Yellowstone Park - Grand Prismatic Spring and Old Faithful - Part 5

Click here to see the previous part - Yellowstone Park - a very alone buffalo and more geysers - Part 4

We left the Fountain Paint Pot area and drove down the road. By this time the weather changed. Mild and even warm midday turned into a chilly afternoon. So when we stopped next time we found more steam and white fog covering the ponds, lakes and geysers.

 

Colorful water was streaming from Excelsior Geyser Crater to the Firehole River. I mean the water wasn't colored but the bacteria lining the bed of the stream made it colorful.

The crater was steamy and at this point we had a hard time seeing anything. But it didn't really matter, because what we could see exceeded any expectations and made our hearts beat faster.

A few more steps and we stopped next to the marble bacteria mat. The water was running from one lake to another and it was just half an inch deep but hundred feet wide. Isn't it amazing?

And finally we were at the biggest and most attractive lake in the Park - Great Prismatic Spring, huge and really colorful. It's hard not to admire every tint of color and every shade of it. The steam was messing around and we had a hard time seeing all this beauty.

 

The colors close to the boardwalk are really bright and bold, see for yourself...

Unfortunately it's impossible to see all colors and all beauty from the boardwalk but we didn't have time to hike to the higher ground where you can see the lake from the vantage point. But here is an image I found on the Internet that should give you an idea...

We wanted to stay there longer but the temperature dropped even more and we were frozen so we jumped into the car, turned the heat on and drove toward Old Faithful Inn. We get there just in time, because the Old Faithful geyser just started its eruption!

Old Faithful is one of the most predictable geysers in the park. Currently it performs every 90 minutes and lasts about 5 minutes. Eruptions can shoot 3,700 to 8,400 US gallons (14,000 to 32,000 L) of boiling water to a height of 106 to 185 feet (32 to 56 m) and... more than 1,000,000 eruptions have been recorded. Once it stopped we decided we wanted to see it again so we had 90 minutes to explore the valley around the famous geyser and hotel.

And we had a good time there, slowly walking between geysers (were sprayed a few times), ponds, bacteria mats and mud volcanoes.

When we came back we had an opportunity to see Old Faithful erupting again.

Finally we walked through a hundred years old Old Faithful Inn (I mean it, we literally entered one door, crossed the hall and left through the other door) and drove to the hotel where we tried to recover after such a long and full of impressions day.

 Click here to learn how we started next morning - Yellowstone Park - on the road from here to there - Part 6

Pictures were taken on September 04, 2010.