Mammoth Hot Springs
Mammoth Hot Springs is located at the Northwest corner of the park. It only takes half a day to see everything there, but is
is worth visiting. Boiling water bubbles up from the earth's interior, and it slowly builds up a rim of travertine around each pool. The algae that love hot
water inhabit these springs and give them dramatic colors. But the flow of hot water is dynamic, and the point where it surfaces changes from time to time.
When I was young, we visited Yellowstone in 1972 and Minerva Terrace was a colorful display of hot water springs. Now Minerva Terrace is dry, and bleached
white. It looks water has shifted to the edge of the terrace and now is flowing out of Canary Spring. The lower terrace has boardwalks and steps that allow you to walk up close to the formations and springs. This is easy to traverse. We started
from the parking lot at the upper end of the terrace, so the first site we encountered was the New Blue Spring. Park literature says this spring is especially
dynamic, it's flow of water turns on and off, sometimes several times in a single year. Jupiter Terrace and Mound Terrace have both been dry now for about a decade, and the soft travertine formations have started to erode.
These next two photos show the Jupiter Terrace. Liberty Cap is an unusual formation. It is thought to have formed by an active spring under high pressure that did not shift location over a
period of hundreds of years. The high pressure allowed the hot water to continue to carry mineral deposits to ever greater heights. The hot water spring that
formed Liberty Cap is now dormant. The formation is named after knit hats worn by revolutionaries during the French Revolution, the hats
were worn by the Sons of Liberty - or something like that. Palette Spring was flowing when we visited, so we could see the dramatic colors that the algae produces when there is hot water for it
to grow in. I wish I had better camera and film to capture the dramatic coloration here. Minerva Terrace is probably the most famous feature of Mammoth Hot Springs. Even though it was dry when we visited, you can still see
the amazing formations. It sort of reminded me of an alien city, perhaps on a desert world in a Star Wars movie. The boardwalk almost completely surrounds
Minerva, so you get lots of different angles and viewpoints. I bet it would look pretty dramatic late in the day or at first light when there were lots of
cast shadows to highlight the bone white features. This next photo shows Cleopatra Terrace, which is currently partially inactive - the orange colored algae shows where
hot spring water is flowing, the stark white color shows where there it is dry. Canary Spring seems to be the most active part of Mammoth Hot Springs. It must be a relatively recent out flow on the Main Terrace, you
can see trees still standing in the boiling water. The boardwalk is extended over to this new spring. There is a lot of water flowing here, this seems
to be the main point of current activity. There was a tripod mounted to the boardwalk fence, it was used to take a series of time lapse photographs of the
Canary Spring, perhaps it is still be using to record the growth of this spring. Because there is the most hot water here, the most dramatic colors are
visible here. All the remaining pictures on this webpage are of Canary Spring. 
