Personal Travel // Landscapes, Colors, & Textures of Yellowstone National Park

(This is part 1 of a 3-part series, be sure to check out part 2, featuring Yellowstone wildlife, and part 3 from Grand Teton National Park!)

Yellowstone National Park, our first national park, is a marvelous landscape of mountain ranges, lush forests of lodgepole and whitebark pine, valleys of sagebrush, winding rivers, geothermal features in a spectrum of colors and sizes, and of course, an array of wildlife. Part of Yellowstone National Park lies atop the Yellowstone Caldera, with the grounds acting essentially as a cap to a massive reservoir of molten lava. Potential death and destruction aside, the molten lava is responsible for providing the energy to the various geothermal features found throughout the park, from the far northwest Mammoth Hot Springs to the most famous geyser and thermal feature of them all, Old Faithful. In addition to the explosive eruptions, the hot springs create mineral deposits and allows thermophilic bacteria to thrive resulting in an array of colors and textures throughout the lands of the park.

Since the area is so diverse, I decided to break up the trip into two separate blog posts to appreciate the unique features of the park. In this first part of a two (maybe 3?) part series, you'll see the colors and textures of the vast expanses, deep canyons, rushing waterfalls, big skies, autumn leaves, thermophilic bacteria, travertine terraces, and geyser basins, of Yellowstone National Park.