Yellowstone
Grotto Geyser at Sunset
On September 18, 1870 members of the Washburn-Langford-Doane Expedition entered the Upper Geyser Basin where in a day and a half of exploration, they named seven geysers of which Grotto was one. Nathaniel P. Langford described the Grotto in his 1871 Scribner’s account:
“The Grotto” was so named from its singular crater of vitrified sinter, full of large, sinuous apertures. Through one of these, on our first visit, one of our company crawled to the discharging orifice; and when, a few hours afterwards, he saw a volume of boiling water, four feet in diameter, shooting through, it to the height of sixty feet, and a scalding stream of two hundred inches flowing from the aperture he had entered a short time before, he concluded he had narrowly escaped being summarily cooked. The discharge of this geyser continued for nearly half an hour.
Boardwalk at Sunset in Yellowstone
The sun was setting, the warm colors were reflecting off the stream & water in the hot springs.
Boardwalk by Moonlight
To make this shot interesting, I had to angle the boardwalk, the hot spring, the moon and its reflection into the frame. There’s so much to look at in the photo.
Consequences
Yesterday’s photo was the Black Pool hot spring in Yellowstone. The temperatures within the pool can reach as high as 70`C (160 `F). I noticed something in the water and got a closer look. It was a bones of an animal that must have met its untimely death. 
Black Pool
This is a portion of the Black Pool at Yellowstone National Park
Black Pool is a hot spring in the West Thumb Geyser Basin of Yellowstone National Park in the United States.
The pool was cool enough up until 1991 for dark orange-brown cyanobacteria to grow throughout the pool. When combined with the blue of the water, the pool appeared to be an exceptionally dark green to almost black, hence the name.
An exchange of function took place in 1991, shifting thermal energy to Black Pool and nearby Abyss Pool, causing them to heat up. Black Pool’s temperature became hot enough to kill all the cyanobacteria in the pool, turning the pool a rich teal blue color. The pool also had frequent boiling eruptions on August 15, 1991, doming the water to 3 feet and causing heavy runoff. Black Pool remains extremely hot, and is now one of Yellowstone’s most beautiful and intensely blue pools. The name of the pool remains “Black Pool.”
Snapshots by Kats 