Yellowstone & Grand Teton in 5 Days: Wildlife, Geysers, and Natural Hot Springs

You wake before dawn on the first mountain morning and the bus hums to life beneath a sky still bruised with stars. The road eats miles of high desert and sage; wind scours the glass of distant ranges and the tour guide points out a line of bison like dark punctuation against pale grass. By late morning, steam unfurls from the ground and Old Faithful announces itself with a long, hissing exhale. This is not a single attraction but a sequence of places that push and pull—geyser basins that boil and blink, lakes that hold the reflections of teeth-like peaks, rivers that dare you to move faster.