ok. i have the life and times of this yellowstone park bull elk.
ok, not really, but there are a crapload of pictures of it.
we stopped when we noticed it feeding on the opposite side of the river.
but then it starts heading north.
normally there wouldn't be a problem, but in this instance, there was
a steamy river of geyser lying in its path.
he reached as far as he wanted to go, exclaiming, "FUCK".
undaunted, he turned back and inched his way down with careful steps, apprehensively down to the riverbank and eventually (did i mention eventually?) made its way down to the goddamned river.

could i stretch that sentence out any longer?

anyway. all the onlookers thought we were going to witness this guy washing down all that herbage he'd been eating, but on the contrary, he came down that steep bank to ford the river.
this kind of put everyone on edge. before we had a whole river as a buffer between us, but now the bull elk is tredging through our buffer zone to come greet us.

enter: dumbass.
this guy wanted his closeup, to which the bull elk responded by rearing down its horns and forcing the guy to hide behind that dead stump that you can see between them now.
this is how close my dumbass got to him.

after he had our fill of the bull elk, it was on to more geyserness.
you don't quite get the perspective on "film" here, but this is a very subtle waterfall. in the back there is the boardwalk, and the steam coming from the geyser itself. the water trickles down under the boardwalk and eventually ends up in that river the elk crossed. actually that steam you saw in some of those pictures was from this geyser. the geyser itself was too steamy to photo. that and by this time i thought i had seen it all when i comes to geysers.
but i was wrong.
this next lot of geysers is known as the painter's cauldera. can you guess why?
whatever substance that is in there, my guess is calcium carbonate (?) makes the liquid in this geyser very viscous. in the winter, instead of bubbling like it is in the summer, on the surface there forms a film, like on soup or in a paint can that solidifies in bubble form or whatever designs are created from stuff pooping up from beneath.
there were some sideshoot geysers adjacent to this big cauldera that was less thick, but still colored and highly noisy from the water evaporating off the rocks. it almost sounded like traffic, oddly enough.

on the other side of this little knoll that held the oddity, was plains that spelled out the extent of the geysers.
the last hoorah in what is probably in the middle of a giant cauldera bounded by the hills seen in the background.
the steam from this geyser was actually soothing and lacking that potent sulfuric smell. it was also spurting water at least 15 feet in the air the whole time my dad and i were there, and its bubbling waters would splash on us and not burn. i guess the water splashed was small enough to cool before it reached our skin.

well, i leave you here for tonight. the voyage is about to come to an end. i think i quoted that i'd be done in this round, but i will most definitely be done the next time i bother to sit down and do this.
. . . maybe the next time i don't want to do personal statements.