I could have spent the whole Yellowstone trip photographing wildflowers. I didn't, but I still captured a few. This one is a Penstemon, I believe Wasatch penstemon, specifically.




Clearly a lupine--maybe dwarf lupine?


We saw a bright red flower while driving and resolved to try to find it to photograph it, but didn't see it again for days. We finally passed a patch of them, parked as close as we could, and walked back a while on a dangerous blind corner to find the flowers. They turned out to be Indian paintbrush, the state flower of Wyoming.


There are three species of paintbrush (genus Castilleja) found in the park (from what I can tell). This one is giant red paintbrush, which hybridizes with alpine paintbrush, which I think by dad is surrounded by in the previous picture. Note to readers who are my brother: the thing that mom called Indian paintbrush is usually known as orange hawkweed.


This pretty hole in the ground is ringed with the western version of what naturalists like to call d.y.c. (Damned yellow composites--yellow flowers in the family of dandelion and sunflower that are really hard to identify to species.)


What looks like a frosty landscape is actually a midsummer scene scorched with steam and poisonous sulfurous gases.


A moist spring thick with bacterial mats is suitable habitat for many dragonflies.


And flowers like this western fringed gentian.


/>My father and I went back to the Midway Geyser Basin to try to find a way to see the Grand Prismatic Spring better.


This is from the opposite side of the Spring, looking toward the tourists on the boardwalk.


Behind us a hillside is thick with the paintbrushes we'd risked life and limb to find earlier in the day. I find a path up the rocky slope, and uncontrollably weep when I see the spring from above.