Yellowstone National Park

So this isn't very recent, but over the summer Doug and I went to Yellowstone National Park (some friends of ours gave us a partially used pass, so we didn't have to pay to go) It was really fun. I had never been there before. Doug had been there once before with his family. We didn't go very far into the park. It was way crowded there the day we went. Traffic was terrible; there were people stopping in the middle of the road, getting out of their cars to take pictures of animals on the side of the road. Sometimes it was a cool animal like a bear, but other times it was just like a racoon or something. It was pretty lame. So we were pretty tired by the time we actually got out of the car. We didn't stay very long at all, but we saw the melting mud pots and we walked around all the small geysers and then finished up by seeing Old Faithful. I was surprised by just how terrible geysers smell. It's smelled like dirt and bad eggs mixed together and boiled at 1000 degrees farenheit.
This is a picture of what I'm not sure. I'm about 40% sure it's a geyser but the 60% thinks it's just a hot spring. I'll leave it up to you to decide for yourself what it actually is.
That little sign in the corner of the picture says "chinese spring," why it's chinese? I have no idea. But I loved how all throughout yellowstone there were these huge designs in the sand and in the rocks that were gorgeous colors. It was just from the hot flowing water and the fungus growing on top of it. It smelled terrible, but it looked great. There were all sorts of colors: red, green, dark blue, yellow, pink, orange. It was way pretty.
Doug and his camera. I have no idea what he was taking a picture of, but I thought I would put this one up on the blog, because when I think of Yellowstone I think of this sight right here. Doug + Camera.
I'm probably the biggest nerd ever, but I took this picture because to me it looks like the U.S. and how great is that? The first U.S. National Park has a hot spring in the shape of the United States. What a patriotic body of water! (if you can't see the U.S., it also looks like a big whale...)
Here's Old Faithful. It took FOREVER for it to finally shoot up. For about 20 minutes we watched it trail out of the hole like so. (the above picture) It was way boring.
Finally the smoke started to trail upward and it would tease us for another 10-15 minutes. It was more promising than the horizontal smoke though, that's for sure! Finally it shot up and it was HUGE. It didn't shoot straight up like this picture makes you think. It worked it's way up that high like a pot of boiling water. It started out small and then gradually got taller and taller. It was pretty fun to watch. It was very very hot water too. They make everyone stand pretty far away from the geyser, but even standing several yards away you can still feel the heat. (It was already a hot day, so the geyser wasn't helping much) Oh yeah, and it was stinky.