Yellowstone is about getting lost. It’s a gigantic park, where you could spend hours driving through the slanted roads deeper and deeper into a wild reality far from the comfort of home.

There’s magic in this place.

The first morning I unzipped my tent to the sight of an elk grazing twenty feet away from my campsite. Twenty feet. As I drove to Old Faithful the sight of a mountain goat sprung up at me from around the bend.

This place will surprise you. You never know what you’ll see just around the corner, and there’s plenty of corners, nooks, and caverns here.

So much steam rises from the ground, too. It likes to envelop you, and disorient you. From the parking lot it looks like a group of souls trudging to their death, walking straight towards an intimidating cloud. It feels supernatural.

But then you step into it, and you feel the warmth. You don’t know where you are but that’s the fun of it, and you step out on the other side into a different world. Your eyes get to then feast on the most vibrant natural colors you’ve ever seen in your life.

That’s Yellowstone.

I could tell you what I did, but that’d be boring.

I’ll tell you how it made me feel.

I felt like I was walking through another world. If I had a better camera I could’ve taken pictures of the ground alone that could go straight in an art museum.

But there’s more than that.

For the first time in my life, I felt like I was at the mercy of the wild. I swear on my second night I heard an elk sniffing the side of my tent–poking its nose into it.

It just reminds me that without everything else, humans really aren’t in control here.

So come to Yellowstone–a place that’s downright enchanted with vibrant colors and rare creatures. And, if you keep your eyes open, what seems like portals into other worlds.