Yellowstone

Right now, we are in Yellowstone and it is awesome! There are bison everywhere including: elk, moose, wolves (even though we haven’t seen any at all), and even bears. There are also geysers, multi colored hot pools and springs, and mud pools. But the pools and geysers aren’t just fun and games. There was one mud pool that was so acidic that it would burn your skin off. The pools and springs are so hot that it could seriously burn you or even worse, kill you. The crust around the pools, springs, and geysers might be so thin that if you stepped on it, you would fall into the scolding water. Plus, the steam from the geysers kills the trees around them. But first I should tell you how the geysers and pools were made. What if I said that a volcano, whose explosion was bigger than Mount St Helen’s, created Yellowstone? It’s true. The volcano blew its self up and created Yellowstone. The lava is still active and that is where the heat came from. The water came from rain and snow. Put that together and you get a geyser or a pool of hot bubbling mud. My favorite part of the park was the geysers. There were tall geysers, short geysers, big geysers, small geysers, water geysers, and even mud geysers.  There was a geyser that was called the Porkchop Geyser. It was called the Porkchop because it was the shape of a pork chop. It was a small pool which people said it had small eruption. But then, in 1985, it spouted continuously. It only stopped spouting in 1989 when it finally exploded.  Big chunks flew everywhere. After that, it became a gently rolling hot spring. But, on July 2003, Porkchop roiled as if in eruption. Sadly, it ceased within a few days. The first geyser that we saw go off was Old Faithful Geyser and we had just got there and it was even raining. We also saw the Riverside Geyser and it was also cool. We didn’t see the Grand Geyser but it’s the tallest predictable geyser in the world. It could last 9-12 minuets and consisted of 1-4 bursts, sometime reaching 200 ft.  It must have been amazing. There was a geyser that was called the Constant Geyser but it wasn’t going. So much for the “constant” part. The weather is really weird here. The first day it was raining a bit. The next day it was raining a lot more and it was going to snow at night. Today, there was snow everywhere and it was still snowing and raining at the same time. How weird is that? The good news is that Zoë, suddenly going trigger-happy on the camera, got some good pictures.