Day 2 at Yellowstone

There is so much to see at Yellowstone it can't be done in one day. The second day started by making the 60 mile trek to the northwest corner of the park to see Mammoth Hot Springs. The Mammoth Hot Springs are created from calcium carbonate in the spring water. The water is somewhere around 160 degrees when it comes out out of the ground. Luckily it was warmer, clear and calm so the steam was a little easier to see through.

After Mammoth Hot Springs we saw a bufflao hanging out taking a nap so we stopped to take a few pictures.

After the buffalo we stopped at Norris Geyser Basin. Its one of the more active thermal areas in the park with tons of small pools and geysers. We walked about miles total at Norris and saw several geysers although they weren't going off at the time. Most geysers go off every several hours to days or even months. So we weren't lucky enough to see any other than Old Faithful go off.

Here's Sarah in the lower half of Norris Geyser Basin at the beginning of the trail. You can see all of the steam coming up in the distance, those are geysers and steam fumeroles. There were tons of them around here, too many to take pictures of them all.

This is the Echinus Geyser, obviously not doing a whole lot at the time. The first time I came to Yellowstone I was lucky enough to watch it erupt but they said in the past few years it has been very erratic and erupted every couple days to several months in between each eruption.

It doesn't look like much in the picture but its very deep and the colors go from reddish brown to bright blue in the middle.

Another cool feature at is paint pots. I think there is only 3 places in the park where these occur. These things have a really cool sound and I guess its exactly what you would expect it to sound like. We could hear them before we saw them and knew what it was.

We have several hundred pictures from Yellowstone but perhaps the most entertaining came from the moments before we left the park. I was driving and turned onto East Entrance road and went about 1/4 mile and crossed a bridge just as a few buffalo started poking their heads out of the woods. They had no intention of stopping and soon there was about 20 or 30 right in the middle of the road and we were stuck in the middle of the bridge. I was thinking theres no way these things were going to go onto the bridge but Sarah got really nervous so I backed up all the way off the bridge and into a turn-out. Sure-enough the buffalo came right onto the bridge with a big male leading the pack. Other people kept driving onto the bridge right in the middle of them. I was secretly hoping the buffalo would ram their cars. We could tell they were starting to

get upset because they were bucking and grunting when the cars started getting too close. I don't know why people are in such a hurry that they couldn't wait 5 minutes to let them cross but it ended without incident. The buffalo crossed, hung out in the road and stared at people for a while then we got on our way.