Location Taken: Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming
Time Taken: October 2012
There’s a wide variety of interesting volcanic features scattered through the immense Yellowstone park, and paring the list down to what would fit in one day was tough.
Some things were easy, the big features like Old Faithful. And I’ve always loved the pictures I’ve seen of the Grand Prismatic Spring, so that made the list. And then, while looking over the map we got at the front gate, I spotted a little dot with the words “Artist’s Paintpots” written after it.
Since I’m an artist, well, that got on the list immediately.
It’s an interesting place, tucked into the hills right at the edge of the caldera. It’s a bit of a walk to get there, but as you come out of the pine forest and see the steam rising from dozens of bubbling pots of mud scattered across the face of a hill.
It’s called “Artist’s Paintpots” because the colors of mud and water some of them produce would belong in any artist’s set of paints. I have another photo that shows this brilliantly. But a lot of them are a beautiful off-white, or surrounded by plants to the extent that you can only see steam coming out of the ground.
And oh, was there steam! Great billowing clouds of it! In the cold air of late October, every hint of heat in the air turned to steam. It made it tough to see a lot of the features, but it was beautiful in its own right.
And the heat turned the land around it into a colorful display as well. With the first frost well in the past, the grass had turned dry and brown in most parts of the park. But the steam keeps the ground temperature at Artist’s Paintpots above freezing for much longer, and swaths of green grass littered the hill. And even the brown grass had far more variation, as different plant types could survive the steam and heat better than others. The Paintpots were obscuring themselves, but brought color to the world in a different way.
