Upde Designs

Happy Tuesday!

I should have posted this address yesterday.  The tour company we used and I recommend them highly is Viator. Here is a link to their website.  –>  https://www.viator.com/Yellowstone-National-Park/d22411-ttd

Click on any of the images to reveal a larger more detailed version.  The majesty and beauty of Yellowstone is everywhere.  Everywhere you look is another photo.  Sometimes it’s overwhelming and if you have a fast shutter you can take a ton of photos of the same thing.  Trust me I know.  

As you travel through the park there are lots of geysers, mud pots, and boiling water pools.  Alex said that is the first thing she looks for when entering the park.  If there is steam coming out of the ground it is a good sign that there are pressure relief places for the volcano that is under much of Yellowstone.

This is a large pool of super hot water.  Although this photo doesn’t do it justice you can actually see the water bubbling (boiling.)  According to a book that Jeanne has the early explorers actually cooked their food with these heated pools.

And right on the edge of this dangerous pool are wild flowers thriving.  Some of the pools have the smell of sulfur but this one did not.  It was just  very hot the closer you go to it.

As I said earlier there is beauty everywhere you look.  I don’t know what happened to these trees.  There are thousands of downed trees all over the park.  Some as a result of wild fires some from the movement of the ground and still others that have died because of the minerals in the ground. 

The Grand Prismatic Hot Spring is the most photographed thermal feature in Yellowstone. That’s because of its crazy-bright colors and enormous size. 

Factoid

Deeper than a 10-Story Building
Extremely hot water travels 121 feet from a crack in the Earth to reach the surface of the spring.

Football Field on Steroids
The third largest spring in the world, the Grand Prismatic is bigger than a football field at 370 feet in diameter. A gridiron is 360 feet long and 160 feet wide.

Rainbow of Colors
The hot spring has bright bands of orange, yellow, and green ring the deep blue waters in the spring. The multicolored layers get their hues from different species of thermophile (heat-loving) bacteria living in the progressively cooler water around the spring. And the deep blue center? That’s because water scatters the blue wavelengths of light more than others, reflecting blues back to our eyes.

A Living Thermometer
What living thing in Yellowstone has helped investigators solve crimes and NASA search for extraterrestrial life on seemingly inhospitable planets? Heat-loving microbes living in the Yellowstone’s thermal pools. In 1968, researcher Thomas Brock discovered a microbe living in one of Yellowstone’s extremely hot springs. In the years since, research on Yellowstone’s microbes has led to major medical and scientific advances, including the sequencing of the entire human genome.

Brian a member of our group took this image of Jeanne and I with my Nikon D5.  Yes I actually let someone else hold my beloved camera.

That’s it for today.  Thanks for the visit. 

Enjoy your day and be careful.