Yellowstone Stinks: Upper Geyser Basin Walk

The walk to Grotto Geyser. It was especially stinky

After the Old Faithful show, it was time to stroll around the Upper Geyser Basin.  This is the landscape that really lets you know that you are sitting on top of an active super-volcano with molten lava churning below your feet.

The first pool looked innocuous enough, the Blue Star Spring.  Very blue, indeed.

This bubbling cauldron, however, looked less inviting.  Unless you brought some hot dogs, or maybe spaghetti.  Then the water was perfect for cooking,

You can see the aptly-named Firehole River in these pictures.  This feature was more of a pustule on the face of earth:

Looking out over the Upper Geyser Basin:

This is the Beehive Geyser, with its nice, clean beehive shape:

It erupts at very irregular and unpredictable intervals, so it's not a star attraction.  Apparently, however, when it does erupt, it is spectacular.

This is the sadly-named Depression Geyser:

So many other geysers get really cool name.  How sad to be the one that gets named for a psychological malady.

This is the Heart Spring.

So named because it is in the shape of a heart.  If you use your imagination.  And you really have to use some imagination to figure out why this is the Lion Group of Geysers:

Here is an awesome one.  Spasmodic Geyser.  I don't know if this counts as a full bore eruption, but it was fun to watch:

I'm not sure of the name of this one, but, again, wandering out here you really do get the sense that the landscape is not of this earth:

On to the Grand Geyser:

When you see dead trees in the background in Yellowstone, especially within the caldera, it does not necessarily mean a disease or a fire.  Often, it just means that the magma underneath shifted, usually from some earthquake, and suddenly the ground got a lot warmer where that tree had been comfortably standing before.
 

In other words, those trees are probably cooked.  Grand Geyser does have a few benches for viewing its eruptions, but it's nothing like Old Faithful.  Its eruptions are somewhat regularly, but they're usually within a window of hours, not minutes, like Old Faithful.

And people are content to just watch the show.  No one (except me) viewing it only through the camera.

Water drainage from the eruption:

Colorful pool:

This is Giant Geyser:

Not sure why this one is called "Giant."  Perhaps marketing.  Old Faithful looked more "giant" if you ask me.

Giant Geyser erupted earlier in 2019.  The frequency is way insufficient to sit around waiting for the new spout.

Giant may refer to the height of that cone.  All those mineral deposits from the eruptions leave a trace.

And now we come to the geyser that caused me to observe "Yellowstone stinks":

Grotto Geyser.  You can smell the sulphur all throughout Upper Geyser Basin (and many many other areas of the park).  But the steam emanating from Grotto Geyser was particularly thick with the sulphurous stench:

And the hour and one-half loop walk is done.  Just in time to miss the next scheduled explosion of Old Faithful.

Back to the hotel, which is along the shores of Lake Yellowstone.  Lake Yellowstone is the highest altitude lake in North America.  Higher than Tahoe!  It sits in the caldera.

It's huge.  I'm staying at the historic Lake Yellowstone.

It was a clear night so I got up in the middle of it to go out and see the stars.  Oh.  My.  Gawd.  I have never seen a night sky so thick with stars in my life.  The Milky Way was very visible.  No pictures because no pictures could do it justice.  But the stars in the night sky is definitely one of the pluses of being far away from the lights of the nighttime.