Yellowstone

I went with the other interns and our advisor and his wife to Yellowstone this weekend. We went up on Friday afternoon and camped there until today. It was really cool to see the geysers and hotpools and even some wildlife.

We started in Jackson and went through Grand Teton National Park.
We stopped in West Yellowstone at Madison camp grounds and set up tents and everything for the night. We had yummy chicken stirfry stuff and smores :) Then we called it a night.

The next morning we got up at 6:30 am, ate a quick meal of oatmeal and then headed off to the Grand Prismatic pool. Our advisor Dr. Steve told us that it would be better to see all of the Grand Prismatic if we were on the hill behind it, so we went on a little hike, climbed the hill and saw this:

That is just steam not water over the pool. This one is also the biggest hot pools in the entire world!
Then we went further on to a really pretty waterfall called Fairy Falls. The water cooled us off basically instantly, it was like mist. While we were there we saw a marmit, and I found my perfect wand for the Harry Potter premier on tuesday night.

After that we looked at some hot pools while we waited for Grand Fountain Geyser to go off.
I found out that when the hot pools are white or blue as opposed to yellow and orange, the water is too hot for any bacteria to grow. The orange and yellow colors are from the bacteria. Gross huh?

Grand Fountain was really spectacular and looks way better in person. The top of it shot more than 50 feet in the air!

We saw a couple more geysers

and then called it a night. A five hour hike can make you really tired! I got a really bad sunburn line that day too waiting for the geyser in the hot sun.



Then today we just looked around at the geysers and pools closest to the lodge and Old Faithful. I finally did see Old Faithful, and thought it was pretty, but not worth all of the hype.
Our plan was to see some of the really nice geysers, but we missed a few. Our information about when Castle geyser was going to erupt was wrong, so we waited for about 45 minutes for that one then found out it went off 10 minutes before we got there. Then we saw Riverside Geyser which was my favorite throughtout the weekend. It shoots out right above the river (hence the name) but it was so high and my picture makes it look like I was close and it was small, but it really looks better in person.

We missed Grand Geyser. The window of it going off was estimated from 2:40-7:00pm we got to Old Faithful around 2:50 after our lunch and it was probably a 10 minute walk to Grand, but we saw it erupting over the pine trees from a mile and a half away. So technically I saw a bit of it but I was really sad about that. So instead we went to Excelsior and Grand Prismatic. Its really different from the ground instead of above it. The steam above Grand Prismatic was pretty colors ( a feat that Professor Steve loved to tell us the physics of but I have now forgotten...it has something to do with the angle of the sun and the water droplets). The pic makes it look like you can see the water through the steam making it look those colors, but it really was just the steam.Heres the hill we saw Grand Prismatic from ^ (see first picture)

Then we went home. And we saw some deer and elk. I also passed Rexburg and saw the temple. I miss that place!

So yeah this weekend was all in all very very fun!