We reached a new milestone last night. For the first time, we didn't have to shut off our water to prevent it from freezing. The days have been pleasant and in the mid-60's, but it's dipped below freezing every night until last night.
Today is National Donut Day, and we have no place to buy donuts. The sacrifices we make to travel...
The weather pattern we've been seeing shifted today. Instead of clear skies in the morning with clouds coming in during the late afternoon, we started the day with clouds and had clear afternoon skies. We waited for the skies to clear and then drove the 50 miles to Great Fountain Geyser. This is one of my favorite geysers. We missed the main eruption earlier in the week, but this time we made sure we were there early. Scattered cumulus clouds and some good surges during the eruption provided some good opportunities for images.
White Dome Geyser was just down the road from Great Fountain Geyser, and it erupted just as we drove up. We couldn't beat the timing, but the eruption was so brief that we didn't really get set up in time to get any good images.
There is something fascinating about watching the mudpots boil, so our next stop was Artist Paintpots. We hiked around the loop trail past Blood Geyser and climbed a ridge to reach the main paintpots. One section had very thick, gray mud that spit and sputtered and hurled small globs of mud into the air. The other section was more the consistency of soup and the "action" was limited to thick bubbles erupting across the surface. We were there in late afternoon light which produced some good shadows and made it more 3-D. I'd like to shoot here again in the morning when the most interesting area wouldn't be in the shade.
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Since we enjoyed the Artist Paintpots, we decided to check out the Fountain Paint Pots (no, I don't know why one location has "paintpots" as one word and the other has it as two words) near Old Faithful. The sun was nearing the horizon, so we were hustling to get there before the best light was gone. Fountain Paint Pots was a larger area with less viscous mud, so it was more bubbling than spewing mud into the air. Just below the Fountain Paint Pots was Clepysdra Geyser. Clepysdra goes off almost constantly, but unfortunately it doesn't erupt high enough to put in front of the setting sun for the shot I had hoped for.
We returned to Great Fountain Geyser just before sunset to catch the colors of the setting sun in the shallow terraces of runoff surrounding the geyser. We only had a short wait before the cirrus clouds overhead lit up and the sunset light stretched across the horizon. The sunset lacked the pinks and reds of the best sunsets, but the sunset was still dramatic.
We still had 50 miles to drive to get back to camp, so dinner was at 11:30.
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