The rest of Wednesday

After our excursions on Wednesday at the crack of dawn in the fog, we went to Camp Hall for some fantastic pancakes and sausage (and learned from the kids the art of putting whipped cream on the pancakes, then immediately eating off the whipped cream and leaving the pancake. A good trick!). We then hopped in the big red truck and went about a mile down the road to the Norris Geyser Basin. We explored the Porcelain Basin first, and then the Back Basin. I was a bit of an idiot and left the good camera in the car, but the little camera cranked out some good pictures, too. Always a mystery with that camera - you never quite know what you got til you download the photos.

Norris Geyser Basin is the "hot spot" of Yellowstone - three faults come together here and boiling hot magma is barely 2 miles under the earth's surface. The landscape is crazy - it's like this moon landscape, surrounded by mountains.

Little steam vent in the foreground, crazy white barren nothingness behind it, with some snow-capped mountains way in the distance.

Ummm. Whatcha doing there, Gracie? Inadvisable to try to touch the water - Norris hosts a majority of the world's acidic geysers, so the run-off is sure to be bad for you.

Who, me? I wasn't doing anything. Nothing to see here...

Multi-colored runoff from one of the geysers. I think it was here that we learned that the runoff changes colors because of the algae that grows in it. Some algae like different temperatures, so the color of the runoff will change as it gets further from the source.
Whose arms can reach all the way around Daddy? Katie's got it down. Gracie needs her arms stretched out a bit - she can't quite make it!
The minerals from this runoff have made a super smooth rock under the water. Makes it look like a cool shot of water running. Really there's not much water there, just some cool looking rock.

After a fabulous lunch of BLT's back at Camp Hall, we took separate cars up to Mammoth Hot Springs. A new road for us - we'd never been up this far north in the park. After the hot springs we'll continue a few miles further north to our new digs.
John and Katie check out where we are on the map to see how far we'll have to walk
From the Upper Terrace of Mammoth - essentially a mountain in progress. The springs deposit over a ton of limestone on the terraces every year.
Katie shows off her stylin' hat
What do they call those pools that look like they keep going on forever off in to space? That's what this reminded me of. And I have no idea why this is being underlined, as I can't even find an "underline" option.
Gracie shows off her cute hat, as well.
Everybody's got a hat but me...
The limestone build-up in the runoff creates some really cool patterns.
A little closer view of the everlasting pool, with mountains in the background

Amazing what a little bit of limestone can do...
Down on the Lower Terrace, which is HUGE and very very white

We decided this looked like roasted marshmallows. Which, of course, made us hungry!

After we toured the Terraces we stopped in to the General Store in Mammoth for some ice cream. Along with perhaps every other tourist in Yellowstone. The place was mobbed. But, the cool thing about vacationing with 6 and 8 year olds is that you get ice cream pretty much every day! :-) From there we said good night to the Halls and continued north through the town of Gardiner. Remember how we said West Yellowstone was small? Jonathan said it was a metropolis compared to Gardiner, Montana. And we was right. West Yellowstone's three blocks of activity shrunk down to one block in Gardiner. Tiny cute little town. And not nearly as crowded as West Yellowstone.

We found our B&B without too much trouble, settled in, went in to town for some dinner at the Raven Grill (John is STILL teasing me for trying to eat at the very sketchy Blue Goose bar, because out B&B hosts told us to go to a place right next to the Italian restaurant, and that it was a little bit low key. Well, Blue Goose was NOT where we were supposed to go. The Raven Grill, however, was an excellent recommendation.) We eventually fell in to bed, looking forward to sleeping in the next morning!