Yellowstone National Park – July 9
Mammoth Hot Springs
Today I’m exploring the lower terraces at Mammoth Hot Springs. I’m doing a little more experimenting with my camera and think some of my testing is paying off. I think the colors are better than past trips and I’m getting the hang of using the tripod.
Because the water is hot and smells a little of sulfur, I wasn’t sure that animals would be drinking it. I saw several birds flitting about drinking the water and scooping up bugs. An elk came through for a drink and seemed surprised to find himself in the center of a crowd of people. That was a funny moment because he came in so fast there was no time for people to move back. He quickly backed away and moved on.
This is another place where I’m running out of ways to say how great it all looks! And of course I shot way too many photos to post. Everything is just so fascinating here! The color, the textures, and the size of the formations is incredible. There are places here where the changes to the plumbing have taken out portions of the boardwalk. Water has stopped flowing and started again. It is truly a work in progress.
The park service has done a nice job with the boardwalk through the terraces. You can get pretty close to most of the features. I think it is a good way to give access and protect the area at the same time.
The different shapes the microbes make up are incredibly varied! When you start looking close you see branches like bits of tree or coral. There are ridges and layers on top of layers. Worlds within worlds.
The hard white stone is travertine. The colorful patches are heat loving microbes. Some of the bacteria in these pools live on the hydrogen sulfide gas that comes up through the underground vents. In some cases it is this gas bubbling to the surface that you see and not boiling water. An amazing place for life to be thriving for sure!
In a dormant section of the terraces a group of sparrows have taken up residence in the nooks and crannies. They were flying in and out all day to feed their young. I couldn’t see them, but you could hear them chirping up in the walls.
Gardiner
Well now it is time to do some housekeeping – literally! We’ve been here a week and we have another week to go. If we want to hang out with friends the second half of this trip we better do some laundry. Turns out that the hotel has no laundry services (I’m totally surprised to discover this). Other places in the park have laundry services, but not here. No worries – Gardiner is just 15 minutes outside the park from Mammoth Hot Springs. There are a few laundromats and one that will do your laundry for you. This is perfect. We are leaving Yellowstone tomorrow and will be passing back through Gardiner. For those of you that are camping I noticed that the laundry also rented showers. This is a cool little town. I’m hoping to spend some time checking out the galleries tomorrow.
While I was in Gardiner I could see storm clouds forming. By the time I was heading back up to Mammoth it was sprinkling on the windshield. We had been thinking of going back out to look for wolves again, but it started raining up here just about dinner time. If we hadn’t seen one we probably would have gone out. But since we had it didn’t seem like we needed to be driving on those narrow curvy roads in the dark and rain. We had a nice leisurely dinner got caught up on our books.