July 15th Yellowstone National Park

  


Saturday, July 15, 2006
Day 20
Yellowstone National Park

Mudpots, fumaroles, hotsprings, and geysers were on tap for today, and they were some of the weirdest and most interesting things we’ve seen so far! In the morning we just hung out at the campsite. I was not feeling well at all, my cold was kicking my butt this morning, and I had a neck cramp to boot. After some DayQuil, time and Advil I started feeling much better around 12 o’clock. Just in time for our drive over to the Mud Volcano area for the Ranger talk about that area.

We learned about the Dragon’s Mouth feature, where steam and water pump out of a giant crack in a rock and it sounds like there might be a dragon in there! We found out that Mud Volcano used to actually look like its name, but doesn’t anymore because it basically blew itself apart a long time ago. We saw all sorts of other muddy, bubbling, roiling features, but by far the coolest this we saw was “The Gumper”. Since we were with a Ranger we were allowed to go to an area “off trail” that is closed to the general public. We walked down a bison trail to some dead features, and then a little further up was this huge hole in the ground filled with bubbling dark gray mud. Bloop, bloop, gump, gump. You could tell why it is called the Gumper. This truly looked like a mud pot. You know when you are a kid and you “cook” mud pies, and stuff? Well, this looked like a boiling mud soup. REALLY thick soup.

I thought it was really interesting to watch the older bison just kind of hang out near all these smelly, sulfer-y, hot features. Apparently the dried muddy stuff is good for keeping flies and other insects at bay, and the ground is quite warm which is good for their aches and pains. As the Ranger said, when he gets his aches and pains he likes a nice warm heating pad or hot water bottle. The whole area is like a giant, natural heating pad! There are places where the ground got so hot that it killed the trees living there.

To answer my questions from yesterday: the hydrogen sulfide gas that is bubbling up and out of many of these features is converted to sulfuric acid by the bacteria that are living in and on the features. These cyanobacteria are thermophilic (heat loving) and grow in warm to hot temperatures below 167 degrees Fahrenheit. They also give interesting colors to some of the muddy features. Another interesting fact to note is that the area is constantly changing due to all the seismic activity here. Geologic time is S – L – O – W, but we’re talking within weeks to months to years there can be significant changes in this area.

So, after a late lunch we drove over to the Old Faithful area, which is roughly 39 miles from here. That was a long 39-mile drive through coniferous forest. We even crossed the Continental Divide (twice) going there. I suppose it isn’t a straight line, but I’ll have to learn more about that. Since it took so long to get there we practically ran to the Ranger Program that I wanted to see. It met at a geyser called Castle Geyser which was further away from Old Faithful than it looks to be on a little map. Anyway, we got there and learned a little about geysers and how they work. It is quite complicated to say the least.

Basically, there is like a series of pipes underground that are interconnected. Water that seeps into the ground gets into these “pipes” which really started out as cracks in the rock. It works its way down into the crust near the magma, which is only 2-3 miles down in this area of the caldera. Once there it gets superheated to temperatures approaching 400 degrees Fahrenheit. You may be thinking that that is not possible because the boiling point of water is 212 degrees. (And I learned that here at elevations above 7000 feet, the b.p. is only 199 degrees! Better follow those “high altitude” cooking directions…) Anyway, the water can get that hot because it is under such great pressure from all the rock above it. Raise the pressure, raise the boiling point. This hot pressurized water eventually makes its way back to the surface through cracks which are called pipes. The water is so hot that it is able to dissolve some of the silica (type of mineral in the rock). Silica is the main mineral in glass. So, as it is flowing through the cracks it is self-lining the cracks with glass because it is depositing some of the silica. This makes the cracks into pipes, sealed glass pipes! How cool is that?

If there are no constrictions in the piping, the water makes its way to the surface and is called a hot spring. If there are constrictions in the piping the hot spring is called a geyser. Hot springs are basically areas that are just bubbling away with very hot water. It is sometimes boiling, but more often below 199 degrees where it is coming out of the ground. Still some of them are about 160 degrees where they come out. Pretty darned hot! In a geyser the constriction can be as narrow as four inches across. This narrow spot kind of causes a back up and pressure builds in the pipes. Some of the really hot water escapes and flashes to steam as the pressure drops. This is where I get a little lost in the whole process, but it basically causes a chain reaction that eventually allows the water and steam to come flying out of the ground in a gush.

We did see Old Faithful erupt from a distance, and we tried to wait for Castle Geyser to erupt, but after waiting for almost an hour we couldn’t wait any more because it was almost sunset and we were hungry and tired. So, we saw it “pre-erupt” with lots of little spurts here and there, and then we went back to the parking lot for the long drive home. Yes, home is the camper now!

I have to commend my children for being really good and well-behaved! They have hiked all of this with us with very little complaining. They seem to enjoy learning all this stuff right along with us! Tomorrow we are driving to Utah, it should be a long drive, but since we are going through the Tetons, hopefully it will be interesting too.