Another trip into Yellowstone – Mammoth Hot Springs and more animals (and our first bear sighting)

We took another trip into Yellowstone (we’re here for a month so we’ll be going into the park many times) and on this trip we saw even more geysers as well as Mammoth Hot Springs.  Mammoth Hot Springs is a weirdly beautiful place.  The formations look a lot like what we’ve seen in caves.  They were formed by hot springs up the side of a large hill that spewed out chemicals such as calcite that flowed down over the hillside, sometimes forming pools and then overflowing to form terraces.

We also saw a black bear – it was a ways down a hill so we didn’t have a close encounter but I have a couple of pictures of it.

We almost saw a grizzly too – we rounded a bend in the road and saw lots of people stopped at the side of the road with cameras and binoculars out. We asked what they were looking at since we didn’t see anything and were told a grizzly had just crossed a meadow but was out of view now.  Darn!  We also saw more elk and antelope…and we saw lots of bison again but we have so many photos of them we didn’t take anymore.  We laughed at people who were stopped at the road to take telephoto photos of one bison way on the other side of a meadow and wanted to tell them “Hey, head south over to the meadows near Old Faithful – there are HUGE herds with babies all over the roads down there!”  But, we didn’t.

Here are pictures from this trip:

Another trip into Yellowstone – focusing on seeing the many geysers and springs

A lot of people may think that ‘geyser’ and ‘Yellowstone’ means Old Faithful.  But there are DOZENS of geysers and hot springs and mudpots in Yellowstone.  We spent a day walking around amongst them and were really impressed!

Here are some videos I shot:
geyser spouting: click here
geyser bubbling low: click here
steaming lake with bubbling geyser in it: click here
steaming hot waterfall: click here
bubbling modpot with a fumarole (steamvent) in the background (hey, that hissing sound in the video is the fumarole!: click here

While there we saw more bison in and near the road, and we saw more elk as well!  Here are pictures of the geysers and springs as well as bison and elk:

Earthquake Lake – a lake formed in 1959 when a 7.5 earthquake struck

Not too far from West Yellowstone is a lake that was formed in 1959 when a 7.5 earthquake caused a massive landslide that blocked a river and killed 28 people who were camping in a campground right in the path of the landslide.

On the way we saw some beautiful scenery, and at a bend in the road where there was a very steep cliff along the road we saw a group of mountain sheep with some babies.  Very cute!

Here are some pictures we took:

Yellowstone – first trip into the park

We’ll be here at Yellowstone for a few weeks, so we’ll have plenty of time to take pictures.  On just our first trip into the park we saw lots of bison and a couple of elk, saw Old Faithful erupt, and saw lots of beautiful scenery!

My favorite pictures from today:

And here’s a video I took of the entire Old Faithful eruption: (click here)

And here are a bunch more!

Craters of the Moon – a volcanic landscape like nowhere else!

While staying in Idaho Falls we took a drive over to an area known as Craters of the Moon.  It’s an area where there were volcanic eruptions and lava flows every 2,000 years or so from about 16,000 years ago to the latest about 2,100 years ago.  The area contains cinder cones (large conical hills made of black or red cinder rocks), spatter cones (small cones between 10-20 feet high and fairly vertical made of lava that spatters straight up and falls back onto a small area), lava flows and cinder fields.  It’s very interesting to walk among the volcanic material and see all the shapes, flows and colors – in addition to the most common black and fairly common red, there area also areas of blue lava!

A large swath of Idaho following the path of the Snake River is known as the Great Rift, which has seen lots of volcanic activity for thousands of years.  The volcanic activity over these thousands of years has moved northeast and currently Yellowstone is the ‘hot spot’ in the Great Rift.

Here are pictures we took while at the Craters of the Moon: