On 4th of July we went to Mammoth Springs. In this area there was a trail called Beaver Ponds where supposedly you can see beavers [koprad], elk [hirved], moose [põdrad] and lots of waterfowl. As we drove we got a good dose of rain but when we reached the Mammoth Springs the sun was peeking out again.
<-- This old Ford was parked on the campground where we stayed.
We decided that we would look at the geysers there after we hiked the ~5 mile trail. The weather was nice and we just wandered along the trail going really slow. Despite our slow speed we were huffing and puffing really soon because the trail climbed up a hill. We tried to be really quiet in case there were any animals.
All these pictures of forest and alpine meadows are taken on the trail. The meadows are really beautiful because there are so many flowers that it is almost amazing. I took many close-up photos of the flowers with the non-digital camera. The red flowers on the left are Indian paintbrushes.
Pictures below show the beaver ponds. Despite us being really quiet we only saw a couple of water birds and even those were so far away that we couldn´t identify them.
The images below show the Yellowstone they don´t show you in the books and postcards - a little touristy village of Mammoth Springs.
We were quite tired after the hike, it had taken us about three hours to walk the trail. We decided that we would not go to look at the geysers in the upper geyser basin that you had to walk to but we did go and drive through the lower basin. This big hot spring was the most impressive one - it had many thermophiles living on it and it was really colorful.
The Mammoth Springs area is the only geyser basin in Yellowstone that keeps changing almost daily. There were some areas where in the previous year had been big fancy spurting geysers. Now they were dried up and the ground was white with limestone (the white stone surrounding most geysers is geyserite but in the Mammoth Springs it was limestone).
When we drove back towards our camp it started snowing! Neither of us had ever seen snow in July. In a way it was kind of special to have snow on 4th of July.
The hot springs and streams by the road were steaming and it looked rather mystical. You could almost expect a troll to peek out from the bushes.
At night when we were in bed David heard some fireworks go off in the distance. I just slept..
