Geysers, part 1

We arrived at the Upper geyser basin midday one day and missed all predictable geysers by about 10 minutes.  We did arrive about when Old Faithful was going to go off so we waited for that one.  That was the only time we saw Old Faithful erupt up close.

We walked around the paths to see the little geysers, the hot springs and the color pools.  N2 learned in their junior ranger books that each color in the color pools are a different organism and that they are different temperatures.  Blue is the hottest, then yellow, then orange, then brown and finally green is the coolest.  They could look at the pools and tell me which color was the hottest and which pool wasn't so hot.  Knowing that was handy to make them look at pools a little longer :)

 Below is Giant.  It hasn't erupted since 2010.  Splashing in the cone is normal.  We thought it would have been really cool if we had seen it go off when we were standing there.  Too bad it didn't.

 Morning Glory pool

Our favorite geyser is probably Sawmill geyser.  It's not too big but it just keeps going.  We think it should be called The Little Geyser That Could.  We saw this one erupt for quite some time.  The boardwalk goes close to it and Natalie did not want to stand at the edge of the boardwalk because she was afraid of being splashed.  It did not splash us even though we stood at the edge.  We also saw Sawmill the second time we came to the geyser basin.

I could have shared so many more pictures of sawmill.  I think this is the geyser I photographed the most.  But I won't bore you with more pictures of it.  Here is a video of Sawmill geyser.

I really loved watching the water flow away from geysers and see the colors in the rock.

We also went to the Artist Paintpots that day and that is where we saw mudpots for the first time.  There had been a lot of rain so most of the mudpots in the park weren't really thick-they were more like water.  It was kind of disappointing.  N2 really loved watching the mudpots bubble and pop.  We could have watched them for much longer but we hadn't had dinner yet :)