October is a great time of year to visit Yellowstone. No queuing to get in the park, only a couple of places packed with tourists, and beautiful autumn colours. What surprised me the most though was the amount of geothermal activity there. I’d heard of the huge ‘Old Faithful’ geyser but didn’t anticipate seeing steam coming out of the ground and boiling water in so many places. That is all due to the nearly 3,500 square miles of park sitting on top of a volcanic “hot spot.”
There are several waterfalls in Yellowstone but we only saw a couple of them. I thought the black rock in this one made it more interesting.
Sometimes when driving along a road we’d see cars pulled off to one side and cameras all aimed in the same direction. We followed suit one morning and to my great excitement somebody pointed out a wolf near the riverbank. It then waded into the river and swam over to the other side and I was able to see it clearly. My excitement turned to slight disappointment afterwards when a women said that it was a coyote, and not a wolf. This was confirmed later in the day when we showed the images to a park ranger. Oh well, it was still an exciting sighting for me.
Some of the water in rivers and streams seemed either bright green or bright blue and I’m not sure whether the effect was from the actual colour of the water or the ground.
We thought that this scene warranted a closer look and it was unlike anything I’ve seen before.
If you look closely at the image below you can see the steam in the air from the hot water.
Below is a vast area where hot / boiling water or just steam escapes from the ground. There are boardwalks which take people through the area as you wouldn’t want to be walking just anywhere and potentially getting scalded.
As well as photographing the wider scene, I liked to put my long lens on the camera and focus in on one spot. I particularly like the abstract nature of the image below.
The pools below really were this bright!
Below is a shallow pool of water hot water that was bubbling in places, but I thought the rock looked like a miniature mountain range.
I wanted to see Bison as I hadn’t seen them before, and we saw plenty of them. A lot were far away in the distance, but some ventured close to roads and even caused traffic to stop as they crossed. They are certainly huge creatures.
Finally, Yellowstone has lots of dead trees with white at the bottom of their trunks. This is caused by them soaking up silica from the ground.
Next stop – The Grand Teton National Park……..
As, always, thanks for the great photos, Julie!
This looks like a fabulous adventure 🙂