YNP: Lower and Midway Hot Springs Basins

On this day trip to Yellowstone National Park we enjoyed clear and sunny skies with comfortable temperatures.  We drove out to the Midway Geyser Basin, home to some of the more colorful hot springs in the Park.  The colors for these hot springs are all dependent on the temperatures of the water.  The middle of the hot springs, where the hottest water is located, is too hot for the thermophiles to survive.  That aquamarine to the dark blue color of the hot springs waters are blue just like why the sky is blue.  When the sunlight hits the water's surface, the light scatters. That blue light scatters the most and that is what is reflected back to your eyes.  As the water runs out of the hot springs, it cools creating a more friendly environment for the microbial mats to survive.  Different water temperatures create different types of thermophiles and therefore different colored microbial mats.

 This was our view as we drove towards the Lower Geyser Basin.  What an eerie appearance off in the distance of the steam rising from the hot springs.

The beginning of the Fountain Paint Pot Trail here (part of the Lower Geyser Basin) exhibits a good example of the "bobby sock" trees. These lodgepole pines died while siphoning up the hot spring run off up their trunks.  While the trees were soaking up this mineral laden water, it changed their bases white while also retarding decay. Many of these trees are decades old.

Fountain Paint Pot Trail: This is Silex Spring

Fountain Paint Pot erupting!

Then the Jet Geyser erupted while the Fountain Paint Pot was erupting. Wow, what a lot of water and noise.

This is Red Spouter Spring.  It was created the night the earthquake struck on August 17, 1959.  Because we are here late in the summer, the water in it has dried up and it is a hissing fumarole now.

Next we drove to the Midway Geyser Basin where one of the more popular hot springs can be found, the Grand Prismatic Hot Spring.  First we strolled on the boardwalk to the Excelsior Geyser Crater.  This hot spring discharges over 4,000 gallons of 199 °F water a minute into the Firehole River.

The aquamarine color was beautiful yet hard to see at times because of all the steam rising from the hot water.

The cooler runoff water from Excelsior Geyser created bright colorful microbial mats.

We walked towards the Grand Prismatic Spring, its colors and steam very noticeable in the distance.

The Grand Prismatic Hot Spring is the largest in the United States and the third largest in the world.  The colors are really this bright especially on this sunny day.

These bright bands of orange, green and yellow are from the different species of living thermophiles.  The blue water is from the blue light wavelengths scattering and reflecting back to our eyes.

To learn more interesting facts about the Grand Prismatic Hot Springs click HERE and HERE.

It was hard to walk away from something so beautiful however as we moved on we came across this colorful hot spring, the Opal Pool.

Ronnie and I drove on to the next smaller collection of geyser features, the Black Sand Basin.  Named for the obsidian black sand surrounding the area, we found this area surprising.  While standing at the empty Spouter Geyser hole, it suddenly started to fill with hot water.

It started to boil and spit.

And then suddenly it was boiling over and shooting hot water up in the air.  I was shocked!

Ronnie and I then walked over to the Cliff Geyser where it was erupting, sending water almost 35 feet into the air.  It spewed water up the entire time Ronnie and I were at the Black Sand Basin.

The Emerald Pool, part of the Black Sand Basin.

Ronnie and I made one more day trip back to the Grand Prismatic Hot Spring and the Old Faithful Geyser.  This day the sky was completely clear.  We walked the 1.4 round trip hike on the Fairy Falls Trail to the Grand Prismatic Overlook.  Here we had a better view of the entire hot spring.

It is always a great show to see Old Faithful Geyser erupt but this day, the sky made it even more special.

If you think we surely must have seen all of the geysers of Yellowstone National Park, we have not!  We missed the all of Upper Geyser Basin located at the Old Faithful Geyser.  There are more geysers and hot springs in that basin than anywhere else in the Park.  We didn't walk the second, longer boardwalk section of the Norris Geyser Basin, where the famous Steamboat Geyser is located either.  Also there are several geysers and hot springs in Yellowstone you can only visit by hiking out to them.

More Later
Mt Washburn and the south rim of the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone