Yellowstone: Fountain Paint Pot

Monday morning (Aug 19) in Yellowstone and we're leaving the park today, but there's much to see along the way. Remember that on our drive up to Madison we passed a few spots that we decided to hit on the way back? We'll stop at them today!

It's all about the hydrothermal features in this part of the park, so I hope you like steam, water, and color because that's mainly what you'll be getting in the next few posts. Our first stop was Fountain Paint Pot. Not as colorful as some pools in the park, but still a nice way to start the day!

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It was quite chilly this morning, something I didn't think about when deciding to visit big pools of steaming water in the morning.

The steam definitely made things more beautiful, but it also made getting some photographs really difficult.

I snapped a dozen shots of this bubbling mud, thinking I'd get at least one good shot of the bubbles in one of them:

Nope. You'll have to wait until I edit the video if you want to see what's going on here.

Here's the wide shot of this feature:

It's got some nice colors and that wonderful cracked mud texture that I really like (when it's not in my own garden):

There were also several geysers here, some that erupt periodically, and others like "Spasm Geyser" shown here that seem to be always active:

That water is only splashing 6' (1.8m) tall at most -- maybe even less than that -- but the steam makes it seem much more impressive. It was quite pretty -- much more colorful than Old Faithful was:

(I read later that Spasm Geyser stops for a while after the neighboring Fountain Geyser erupts. We didn't witness that while we were here.)

One thing that I started focusing on was all of the runoff water. It cuts little stream channels in some areas, but in others there are large sheets of this expelled water, quietly flowing away from its geyser or pool source.

These runoff areas (there may be a more technical term for it -- does anybody know?) were very interesting to me. Although they're not doing anything exciting like erupting, bubbling, or frothing, they were so beautiful and worthy of attention:

I'll have more of these in another post, as I spent more time bent over looking at the ground than I did looking up at the "main" features I think.

Fountain Paint Pot: It was a nice first stop of the day, but the morning got even better after that.

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