After watching Old Faithful go off, we decided to take a turn around the Upper Geyser Basin that surrounds the Inn area. This is an extensive plain filled with geysers, hot pools, frothing holes, and lots of startling color in an otherwise white landscape. There are miles of boardwalks that take you on a tour of the various features. Signs everywhere warn that you should never venture off the walks, as the crusty ground, which looks solid enough, could be thin and you would sink through into boiling liquids. Even pools that look serene and coolly blue are at the simmer level. We heard a ranger talk about a young 12-year-old boy (back in the 1920’s) who “didn’t believe the water was all that hot” (allegedly his very words) and proceeded to jump into one of the pools. Lobster, anyone? I thought it might be an apocryphal story, but later saw some repros of old newspaper stories about it. Yikes. As you can see, the colors of these holes are wildly varied:
I bet the kid jumped in the nice, cool, blue one. While we were out on the boards, we heard an announcement that the Beehive Geyser was about to go off, and boy did it. Twice as high as O.F., its eruption lasted over 5 minutes, with the Inn as a backdrop.
We got lucky with this one, as its time between blowoffs is 11 to 14 hours. Time your visit wrong, and you’d never see it. Continuing on the boardwalk, we came to this gorgeous pool that looked like a berserk Morning Glory.
There were some pretty neat fumaroles, as well. These were dotted all over the landscape, steaming constantly.
A ranger walked by, letting everyone know that another long-period geyser was giving signs of erupting, called Grand Geyser, which goes off every 10-12 hours. Wow, we really hit the synchronicity jackpot today. We beetled off that way and took up station next to an elderly woman holding a clipboard and stopwatch. She turned out to be a volunteer recorder of the eruptions, and proved a font of knowledge about all things geysers. She could read the waxing and waning signs and tell us whether or not an eruption would take place. Good thing she was there, or we would have given up and left. It was over an hour of false alarms before she said, “Yup, it’ll go this time,” and was right. It started slow, then increased steadily before becoming a massive fountain. This one is not very high, but it puts out huge volumes of water in its column.
When it died down, we turned to go, but the woman said to wait a sec, as it often had a second act. Sure enough, a few minutes later and it gave out with a second burst. This, she called a “double,” and duly recorded it in her log. Then she said she was late for her dinner and strode away. That sounded good to us, so we rode the scooter back to our mobile cabin site and, well, toasted our lucky day.
Ah, but there’s good luck and bad. It needs balance, and the next day it was my turn. [ CLIFFHANGER ]
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