2012/07 Western USA trip - Mammoth Hot Springs |
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Wednesday July 11th
We were changing sites, a move of about a hundred yards, but the other people weren’t out yet. As we had time to kill we used our shower tokens to wash off a week’s grime. It was a dampish, overcast morning so we were in no great hurry anyway.
I’d declared this to be Mammoth Day. No, we weren’t going looking for mammoths; we were going to Mammoth Hot Springs, so named because of their size. To get there, we went past Old Faithful and Firehole Drive again and then stopped at a few of the more interesting spots. The Fountain Paint Pots are always worth a look with their spurting coloured mud, but difficult to photograph; I’ve cheated here by pasting bubble and spurts into one photo. We didn’t stay long as the pots are very popular with the bus tour groups and there were armies marching along the boardwalks with their tour guides.
We stopped at a much quieter spot by the Firehole River for a snack. I seem to remember driving further along the river in the past, but the road is now a trail, probably a good idea, but the weather looked too threatening for a long walk.
Afterwards, we took a quick drive around the Firehole Canyon road, with its overlooks of rapids and waterfalls.
My memory of Gibbon Falls is of a really beautiful river swirling over black rocks, but hard to see and dangerous with traffic thundering by a few feet away, so I was very pleased to see that there’s a brand new, very safe pull-off, with plenty of places to see the falls from different angles.
I have no memory of prior visits to A
rtist’s Paint Pots, well worth seeing. Parking was tight and the paint pots and fumaroles were a few minutes’ walk away, which kept the crowds light. Further on, Roaring Mountain is an impressive scene of desolation but it no longer roars, just a soft hiss.
A storm hit us just as we reached the top of the hill above Mammoth. The combination of wind gusts and a poorly cambered and bumpy road was too much for me; I was worried that the camper might flip over, so I pulled off and we waited out the storm.
xIt was fine and sunny down at Mammoth Hot Springs. Although I‘ve been there many times, it always looks different. The water runoff from the springs colours sections of the massive travertine cliffs, but when the runoff finds a lower path, the previous section “dies” and fades to white and the colours spring up around the new path.
The bird tiptoeing through the boiling water is a killdeer, I think. It sings out “killdeer, killdeer”, which is bird language for “ouch”.
This bull snake was totally focused on some mission as it was racing forward in a straight line to the right, ignoring us and not bothering with any side to side 
movement.
Mammoth township is usually infested with elk, which are often lying about on the grass at the roadside, but despite a couple of laps around town we saw none; the town’s residents must be using elk repellant. We headed back towards camp, looking for moose or elk, but finding this massive grizzly causing the usual bear jam. We were too big to stop there in the road, so we had a long walk back. 
The grizzly was kind enough to wait around for us, unlike the two lady rangers who were controlling the crowds; they upped and left at the end of their shift, leaving the bear and tourists to mingle. Luckily, the bear was on a veggie diet, digging up bulbs and roots, and not interested in any munching on tourists.
I took the cross road from Norris to Canyon so that we could have another look at the Hayden Valley. This time the bison herd was all over the road, creating a massive traffic jam. A thunderstorm eventually came and cleared us all out, and I had a drive through rain, fog, and lightning arriving back at the campground after ten. The tendrils of fog were pretending to be bison and elk, so it was a nerve wracking drive, maybe the worst of the whole trip for me.