Yellowstone National Park - MAMMOTH HOT SPRINGS

Oh yes! 
Still DAY 1:


 Roaring Mountain behind us, we are heading North towards Mammoth Hot Springs - the town and the terraces.

Country keeps on changing from open to forested and in one section we have to yield a large bison bull. 
He looks like coming home from an all night party, dishevelled in his still winter coat, tired and .... well the branch!

Bison bulls are mostly solitary and when the mating season nears they start their preparations for the right to mate. This guy looks like he was thrashing some vegetation and that he would take no part in some silly games.

Bison are the most dangerous animals in the park.
They can run at 60 km per hour when they decide to. 
It would NOT be a good idea to upset any of him.
That's why we all stop and let His Majesty lead the way. 
Being a passenger I am taking photos through the front windshield - another good reason for keeping the vehicle clean.









Mammoth Hot Springs:

Some 30 km North from Norris is a place much different from other features in the park. Famous the world over Mammoth Hot Springs does not straddle the ring fracture made by the explosion of the Yellowstone volcano or the fault that heats the Norris Basin. 
But all the quaking and rumbling of Norris created open-enough plumbing to allow the heat waters of Norris to reach Mammoth helping in creation of its famous terraces.


The Mammoth Hot Springs Terraces and how they came to existence.

To start with we need to realize that some 400 million years ago (long after the last volcanic explosion) the area was covered by sea.  Where there is a sea there are deposits and sedimentary rocks. 

The following are not my photos - they are from Wikipedia, intended to bring the point a bit closer.
 These shells are (more often than not) made of  Calcium carbonate. Aren't they amazing?

One of the sedimentary rocks is limestone; a nice soft rock with, made by compression of tiny shells of tiny shell-protected animals that lived and perished in the sea all those millions of years ago. Their dead bodies, only millimeters in size, "rain" down to the sea or ocean floor, get squished by pressure of water and, crystallize into minerals such a calcite or aragonite (both chemically still Calcium carbonate) which eventually becomes limestone (chemically Calcium carbonate).

Limestone is a soft rock that is "easily" dissolved in water.
Ok, ok, this is a middle school stuff but it never hurts to dust it off.....I am not even sure if I got it totally right.


In any case, we are at Mammoth and, here, thanks to the ocean life of the past, are the limestone deposits.

I am actually springing forward a bit, the original limestone is underneath, stuff on the surface is already travertine
 (still limestone but in a different form)

There is also water here - from rain and from the thick layers of winter snow. 
It, seeps into the ground and percolates into the depths of the rock deposits, slowly, patiently, working its way through the porous rocks -  down and down ..for hundreds and thousands of years.
It seeps towards the heated plumbing of  the Norris system. 
And there, the pure rain or snow water enters the cracks heated by the magma below. 
Gases from magma have already filled the cracks and our rain water reacts with them. 

Water and gases are a good recipe for creating acids - and that's exactly what happens there.


So we have the system full of hot acidic water and there is no other way for it but to rise up through all that beautiful limestone. 
It dissolves large quantities of it, dragging the solution along until everything reaches the surface.





Once exposed to air, the limestone solution restructures itself and hardens into a slightly different rock - the travertine.

Travertine is white or gray but at Mammoth the terraces dazzle visitors with oranges and yellows, pinks and reds, greens also - all courtesy of microorganisms and dissolved minerals.

So having all this out of my mind I can look back at few of our photos seeing them now in a slightly different light.

Photographers at Mammoth will have so much to do! Any lens will work - all one needs is time.

Liberty Cap; a dormant spring.

Give me a penny for every photo taken here! 
And all that because of the little guys of the sea, water, heat and a bit of gas combined in this one place on Earth.

BUT!

No text needed.

Mammoth Terraces keep changing all the time - the aqua-blue over white travertine could be the images of the past. 

No matter what - there is always beauty in Nature.

Note:
There are many travertine deposits around the globe - most famous are in Tivoli, Italy. Travertine had been used as a building material for many famous buildings around the globe: Colosseum in Rome, St, Peter's Basilica in Vatican, Fontana Di Trevi .... that just for starts. 
But that would be another story.


When we finally visited the town - Mammoth Hot Springs - someone told us that there was a brand new baby elk - just born - by the info building. A large area had been closed off to give elk mom some space and to protect people from an injury. That's where our zoom lenses came handy. We watched for half an hour before our departure to the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone.

A thorough wash and gentle nudging were the first two things she did.

Then she guided the baby towards her rear and when it finally began to feed she turned her head back to the place where the baby was born. There in the grass was her placenta and she proceeded to eat it.  

The ranger told us that it was a protection from predators, so they could not find them by smell. We thought that perhaps there might be a bit more to it such as recycling some precious substances - but that was only our guess.