25/05/10 part 2

On our way down towards Old Faithful we got to see some elk and bison both in herds on a plain and up close next to the road. Those bison sure are big things, fortunately not aggressive towards us though. The road down to Old Faithful actually wasn’t that picturesque, large swaths of forest had been destroyed by fire. We later found out that this is all part of the ecosystem. That variety of pine need fire to reproduce, the cones are “glued” closed and need the fire to open them up to spread the seeds. The destruction of the older trees is all part of the cycle; it lets the next generation of trees get started.

Lesson over. Old Faithful was a bit late on erupting, so everyone was there with the cameras getting excited every time a bit more steam came out. I guess you could call it a teaser. (Note: this is a play on words; teaser sounds like geyser if you say it the English way and to tease means to playfully or light heartedly annoy or aggravate, which Old Faithful was doing nicely. You can laugh now.)  The eruption was pretty impressive, thousands of tons of superheated water thrown about 300 ft in the air. It really does demonstrate the amount of energy lurking a just below the ground.

On the way back to the campground we stopped at all of the other geyser basins and saw far more geothermal phenomena for me to describe. The pools are fascinating for biological reasons as well as the geological ones. All of the colours come from bacteria, which are living in unbelievably hot and acidic conditions, conditions so harsh that these organisms are called “extremals”. Before discovery of such organisms, it was thought that life could not survive beyond certain levels of heat and acidity. These are the sorts of organisms that astrophysicists are looking for traces of on extrasolar planets.

Another lesson over, I could probably go on talking about the caldera and the rocks, but I’ll let you off this time. We did however see a black bear on our way back to the campground. It was great, we got close enough to see it fairly clearly but far enough away that it was not disturbed by us watching. A bear spotting really becomes quite crazy quite quickly. There was a frenzy of activity as hardcore photographers set up their equipment and tourists like us stop to see what’s going on. They call it a “wildlife jam” as the roads soon get blocked. Whenever we saw a wildlife jam the rangers were on hand within minutes, I don’t know how they manage to get to the trouble so quickly.

Our camp spot for the evening was a gooden, better even than the previous night. We had a view of a valley walled with green mountains. There were even elk and a bison peacefully grazing nearby.

Cube out