 One
of our neighbors at the cabins in Mammoth had left out a cooler and bags
of food on their front porch. This was a mistake. They must
not have read the literature telling how you should always keep your food
in a secure place away from any marauding wild animals. But, they
were foreigners and maybe the rangers were out of literature in their language,
so maybe they had an excuse. |
 We
drove south from Mammoth Hot Springs toward Old Faithful. We stopped
at the Hoodoos of course, but took no pictures. Just a little way
south of Mammoth was a black bear by the side of the road. I think
he was trying to hide from the photographers behind the dead tree.
It was kind of neat to see a black bear because it had been years since
I had seen one in Yellowstone. When I was little we would see them
every trip because they would beg for food by the side of the road, but
then the Park Service started cracking down on that, so now it is kind
of unusual. This guy was looking for his own natural food instead
of begging for twinkies. Good bear! |
 A
little farther, where the land opens up into a valley of sorts called Swan
Lake Flats (or Gardner's Hole if you prefer) there were these cranes of
some sort doing a sort of dance. |
 We
stopped at Sheepeater Cliff. This place was named for the pre-conquest
inhabitants of the park, a branch of the Shoshone referred to as Sheepeaters.
They ate a lot of bighorn sheep evidently. They were the only people
to live in the park year round. Other tribes would hunt and fish
and gather obsidian and maybe even played tourist at the geysers in the
summers, but returned to warmer places for the winter. They were
not very numerous. There is a sign and a picnic area at Sheepeater
Cliff. |
 There
were also marmots at Sheepeater Cliff. |
 We
stopped next at Obsidian Cliff. Obsidian is a kind of lava rock that
forms when high silica lava cools fast and sort of freezes into glass.
The park service sign there at
the roadside exhibit building (which is an official historic place by the
way) explains a bit more about it. The cliff has a lot of obsidian
on it, but as you can see from this boulder beside the road, it is not
solid obsidian, it's mixed in with more normal looking rock. Between
that and the fact that the cliff is a bit of a way away from the road,
and there are trees in the way, and that humans have been removing
the
stuff for thousands of years, well, it's hard to see the obsidian up on
the cliff itself very easily. The native americans used this obsidian
for arrowheads and knives. They traded it half way across the country
from this very cliff. Scientists can tell that by looking at the
chemical composition of the rock and stuff.
Probably a lot of obsidian cliff's fame comes from a story the old trapper Jim Bridger told. He said one day he shot at an elk grazing at a meadow close by. Not only did it not fall over dead, it wasn't even spooked, not even after several shots. So he decided to club it to death with his rife and as he was running to do so he ran into a mountain of glass. In addition, this glass mountain was shaped like a lens, and the elk was miles away. No wonder people tended not to believe poor old Jim Bridger, with his stories about mountains of glass, petrified birds, and jets of boiling water shooting hundreds of feet into the air and unbelievable stuff like that. |
|
By now you may have noticed that we were stopping a lot along the way. Well, we were going to get our money's worth after traveling so far and spending so much money. I recommend that if you haven't been to Yellowstone before, or haven't been there much, that you stop at every single roadside overlook and exhibit at least once. The signs can teach you things. You can see some of the less usual stuff with hardly any of that nasty walking stuff. And, you never know when you might see a dangerous wild animal or pretty flower that you would have missed from your car. Besides, when you are driving in Yellowstone you aren't going to be going anywhere very fast. Road construction is constant, the roads are bad, the motor homes are slow and people tend to park in the traffic lanes wherever they see an animal. If you are prone to road rage let someone else drive. |
 There
was a new thermal area that had started at Norris Geyser Basin that year.
You can see from the line of dead trees that it opened up along a fracture
near Nymph Lake. As best as I can remember from what I read about
it (mostly from the Geyser List Server run by GOSA)
it started as a line of fumaroles (steam vents) that started flinging mud
and silica. You can see in the big picture if you look closely that
some of the trees look like whitish stuff has been sprayed on them.
Then most of the activity settled into one or two hot springs.
Later that summer another part of Norris heated up. The ground was literally boiling hot in places, and some new features sprang to life kind of explosively. Part of the basin was closed for a while because of it. The Yellowstone Volcano Observatory has a bit on their site about the changes at Norris that year. There's always something new and exciting happening with Yellowstone's geysers. This was only the first of three new things I wanted to see this trip. |
 There
is an interesting little museum near the entrance to the campground at
Norris. I think it is an old historic ranger station. Inside
there were some exhibits about the history of the park ranger, and a volunteer
to talk to the visitors. We were there a while looking at the exhibits
and talking to the volunteer guy and waiting for the power to come back
on so we could actually see the exhibits properly. One of Yellowstone's
frequent power failures happened while we were there. There were
also these cool looking tunnels in the dirt outside of the museum. |
 Next
we walked around the Back Basin portion of Norris Geyser Basin. My
mom wanted to wait for Echinus Geyser to erupt. Most years Echinus
is the one predicted geyser at Norris, but not this year. It was
being kind of irregular. Mom decided to wait for it anyway.
I got bored and found this weird looking rock in the runoff channel of
Echinus. The name Echinus refers to echinoderms, which are things
like starfish and sea urchins. Echinoderm means spiny skin.
The hot waters of Echinus deposit spiny sinter, like on this rock.
It did kind of look like a sea urchin to me. Supposedly the sinter
is spiny because Echinus has acidic water.
Mom eventually saw Echinus erupt. I didn't. |
 I
did see Green Dragon Spring. |
 I
also saw some of those milky blue hot pools. |
 Like
on our last trip, Pearl Geyser was erupting. |
 I
had seen from a distance that Vixen Geyser was active, so we waited
for Vixen to erupt. While at Vixen we were talking to a ranger about
what we had seen and what was happening at Norris lately. That's
a good way to learn stuff, talking to the rangers. Some of them are
very knowledgeable. Some are ignorant, but you will be able to tell
the difference. We heard a commotion a short way down the trail.
It was this guy, Rubble Geyser. The ranger was all excited because
Rubble doesn't erupt very much anymore. It erupted more often when
it first formed in the 70's, but now it is a rare treat. It was a
short eruption. By the time we got close enough for this picture
it had died down quite a bit. At the start it was maybe knee high
or waist high. |
 The
friendly ranger pointed out to us that the nearby Corporal Geyser was in
full eruption. Corporal is more of an intermittent spring than what
you would normally think of as a geyser. But, a hot spring that only
sometimes overflows without actually throwing water into the air, like
Corporal, is thought to work more like a geyser underground than a feature
that throws water into the air non-stop.
We went back to Vixen to wait on it's eruption. Veteran Geyser erupted, but of course the pictures I took were less than desirable. There are some pesky trees in the way of what would be the best spot to view Veteran from the trail. |
 Vixen
was stubborn, but it finally did erupt. The ranger said it had not
been very active in recent years. It used to be when I was much younger
that Vixen was very reliable and frequent, and thus one of my favorites
at Norris. I also like Vixen because it is right by the trail, and
you can hear the water gurgling in the vent, hear it rising and boiling
more vigorously right before the eruption. Vixen has two modes of
eruption. Usually it has minor eruptions like this one. They
are a few quick spurts of water, maybe six or ten feet tall, and all the
water pretty much drains back into the vent at the end. Major eruptions
last much longer and throw out enough water so that a good bit of water
flows down to the creek. They are also much higher, but they are
rare. I have never seen one of those. |
 We
left Norris and headed south. While driving through the Gibbon Geyser
Basin we managed to find the Chocolate Pots at a pullout beside the road.
These kind of small hot springs are depositing some very unusual sinter.
It is half iron oxide, also known as rust. That's what gives it it's
chocolatey color. Supposedly if you let the water from them sit and
cool it turns blood red from the rust, but we didn't do the experiment
to see if that was true. |
 We
stopped to look at Gibbon Falls. I showed my sister a trick here.
You have to stare at the falls without letting your eyes roam around.
Just stare at one spot. Don't blink if you can help it. Do
this for one minute. Then, look at the rocks on the side of the canyon.
It looks like the rocks are melting and flowing upward. Be sure you
aren't standing right on the edge of a cliff or anything, it can be kind
of disorienting. I thought Jennifer might fall in, but she didn't.
I presume this works on other waterfalls too, but for me it is a tradition
at Gibbon Falls. I think I read about this trick in some old forgotten
Yellowstone guidebook. It freaks out everyone I get to try it. |
 We
stopped at Terrace Springs, which are just some fairly typical roadside
hot springs. The hot water from them flows under the road and through
an obviously man made channel by the road. I thought it was neat
the way the yellow monkey flowers decided to grow right next to the hot
water. Monkey flowers seem to like to do that. It looked like
the rangers had planted them there.
The rangers were doing some unknown thing at something, a boardwalk trail maybe, there by the springs. But, it was all under construction and closed off, so I guess I will have to wait till the next trip to find out what is being built there. |
 We
stopped at the Fountain Paint Pots area in the Lower Geyser Basin and looked
to see what was going on there. Spasm Geyser was erupting.
Spasm is the little geyser in the foreground. That is Clepsydra geyser
in the background. Clepsydra was looking kind of weak, usually it
is taller. Clepsydra was named for some sort of water clock, it used
to be very regular and frequent. Then there was a big earthquake
in 1959 and it started erupting nearly constantly, kind of making it's
name obsolete. But, it also means that if you stop at this little
nature trail you are nearly guaranteed to see at least one geyser erupting,
and probably more. The so called Fountain Group of geysers that Spasm
and Clepsydra belong to are a very varied and active bunch. |
 Also
nearby is the very active feature known as the Firehose. The Firehose
is a part of the Kaleidoscope Group of geysers. There are no trails
into the Kaleidoscope Group, so you have to look at them from either the
road or from the trail at Fountain Paint Pot. It's kind of debatable
if the Firehose is a geyser or a perpetual spouter. It erupts for
weeks or months at a time, but it does also stop sometimes. In my
experience it is erupting more often than it is quiet. If it is erupting
it is the big, constant, angled jet of water north of the Fountain Paint
Pot area. |
 We
got to Old Faithful eventually and grabbed our room, maybe a little food
too, and headed out into the basin. I wanted to see a new geyser
I had read about, Butterfly Spring. I saw that there were bunches
of people standing near Butterfly waiting for and expected eruption, so
we waited. Then we waited some more. It kept teasing us with
puny minor eruptions, short ones only a couple of feet high. It was
getting dark, and people were getting afraid it wouldn't erupt with a major
eruption until there wasn't enough light to see it. In the meantime,
Lion Geyser had a very pretty sunset eruption. It also did something
weird. It had it's eruption, stopped for just a short while, then
erupted again. Lion doesn't usually do that. I thought that
was a good sign. |
 Finally,
after a bunch of people had given up on it, Butterfly Spring did erupt.
This was the second new thing I wanted to see. Evidently Butterfly
Spring was at least semi-famous in the early days of the park. It
was famous enough to get a name. It was also famous enough that people
made post cards of it. I happened to see an old post card of Butterfly
in one of the gift shops, one of the old hand colored type. It truly
did have the shape of a butterfly. Back in those days people could
wander about the basins wherever they felt like wandering, there were no
trails or boardwalks. In modern times, you have to stay on the boardwalk,
and Butterfly sits on a hill, so it is not even visible from the trail.
Evidently it had had some six foot eruptions way back in the day, then
it went to a puny one foot high perpetual spouting, and half the butterfly
filled in. Then in early May of 2003 this mostly forgotten small
spring began to have kind of big eruptions. I'm kind of lousy at
guessing heights but maybe 10 -20 foot tall? The water was very muddy
at first. You can see from the picture it is still kind of brownish.
I guess it was clearing decades of crud from it's underground parts.
The runoff from the eruptions cut a fairly good size channel in the dirt
of the hillside. Unfortunately, by the end of the month Butterfly
quit erupting. This was one of it's last eruptions. At least
for the time being. |