Lower Geyser Basin - Fountain Paint Pots

The Fountain Paint Pots parking area gives you access to a short boardwalk (.5 miles round trip) that allows you to look over the Lower Geyser Basin. The highlight at this site is the paint pots.

It was more perfect weather for us as we took the tour of the Lower Geyser Basin - you can see the beautiful blue sky in all of my photographs. We went around the boardwalk loop in a clockwise direction. The first thing photo I took was of Spasm Geyser. You can see in the background the wet steaming surface, it looks like boiling water runs freely above and below the surface here. Definitely not a good idea to step off the boardwalk!

Clepsydra Geyser seemed to be erupting continuously while we were there; at least, there was always steam pouring from the vent. Behind this geyser and down in the basin there appeared to be a lot more activity that you can't walk close too, I guess the surface is too unstable to extend the boardwalk out to these other landmarks.

Fountain Geyser is right next to Clepsydra.

Activity in the fumeroles depends on how wet the weather has been recently when you visit Yellowstone. If no percipitation has fallen lately, the mud around the fumerole will be baked into a solid mass, and the fumerole will just be a steaming/hissing vent. But if there has been rain, then the mud will be liquid, and the escaping steam will bubble through the boiling mud. You can see the thick mud here is exploding upward - I tried to capture the "pop" of the bubble with my camera.

Leather Pool got it's name because it used to be the home of a brown colored bacteria that grew in large mats in the pool. Apparently, the appearance of the mats looked like a sheet of leather. But lately the temperature of the pool has increased, which killed the bacteria. Now Leather Pool is blue in color, it is a hot spring.

The Fountain Paint Pots are just like the fumeroles (though apparently they never dry out completely) - the amount of recent rainfall determines the consistency of the mud, so the mud will boil rapidly or slowly allow the hot gases to create big bubbles before escaping. When we visited, it looked like half of the paint pots were wet, and the other side of the area was drier - with the slow growing mudpots. These are my best pictures of the churning mud.

The last view on the Lower Geyser boardwalk is of the Silex Spring, the water here is so hot that no bacteria mats can grow, the silica rock is dissolved in this pool. Park literature says the temperature in the pool ranges from 165 to 199 degrees Fahrenheit.

I am including a photograph of a buffalo here because we encountered a large herd of these beasts in the Lower Geyser Basin. We were going to take the trail to Fairy Falls, but these animals were all over the parking lot. A young calf was standing right on the trail - I thought about getting out and walking by them, but it would have been just my luck that I would have passed between the calf and the mother. I didn't want to get THAT close to these big animals, so after waiting futilely for them to leave, we skipped the hike to Fairy Falls.

Finally, here is a shot taken from the side of the road between Madison Junction and West Yellowstone. This was the first picture I took coming into the park. When you drive in from West Yellowstone, the first geothermal features you will spot is the back of Lower Geyser basin. It was exciting to see the steam and geysers, knowing we had arrived at Yellowstone.