Joe and Françoise's excellent adventures!: WE ARE SITTING ON TOP OF A POWDER KEG!!!!!!!

Let's face it, Yellowstone is just one, big, giant caldera! The entire place is about to blow up any minute now, give or take a few 100 thousand years ..... But you can really feel that our entire planet has an unstable crust, sitting on top of molten lava, every time you turn a corner on a pretty mountain road, or a meadow, and the ground starts smoking and smelling like sulfur.....
Which is too bad, because the place is very pretty, and there is a lot of wild life in it. But as I say, we may have a few hundred of thousands of years...... or not....

We are staying at the Canyon lodge (which, as I mentioned before, has really bad internet connectivity.... I am right now sitting in the business center, the only place even remotely connected), but has the advantage of being at the very center of Yellowstone National Park: The park roads form an "8", and we are right in between the top and the bottom circle.

Today, we decided to explore the top.
We started the day looking at the "pretty" side of things, and not the "sulfur smelling" side of things. We headed for Lamar Valley, hoping to see some grey wolves, knowing it was a long shot. And indeed, we did not find them. But the valley is very beautiful and we at last managed to get a good picture of a prong horn antelope.

We also saw another big herd of buffaloe.

After that, we headed toward Mammoth Hot Springs. It is an old army base (in the late 1800 hundreds, an army camp was set up there to deal with the general lawlessness, and with the illegal killing of buffaloe- they are probably to thank for the herds we have today!).

The old army barracks are now a fancy hotel (seen from above in that picture), and elk roam all around the place (this being rut season, the park rangers are very careful to keep people far enough away).... while we had a picnic on the lawn, a magpie came and begged for food....

Mammoth Hot Springs is known for the hot springs and beautiful calcite terraces. Really an amazing landscape.

That's where you really realize how fragile our world is, and how amazing and beautiful too.

In this almost lunar landscape, there are patches of green, and elk sit around.......

You can see the crystals growing in the very clear water, and they look almost like corals.....

We spent a couple of hours there, and then headed to another "hot" area, "geyser basin", at Norris point. What and other worldly place that is.

Then, we came back toward the canyon. Although we are staying at the canyon lodge, we did not see it yet. Indeed, you just would not know it's there unless you drove to it, and it's 2 amazing water falls. What an amazing site! We went up both the south and north rims, and it was just amazing. I took the walk down to the rim of one fall (an easy 3/4 miles walk down, but tough on the way back up!). People who went down that river without knowing what was there must have been pretty surprised.... I can only think that their last words were "oh shit!"......