More Yellowstone in a Day

Short Version:
We're still in Yellowstone National Park

Long Version:
A sprawling complex has grown up around the Old Faithful geyser area, with accommodation buildings, stores, and a sizeable visitor centre. We arrived pretty much bang on the start of the next eruption window*, and hotfooted it outside to see some steaming action. After a short delay, the steaming hole started to vent larger and more vehement blasts, and soon it was blowing a spout of superheated water and steam high into the air. The coolness of the surrounding air meant that there was extra steaming going on, which made it difficult to see details of the spouting water, but the Amerikans who were sharing the carefully-safetyised viewing environment seemed satisfied. I guess for them the eruption ticked a national cultural imperative off the list, and once it subsided the vast majority waddled back to their oversized vehicles and set off down the highway in air-conditioned comfort.

We got on our bikes.

The chill in the air meant that Lovely Wife was riding with one hand on the bars and the other tucked into a pocket for warmth, swapping whenever the exposed hand became too painfully chilled. We stopped at a number of geothermal points of interest, including several brightly-colored pools and some bizarrely-shaped geyser spouts. Apparently many of the pools were once even more brightly-colored than they are now, but have been cooled and dulled by the trash people have thrown into them, part-blocking the hot water feed from the underground. Likewise some of the geysers, which have lost power or stopped altogether. Still, there were a lot still active for us to look at: Sporadic Geyser, with its many bubbling children; Sawmill and Mortar Geysers, the noisiest of all the geysers; the small, quiet pools that were Economic and Spa Geysers; and the peaceful, relaxing setting of the aptly named Riverside Geyser, where we sat in the sun for quite a while before being startled by the beginning of what was to prove to be the most spectacular of the eruptions we witnessed. The breeze along the river pulled some of the steam aside, exposing the 75ft column of superheated water to view, and the spectacle continued for long enough that it was still going when we set off back to the Reaper, biking along the "No Bikes Allowed" boardwalk which passed the quiescent Giant Geyser (last eruption: January 2010; next eruption: no-one knows) and culminated at the spectacularly ugly towering vent of Castle Geyser.

The Old Faithful Area is the best-known geo-thermal hotspot in the park, but is by no means the only one. On our way north we stopped at several more, taking in some incredible sights:
- Spasm Geyser and the brilliantly-colored Silex Pool
- The young and grumpy Red Spouter, which formed in 1959 and is a hot spring in the Spring, a bubbling mud pool in the Summer, and, as we saw it, a gas fumarole in the Fall**.
- The Grand Prismatic Spring was largely obscured by steam, but had many buffalo hoofprints wandering around it and looked really pretty in the photographs on the signage
- Variously-colored bubbling mud pools at the Artist's Paintpots (by this stage of the day it was so sunny and hot that one of us was shirtless. Can you guess which one of us it was? Clue: The reaction from other park-goers was not applause or gleeful ogling)
- The impossible-to-predict Constant Geyser, which erupted twice as we watched, then refused to so much as burp for anyone else.

The road had been following the Firehole River, which is very pretty and is, apparently, well-stocked with trout, despite (or possibly because of) the thousands and thousands of litres of super-heated water that are dumped into it every minute by the various spouts and geysers and springs. We'd seen many more buffalo since the first herd, as well as a stoat/weasel creature with a black-tipped tail, several deer, and two coyotes whose behaviour couldn't have been more different; the first was standing, serious and silent and still as a (non-volcanically-active) stone near a tree in a field; the other was frolicking and leaping about in a riverside meadow - we think it may have been chasing small critters in the long grass. Another of the day's critter highlights came to us from a small station-wagon; nine puppies and their mother, in transit from the Oregon coast to St Louis, Missouri. That's a LONG way. Between playing with the tiny dogs and protecting our delicious eggy burritos from the cheeky grey jays, lunch was rather eventful, although it was still incredibly relaxing to be sitting in the sun, away from the conveyor-belt sight-seeing of the park road.








* = Most of the geysers co-operate with human endeavor to the extent that they erupt on a reasonably predicatable schedule. There are exceptions; some follow no discernible pattern whatsoever. Those which do adhere to schedule are flagged by Park Rangers as being expected to erupt within a certain window, the duration of which varies from minutes to hours to days.

** = This was the first geothermal entity that really smelled like Rotorua. We got a wee bit nostalgic. My notes say "Satan's Anus"