Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
name The Devil's Den. Local storytellers claim that prominent Minaret Peak gets its name
from one Minnie Rhett, the girlfriend of an early park visitor, but that sounds to us like
one of Jim Bridger's tall tales. Iconic landscape painter Thomas Moran created one of his
most famous paintings here.
A short trail leads to a viewpoint over the falls. The trail continues down 200 vertical
feet to the Yellowstone River but the section to the base of the falls was recently washed
away in floods so it's not really worth the effort. Stop in for well-deserved ice cream at the
Yellowstone General Store on the way back. Note that the busy parking lot often fills up
by the middle of the day.
Tower Fall Campground is just across the road from the parking area. The potholed and
narrow section of road between Tower Fall and Tower-Roosevelt Junction is one of the
worst in the park.
TOWER-ROOSEVELT TO CANYON
It's 19 miles from Tower-Roosevelt to Canyon. The Grand Loop Rd starts to climb from
Tower Fall on its way to
Dunraven Pass
(8859ft), the highest part of the Grand Loop Rd
and named after the British earl who traveled here in 1874 (it was Dunraven's travelogue
The Great Divide
that popularized the park in Europe). East of the road is
Antelope
Creek
, prime grizzly habitat and thus closed to visitors. Several turnouts offer popular
wildlife-watching opportunities here.
Named after Hiram Chittenden, one of park's early road engineers and historians, Chit-
tenden Rd branches off to the left just before the pass. The road is a popular hiking and
mountain-biking trail to the summit of
Mt Washburn
(10,243ft). A second, hiking-only
trail leads to the peak from Dunraven Pass, 5 miles further south. See
Click here
f
or de-
tails of the hike to Mt Washburn and
Click here
f
or details of the mountain-bike route.
Just below Dunraven Pass is the
Washburn Hot Springs Overlook
, where an inter-
pretive sign describes the hot springs and the surrounding Yellowstone caldera, which you
now enter as you continue south. This is also a good wildlife-watching area, especially for
grizzlies who wander here from the surrounding Washburn and Antelope Bear Manage-
ment Areas.
Canyon Country
The Canyon area is the secondmost heavily visited part of the park after Old Faithful, due
largely to the scenic grandeur of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, but also due to the
