These photos bring me back to the time I was eight, and my dad took us on a long and taxing road trip to Yellowstone National Park. At eight, the last thing I wanted to do was sit in a car for 10 hours a day. And when we arrived, everything in sight looked like dead space. Everything still looks like dead space. But that was the beauty of it. Dead, expansive, and dull land, with secret pockets of water. Sometimes air or water would spew out, straight up in the air. The contrast between the stillness of the land with the energy escaping from below was worth the long car ride.

But it wasn't just the contrast of the geysers that made them so beautiful, it was the oddity of their existence. Occurrences happen in nature that we could never dream up. That's why synthetic chemists look to plants for answers to solve problems. Because plants synthesize compounds that man could never think to make. And that's why, whether ingrained from road trips like these, or growing up in a town in California that was hidden in the canyons, I often fall back to nature for inspiration. It exists, in its oddities and color and contrast.

photos via allthemountains.