USA 2018 (10), Mud pots and fumaroles

Tags

Bison, Bombadier, Fountain Paint Pot, fumarole, geyser, hot spring, hydrogen sulfide, hydrogen sulphide, Lower Geyser Basin, Madison Information Station, Mud pot, Old Faithful, red-breasted nuthatch, snow coach, Yellowstone, Yellowstone National Park

USA 2018 (10), Mud pots and fumaroles. Our next stop for a walk in Yellowstone National Park, this Monday, 19th February, was at the Lower Geyser Basin.

Dead lodge pole pines, with petrified bases. They have absorbed the prevailing silica material through their roots, and ‘frozen’.

More evidence that bison like warm water

Here we learned more from Drew about hot springs, fumaroles, and mud pots, having already learned about geysers, such as Old Faithful. We saw for ourselves how vegetation and even small birds could thrive in well below freezing ambient temperatures. At 7.30 this morning, it had been minus 2º Fahrenheit, which sounds even colder in Celsius – minus 19º.  Photos can show the water vapour/steam – but not the rotten eggs smell of hydrogen sulphide, H2S, (“very poisonous, corrosive, and flammable” – Wikipedia) which invaded the nostrils from time to time, and had done the previous day also.

 

Red-breasted nuthatch, at the edge of the field of mud pots.

Regaining our yellow snowcoaches, we found one of those dark red Bombadiers, the precursors of the modern vehicles we were travelling in. Onwards and northwards.

Snowmobiles approaching, and in the distance, the northern edge of the most recent (640,000 years ago) Lava Creek caldera

 

This is my very favourite bison portrait

Not a human footprint in sight

After a short while we reached our next warming hut, Madison Information Station I think, where we took lunch (in the company of a load of snowmobilists) – and were visited by a coyote.

  I saw no-one give him/her anything to eat!