Bacterial mats, fascination!

At the Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone I certainly enjoyed the beauty of the spring pools themselves, but without the expansive bacterial mats that surround them this place wouldn't be worth seeing.

I spent so much time looking down both here and at Fountain Paint Pot, snapping dozens of photos of the wet, surrounding "ground".

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You probably know that I really love natural textures, and this place, well, it was just overwhelming! My biggest problem was in remembering what I had already taken a photo of so I didn't duplicate.

If you're like me you'll think of NASA when looking at these, images sent back across the solar system from some distant planet or not-yet-understood moon.

Enjoy!

Have you seen enough yet? Nope, I didn't think so.

Can you believe there were people walking right by, barely taking more than a glance or two at this?

If you visit Yellowstone, please spend some time taking in everything that these hydrothermal attractions have to offer. Big pools of steaming water are nice, but these bacteria mats... well, they're the wildlife of the park that nobody talks about!


If anybody is interested, I could make higher-res versions of some of these available -- for use as desktop wallpaper for instance. If you need to mention a specific image, call it "3rd from the top", or "7th after the break" -- the break is where I asked "have you seen enough yet?" -- or "4 up from the bottom". Trying to describe the image might be really difficult. 

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