Yellowstone National Park

John Muir once said, “A thousand Yellowstone wonders are calling, ‘Look up and down and round about you!’”

I honestly cannot remember a time in my life when Yellowstone was unknown to me. My brother and I had a book that talked about wonderful sights in the United States, and though our family never afforded the time to visit most of them, we’d pored over pictures of, and learned child-friendly facts about, the Grand Canyon, the Giant Redwoods, the headwaters of the mighty Mississippi, so much more … and Yellowstone. Also, we were big fans of the cartoon bear Yogi Bear, who lived in Jellystone Park, and even as kids we understood that “Jellystone” was a take-off on “Yellowstone.”

Though everything I’ve seen on this visit – the fulfillment of a lifelong dream – has been indescribably wonderful, today’s wonders just might have been the most wondrous of all. I took picture after picture, and although I’ve discarded a good number of shots that seemed interesting at the time but which now don’t really grab me, and discarded a fair number of shots that seemed virtually identical to another, I am left with 70 photos and find myself completely unable to choose from among them! So I’ve posted all 70 photos to Flickr. Click here for my Yellowstone album.

I’ll still post photos as part of this blog, of course! And although I’ll write about today’s adventures in more or less chronological order, I’m not going to do a whole lot of storytelling. I will share a couple of interesting (to me) facts, just in case you find yourself wondering about the same things that today’s sights caused me to wonder about.

Entering the park through the west gate (where Henry got yet another cookie from the rangers – he’s getting spoiled!) we followed the Madison River, turning south at Madison Junction. First stop of the day, Firehole Falls:

Sue wanted to try her hand at fly fishing on the Gibbon River, and although it was pretty windy to be successful, she nevertheless enjoyed herself. (And was able to console herself with the observation that other, more experienced, fly fishers weren’t having any success either.

On toward the one MUST SEE in Yellowstone: Old Faithful. Along the way, we noticed a sign for Ojo Caliente, and almost immediately on turning toward it, got ourselves caught in a little Bison Jam.

Took the short hike to Ojo Caliente (Spanish for “hot eye”) Spring and wondered whether the hot spring itself was thought to look like an eye, or whether it was so named because sulfuric acid being released into the air burned the eyes. I suppose you could make an argument either way.

We could see steam from the geyser basins, several miles away, so after our short wander, we got back into the car and headed toward Old Faithful. Our timing was near-perfect, as we didn’t have to wait long at all before seeing it erupt. And although supposedly Old Faithful is no longer quite as regular as the legendary predictability that earned it the “faithful” name, you couldn’t prove that by us, as it erupted pretty close to “on schedule.”

Crowds gather close to the projected eruption time, and watch hopefully as little blasts of steam grow in both height and duration. A huge cheer goes up when the blasts steady into a continuous high column of steam.

Here's the thing about Old Faithful: It doesn't erupt at regular intervals and never has. It isn't even Yellowstone's biggest geyser; that distinction belongs to Steamboat, which is actually not just Yellowstone's, but the world's, largest active geyser, with a plume that can top 300 feet. Trouble is, no one has ever been able to predict when Steamboat's gonna erupt. It can go months, even years, between eruptions.

Old Faithful, on the other hand, has been very predictable for many, many years. It goes anywhere from about an hour to two hours between eruptions, but naturalists have always been able to estimate the next eruption within about a 10 minute margin of error. I don't really know, and probably wouldn't even understand, all the criteria they use for predicting the time of the next eruption – for sure they look at the length of the prior interval between eruptions as well as the length of the most recent eruption – but they're spot-on about 90% of the time.

So. Not the biggest geyser and not the most regular geyser. But the biggest regular geyser. Predictable. Reliable. Faithful. 

  

After taking a quick self-tour of Old Faithful Inn, and wishing it could tell stories from its 100+ years of operation, we turned north toward Biscuit Basin, named for biscuit-like deposits that once lined the crater of one of the pools. An earthquake broke up the formations, though the name remains. I was amazed at the amount of color in the basin!

To see even more photos from Biscuit Basin, Click here for my Yellowstone album.

 And although we had grown accustomed to the signs, everywhere, reminding visitors that this is a “fragile thermal area,” this sign drives the point home even more graphically!

Enlarge the photo to see the hapless child getting its feet cooked -- or perhaps it's just about to get blown sky-high in the plume of a geyser. Either way, the message seems pretty clear, even to one who does not read English,  French, Spanish, German, or Chinese: Stay Off! 

Our next stop was Midway Basin, which I found even more fascinating.

 Midway’s most famous feature is the Grand Prismatic Spring which, although most dramatically viewed from the air, is spectacular even from ground level:

But the feature that most captured my imagination here was Excelsior Geyser Crater, also referred to as simply “Excelsior Geyser” or “Excelsior Spring,” technically a dormant, fountain-type geyser. Though no longer a geyser shooting 300 feet into the air, it is very active in subtle and unpredictable ways. Looking carefully at this photo, you can see a little bubbling, boiling action taking place (you can also see where some poor individual irretrievably lost their hat), and I invite you to look at the other dozen or so photos I took (Click here for my Yellowstone album.), to see what may have been going on at that precise moment. It is BUSY, pumping over 4,000 gallons of water into the Firehole River – PER MINUTE.

So maybe at this point you are wondering, as I was, what is the difference between a “spring” and a “geyser.” Both are fed by groundwater from rain and snow melt that seeps through cracks in the surface and collects in porous rock underground. And in both cases the water is heated by magma chambers of the supervolcano underneath Yellowstone, then sent back toward the surface by a network of subterranean “plumbing.” 

Here's where they differ: A hot spring allows this superheated water to circulate to the surface and move freely, constantly giving off steam and heat. The geyser, on the other hand, has an obstruction in its hydrothermal plumbing, just under the surface, that keeps the boiling water underground. Steam keeps pushing water upward toward the surface, which eventually creates a drop in pressure and, subsequently an eruption.

Either way, super-hot and super-dangerous water. Even the “pools,” though they look cool and inviting, are hot and very dangerous. 

I read an absolutely horrific account from just a couple of years ago, of a young man and his sister who had left the viewing area to hike into one of the basins, hoping to find a thermal pool for “hot potting” – the totally illegal practice of taking a soak in one of the pools. Somehow, as the young man reached down to check the temperature of a hot spring, he slipped. And somehow, he tumbled into the spring. And somehow, although (from one account) they were able to recover his body, "there was a significant amount of dissolving," according to one of the park rangers.

So. If you go to Yellowstone, my friends, STAY ON THE PATH. If you’re the type who thinks that rules are meant to be broken and you just have to be able to move about freely as it pleases you, Yellowstone is NOT the place for you.

But it sure is a happy-place for me!

On our way out, Sue tried fly-fishing one more time, this time on the Madison River.

And we’ve said goodbye (for now) to Yellowstone National Park. So much more than I could have even imagined! Hope one day in the not-too-distant future, I can come back. Tomorrow, we’re headed farther north into Montana, to Glacier.

More photos from the Forces of Nature Tour at Flickr.

Click here.