The next morning we do a day-long ski into the west of the Hayden Valley, overlooked by my house. My guests are headed by an old friend from Montana, down in the Yellowstone River valley outside the park, where I pastured my horses over winter for many years. It was on his place that my beloved horse Ishiwah was killed.

Our first stop is the Crater Hills geyser area. Ron brought three high school senior girls with him… his daughter, a French exchange student staying with them for the school year, and a best friend of them both.

The geyser area is spotted with many hot springs and mud pots. The most interesting is a wonderful and beautiful geyser that is in almost perpetual eruption. We watch it cycle for the better part of an hour. The unexpected (to them) high energy burst that follows the geysers’ brief period of quiescence startled alarm calls out of the girls.

Warm humid air continually rises out of the soil throughout the geyser area. When it contacts the cold air it freezes in a hexagonal plate of frost at the surface of the soil. As more humid air rises below the plate another plate of frost freezes. In time long columns of frost, like strands of glass grow up out of the ground.

As the frost grows up out of the ground it lifts grains of soil and sand up with it. The white fluffy frost on top of the columnar frost accumulates overnight while the geyser basin is submerged in thick mist. I have seen clumps of columnar frost three feet tall and in that case the clump was colored red by the deposits of iron oxide it had grown through and carried up into the air with itself.

The floor of the basin is spotted with small crystalline flowers of pure sulfur that grow around very hot vents.

In one of the many runoff channels from the Crater Hills Geyser there blooms a small colorful pool that has been here in one form or another ever since I have lived here.

Color, any color, in the largely monochromatic snowscape of the long winter seems especially vivid. Here, ancient earth elements color this pool: iron oxide or ochre, that anciently and universally sacred blood of the mother earth and sulfur that wonderful elemental stink of the underworld mingle for a pleasing spectrum of colors. The green of algae, thriving in the tepid water, fringe the pool.

The thermal area manifests a variety of geothermal features. This mud pool consists of fine clays created by the reduction of rhyolite lava rock by heated sulfurous acid to its’ primary components.

Some areas of the basin, when ambient air temperature is above 0 degrees F., are very muddy so mud clogs the attachment hardware on the soles of our ski boots. Then the mud freezes to a stubborn concrete. Here we thaw the concrete over small steam vents, so we can dig it out in order to be able to remount our skis.