Yellowstone National Park: action from a boardwalk

The park has well laid out boardwalks that meander around the thermal basins.

Fumaroles and bubbling hot springs are a constant.

We have been so fortunate to be walking on a boardwalk as a geyser erupts.

As did Vixen Geyser in the Norris Geyser Basin.

She is a perfect rock vent, which looks man-made in its symmetry. The geyser vent fills up and drains much like a toilet, and in between erupts with style.

Each water drop was gleaming in the late afternoon sun.

Fabulous Vixen Geyser.

Yellowstone National Park: Mammoth Hot Springs

Day 2 and another very special day seeing how geology and biology interact!

At some point a sea created the limestone layer at Mammoth Hot Springs, add the super heated water plus the thermophiles and you get a vast stepped, cascading plateaus of travertine stone. As it is being built it is as soft as chalk.

So graceful and beautiful.

Birding interlude: the brightest of Bluebirds

A pop of color among the thermal wonders of Yellowstone, a Mountain Bluebird, quite oblivious to all the fuss of people and erupting geysers.

Yellowstone National Park: bacterial mats from Grand Prismatic Spring

Close up of the mats

One of the most fascinating features of the geyser basins here in Yellowstone is the extraordinary colors of the bacterial mats.

These beautiful colors were a surprise to me, and no more so than at Grand Prismatic Spring.
The hot water flows over swathes of brilliant yellow, orange, red, and green and the hot pools are lined with color too.

And they are living and thriving creatures, called thermophiles! In the billions they form these bacterial mats, a parallel universe indeed.

The facsination of Grand Prismatic Spring and its run-off. 

Hint of the amazing colors of the spring under all the steam.

Outer space? a close up.

Eerily otherworldly.