Mammoth Hot Springs

This was the first picture I took at the Mammoth Hot Springs.  Even now, I am amazed that I was the only person laughing (like a ten-year old) and taking a picture.  Mammoth Restroom. Ha!

Apparently the hot springs change on an unpredictable basis, and springs which were active for some time will suddenly stop flowing, and new ones will begin.  The rusty yellow/orange is a functioning spring: the grey is nonfunctioning.

Very ashy looking.

This boardwalk (of course, another boardwalk) was fabulous and took you way up from the valley.  The view kept getting better and better.

At one point, probably after the first time it started sort-of-raining, when I reached what was pretty much the highest points of the boardwalk, the photos started to turn fabulously and epically sinister.

C'est moi!

Artist's Paint Pots

These boiling pools of mud are nestled against a hillside.  But I'm going to concentrate on detail snaps as opposed to overalls.  Just to vary it up.

Fountain Paint Pots

The 'Fountain Paint Pots' sound friendly, but they're actually boiling mud pits.

This is the approach to the 'paint pots' - through the Dead Marshes, outside Mordor - again walking on a boardwalk.  Gollum says, don't follow the lights.

Just a gentle reminder.  Some of the other warning signs elaborate further on gruesome ways that you'll be injured if you step off of the boardwalk.

And there they are, all of a sudden.  Pine trees, then bam!  Boiling pots of mud.

There is also a nearby geyser, to which the boardwalk will take you.  The yellow around it are sulfur deposits.

The Grand Prismatic Spring

Bet you had no idea how many photos I had from only a few days.  And this is after culling the herd.

The first stop of my second day in Yellowstone was the Grand Prismatic Spring.  This sucker is the rainbow pool often photographed via helicopter, the better which to capture its rainbow hues. 

As a spring, it bubbles out superheated water which then moseys its way across extensive bacterial flats into a small stream nearby (see below).  

A few smaller springs, not nearly as prismatic as the Grand Prismatic one.

And here it is!  Steaming like mad!

Boardwalk apocalypse.

Unfortunately all of the steam meant that the colors were barely visible... however, I feel that the sinister nature of all my resulting photographs more than makes up for that.  And I'd far rather have visited on a chilly morning with a few others than with massive packs of people on a warm and colorful day.

This grizzly bear warning was posted next to the little parking area beyond the springs.  Like I need a warning to leave grizzly bears alone - dudes eat people!

West Yellowstone, Montana

I was (and generally am still) not prepared for camping, let alone winter camping.  And I'm a bit of a miser sometimes.  So I headed out of Yellowstone Park and into West Yellowstone, Montana, to spend the night in a little hotel.  Pictured below, one of the main streets of West Yellowstone.

While in Montana, I took the opportunity to send a postcard to Paris (yes, in France) to a certain Mlle. Hye-Sung.  She had popped by Philly for a quick visit earlier in the summer when she was in the US, and when I told her I was actually going to Montana she was shocked!  When she and I had our original Montana conversation, I certainly never imagined that I would go there within the relatively near future.  But that's pretty much the story regarding most of my traveling...

This is the next morning, once I've passed into Yellowstone proper once again.  All the geothermal activity makes things start to look sinister right away.

Silly Buffles!

So I theoretically knew that there were a great number of buffalo in Yellowstone, wandering about.  And lo, there were more of those silly buffles than I could possibly have imagined!

There was one quite close by, picking at the sulfurous grasses near Old Faithful.  These pictured below are only a few of the massive numbers of buffles resting in fields.  Multiple fields, scores of buffles.

I also got to see a buffalo quite up-close.  Sitting in a bear-jam (when all the tourist stop their cars to gawk at some sort of wild animal relatively near to the roadway), trying to pick up a radio station (why don't rental cars come with ipod jacks?), I'm just hanging out waiting for the cars to start moving along. Everyone is photographing some nearby buffalo, but I'm cool, I've already got some photos of them.  

Then, one relatively little buffalo (which is still most of the size of my car) dashes to the side of the road, directly across from my passenger side window, and starts to maul a little pine tree alongside the road.  I do have the windows down, because it was pretty nice out, and the tree-mangling buffle is so close I can hear it's snorts and smell pine from the busted tree.  Worried that any camera-action might induce the buffalo to start mauling my car, I just sat there and tried not to make eye contact with it.  Then, after the tree was decimated, the buffalo ran around the car in front of me, and then galloped, snorting, down the left lane of the road.

Silly buffle!