Going slightly out of order with this one, just to break up two similar images. We’re just going to see how incorrectly I’m interpreting this one, but I see this as a drainage area for geysers and/or hot springs, and the yellow-tan color denotes the most recent still-damp runoff. As mentioned earlier, the mineral content in the water is off the scale, and much of the detail and shaping of the ‘rocks’ is due to deposits from the water itself, the same kind of thing that creates stalactites and stalagmites in caves. This would make those surfaces chalky and not terribly resilient, able to be shattered with a hammer, like the water-softening unit that gave up about a year after installation in my old house in central New York (we just had well water, but it was notoriously ‘hard’ and even left scale within the toilet bowl.)
But I’m probably going to be corrected by Jim – not about our water in central NY, since he wasn’t there, but about this scene from Yellowstone since he was. Confused yet?