West Thumb Geyser Basin is located on Southwest corner of Yellowstone National Park. It is right by the "thumb" of Yellowstone Lake. There are several thermal features in this area and many are quite interesting because some thermal features are simply submerged under the Yellowstone Lake water. There are also board walks that go around the entire West Thumb Geyser Basin for people to explore the area.
We got to West Thumb Geyser Basin around 9AM in the morning. Luckily there were still plenty of parking spaces available. We were thinking that West Thumb Geyser Basin is probably not as popular as other sceneries in the park.
The board walk trail head started right at the parking lot. We went through a small portion of board walk that went through the forest then it led directly to the lake side where they geyser basin was. The geyser basin was quite large and we could also see Yellowstone Lake on the far side.
Many of the geyser features were hot spring pools with bubbles and spring coming out of it. The color of the hot springs weren't exactly that spectacular. Since the board walk was a loop, we first walked towards left to head to the lake shore board walk. As we approached towards the lake shore, we came to the Black Pool. Although it was named as Black Pool, it actually had clear blue color. It was quite pretty and most people stayed here to take lot of photos.
As we walked along the lake shore, we also saw many thermal features beneath the water. There were geyser holes submerged not far under the water and sometimes resurface above the water depending on the wave. There were also geysers holes that had heart shape.
When we got back to the parking lot after 45 minutes, the parking lot was already full! We were glad that we came here a bit earlier to avoid the crowd. Overall it was interesting to see the geysers that were by the lake to see how these are different from others.
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