Yellowstone Tours

On our first day we did the lower loop, which includes Old Faithful, the Geyser Basins, and the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone. On the second day we did the upper loop, primarily to see Mammoth Hot Springs. We took approximately one zillion pictures, I tried to cull it down to some good ones to avoid having to spend eternity uploading in some campground laundry room again.

I only include a picture of Old Faithful here to prove we saw it. I'm sure you've seen better pictures before. Next to that picture is the Young Faithful. They aren't waiting for it to erupt, they are enjoying the last spurts - the large crowd that gathered beforehand departed almost instantly once it was starting to lose its steam, and the boys then sat nearly alone.

I forgot the name of this pool. The sign on the left says it's named the "Don't Throw Objects In The" Pool, but I don't think that's right. The colors are caused by bacteria that prosper in the near boiling water, in this case a deep green. Other pools are light blue, sapphire or orange. There is a bigger version of this image if you click on it. The pathways are all boardwalks so that the tourist traffic doesn't destroy the fragile ecosystem. There aren't any guardrails but everyone behaves. Here we are behaving. That's not our motorhome in the distance, we were using the rental car to get around.

There are four main types of geothermal phenomena that you see in the park - fumaroles (basically steam vents), geysers, hot springs and mud pots.

Here are two geysers. The close one is called "Spasm Geyser." You can tell why when you see its behavior in person.	I caught this mud pot in mid-blorp. (A highly technical Geo-term.)	At Mammoth Hot Springs the minerals build terraces and mounds. This is called "Orange Mound" and it's probably eight feet tall.

The Grand Canyon of Yellowstone is carved out by the Yellowstone River. You can click on this for a larger image, but even that doesn't express the grandeur of the real thing. Way near the top of the image you can see the Upper Falls. This picture was taken from an observation platform you walk down to. It is a sheer dropoff to the bottom a thousand-plus feet below. The platform was fifty feet farther out until an earthquake in the 1970s - now there's just a bit of rock there. Thomas Moran painted many beautiful pictures of Yellowstone during his life - this canyon was one of his favorite subjects, and this view (fifty feet farther out) can be seen in one of the paintings. The colors and textures look like a Moran painting when you are there.