Yellowstone National Park
Lots of things to see here in Yellowstone National Park, it’s just a pity we can’t see any of the grizzly bears, wolves, or free-ranging herds of bison and elk!
First up is the world famous Old Faithful Geyser, it’s in the middle the concentric walkways you can see in our thumbnail. Old Faithful was so-named because of the reliability of its eruptions, which are currently happening about every 65 minutes, unfortunately it’s not erupting in our picture. 
Of the 1000 or so geysers in the world, about half of these are in Yellowstone. If you look closely on the walkway, I think you can actually see people watching for an eruption.
Next up are these fantastic waterfalls at the mouth of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, whose yellow-coloured stones gave the park its name.
Finally we have the awesome Grand Prismatic Spring which is the largest hot spring in the United States, and the range is colour shown here is incredible. The blue-white pool to the Northeast is Excelsior Geyser, although it’s been dormant since 1990.
The colours in the spring are produced by different species of thermophilic bacteria that live in the narrow temperature ranges formed as the waters of the hot spring naturally cool farther from the heat source. The reddish bacteria at the outer edge survive in the coolest water with the yellowish and greenish bacteria living in progressively hotter water. The water in the central blue area of the spring is too hot to support any of the bacteria.
Lots and lots more information about Yellowstone National Park is available on Wikipedia, and the official Yellowstone site even has a webcam of Old Faithful .
Thanks to (and this may be our longest thanks list yet!) Brian Ralli, Rick, Tom Gula, Balazs Ganszky, MIke, dx, CosmicPenguin, Chris Prince, Rosewood, Jeff, spaz, Ballard, Brian, JasonRene, Corey Vilhauer, Benjamin, Peter Szabo, Kyle, Tim, Chris Shinkle, Dick Nielson, Wayne, Ray Bellis, Zoltan Horvath, Jens Kilian, mark, J. Gable, Kimon Berlin, Laura Vance, Sparky Treewaller, Matt, Don S, Jared Roberts, Fakus Namus and last but by no means least Rebecca Ray. Thank you everyone!
I’m pretty sure that building next to Old Faithful is one of the oldest/largest log cabins in the world. I forget the exact award…
scroll south and west from Yellowstone Falls, and you’ll find some of the immense forest fire damage: many acres of bare trees.
Back in ‘95, as I stood waiting for Old Faithful to erupt, a woman walked up to a park ranger to complain about how it was three minutes “late.” She wanted to know why they wouldn’t just turn the water on already.
Very cool photos, thanks for the great sleuth work.
Some folks discussing our natural landmarks here:
http://www.heartlandoutdoorsman.com
We were in Yellowstone a couple of weeks ago and saw herds of both bison and elk. People were watching (as usual) in the Lamar Valley for both wolves and grizzleys. Yellowstone is alive and well. However, very little of Yellowstone is in Idaho and all of the features you show are in Wyoming. –Just for accuracy sake–.
Wierd. I don’t know when it was updated, but there’s now a season split running right through the middle of Old Faithful. To the east is summer, to the west is winter.
Beautiful…I love Google Sight seeing…So cool!