1,204.6 miles later, I am back - Took a long-ass drive up through Wyoming (Contrary to what even I thought - if you go on the second road (There's only like 3) THROUGH the state instead of around the edges it's got some damn nice scenery) and into Yellowstone Nat'l Park.
For those nubcaeks that don't know, Yellowstone is pretty much the only Nat'l park where you can camp inside a non-dormant volcanic caldera (A caldera is a crater that is larger then 1km across). The mantle is only like 2 miles down, the result being one of the rarest of all features on earth - Hydrothermal springs: Water leaking down through cracks into rock that exceeds the boiling point (199 degrees F at that altitude).
Yellowstone has more geothermal features then anywhere on earth and makes up about 25% of all of them in the world - Basically, it's a hugely popular international tourist site.
To prove I actually went:
This is Grand Geyser - The worlds tallest PREDICATBLE geyser (The tallest in the park erupts anywhere from 4 days to 50 years... this one does it about every 8-12 hours). We walked in (In fact, all we saw erupt did so within about 10 minutes of our arrival) sat down, and it blew up. The actual vent it's coming out of has four different little 'tributaries' that come out of 4 places on the geyser crustal itself - There's the big main one, to the far left is a mainly steam jet that blasts out for a while, and between them (hard to see) there's a smaller churning one. The fourth is off to the right and while it normally churns and bubbles it shoots a few feet in the air when this goes. This geyser erupts for about 5 minutes. In our case, it went down and seemed to stop, then about 20 seconds later, you could feel a massive 'kerWHUMP' and it blew again. Fun stuff.
Grand Prismatic Spring - A very large, very deep, very blue hot spring. Hot springs are like geysers, but they have relatively unhindered plumbing - pressure doesn't build up and allow water to go above the boiling point and explode like it does in a geyser. The colors are caused be thermophiles - heat-loving bacteria. Generally from coldest to hottest (cold in this case being like 150 degrees or something) the colors go red - orange - green - yellow - white - blue. White has, obviously, no effect on the color of the pool. Blue means it's really really hot. This is very blue. Hence - hot.
The orange smears are caused by a bacterial mat of red thermophiles, and/or iron oxide (rust) being pulled up from the spring and being deposited. In this case it's a bacterial mat and not rust.
The hugely popular Morning Glory pool. This pool is shaped like a Morning Glory flower - It used to be blue through and through and was really damn cool - Except assholes decided to throw trash and crap into it and the vent has become clogged - the clog reduced hot water flow, and the pool cooled. The edges of it are now yellow as the temperature is lower. The blue thermophiles can't live and yellow can.
Me on top of a wooden platform above flow from a hot spring. Said flow is usually acidic (3.3 pH or lower) and can eventually dissolve neat shapes into rock. Generic hot spring steams up behind me. Also notice the trees are mostly short and young - In 1988 there was a massive fire that annihilated 36% of the park. The result is that most thermal areas are easier to see. Also, the areas around the thermal features are usually 'dead' and look strip-mined. This is because no plant matter can live in those areas - the thermal feature sprung up and the trees got a taste of toxic and burning water - they tend to die.
Earthquakes still plague the area and small shifts can drastically change a thermal feature's eruption time, length, or even if it erupts at all - it'll change temperatures, sometimes even cause it to drain. It's also suspected that someday the Yellowstone Volcano could erupt again and more or less annihilate a lot of... living things... and stuff...
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' occured, I go sliding into the woods and wake up waist-deep in snow with a throbbing right arm and I'm twisted around a tree.
