Mammoth Hot Springs - Yellowstone

Sky Watch Friday

An Amazing Occurrence
A hole in the clouds lets the Sun shine through.

We were in the northern part of Yellowstone, photographing the Terraces, on a severely cloudy day. The photo shoot was going OK and we were finding some things to photograph. (Note: Any day out photographing Nature is a great day. Sun – Night – Cloudy – Rain – etc). We were on top of the Terraces when suddenly the Sun found a hole or break in the clouds and voila - there was Mammoth Hot Springs bathed in sunlight below us. The mountains in the background were these indescribable shades of blue. The red barracks of old Ft. Yellowstone on the right just lit up. The sky can do some amazing things. Needless to say, Martha and I were rushing around photographing everything in sight. We drove down to the bottom of the Springs Area and photographed the Terraces. (We will do Yellowstone in a few weeks as part of the Alaska Sunday series).

Mammoth Hot Springs, Yellowstone

(Click on the photo for best viewing)

Here’s a Tip for Artists

If you are a landscape artist and especially if you use watercolors, buy every shade of blue from every manufacturer that is available to you. Each manufacturer has proprietary formulations for their pigments and final colors. You can’t take one blue and mix it with other colors to produce a certain blue without it becoming muddy in many cases. Sky colors tend to be pure. Look at the above photo and see how many shades of blue (and different blues) that you can see. Notice the midrange range of hills, which are really browns, should be painted with a mix of blues and ochers. If you do landscapes with receding mountain ranges, the same is true. If you are having trouble with desert landscapes, try this trick with yellow ocher also.

In the northwest corner of the park there is a large hot spring complex near Fort Yellowstone called Mammoth Hot Springs. Mammoth is a large hill of travertine that has been created over thousands of years as hot water from the spring cooled and deposited calcium carbonate (over 2 tons of calcium carbonate flows into Mammoth each day in a solution). Although these springs lie outside the caldera boundary, their energy has been attributed to the same magmatic system that fuels other Yellowstone geothermal areas.

The hot water that feeds Mammoth comes from Norris Geyser Basin after traveling underground via a fault line that runs through limestone and roughly with the Norris to Mammoth road (the limestone is the source of the calcium carbonate). Shallow circulation along this corridor allows Norris' super-heated water to cool somewhat before surfacing at Mammoth, generally at about 170° F (~77° C). Algae living in the warm pools have tinted those travertine shades of brown, orange, red and green.

Thermal activity here is extensive both over time and distance. Terrace Mountain at Mammoth Hot Springs is the largest known carbonate-depositing spring in the world. The most famous feature at the springs is the Minerva Terrace, a series of travertine terraces. The terraces have been deposited by the spring over many years, but due to recent minor earthquake activity, the spring vent has shifted, rendering the terraces dry.

The Mammoth Terraces extend all the way from the hillside, across the Parade Ground, and down to Boiling River. The Mammoth Hotel, as well as all of Fort Yellowstone, is built upon an old terrace formation known as Hotel Terrace. There was some concern when construction began in 1891 on the Fort site that the hollow ground would not support the weight of the buildings. Several large sink holes (fenced off) can be seen out on the Parade Ground. This area has been thermally active for several thousand years.

The Mammoth area exhibits much evidence of glacial activity from the Pinedale Glaciation. The summit of Terrace Mountain is covered with glacial till, thereby dating the travertine formation there to earlier than the end of the Pinedale Glaciation. Several thermal kames, including Capitol Hill and Dude Hill, are major features of the Mammoth Village area. Ice-marginal stream beds are in evidence in the small, narrow valleys where Floating Island Lake and Phantom Lake are found. In Gardner Canyon, one can see the old, sorted gravel bed of the Gardner River covered by unsorted glacial till.

I hope you have enjoyed Mammoth Hot Springs and found some use of the Artist’s Tip. Leave a comment if you have enjoyed the post today.

To participate in Sky Watch Friday visit Wiggers World.

Troy and Martha