Sunday, June 17, 2007

Day 13: Yellowstone Day 2

All right, the day I've been waiting for; we're going to the geysers, geysers, geysers. I can't help it, I think geysers are cool.

Today we enter by the west entrance again, the skies are clear and the weather is that nice shorts or pants weather. No rain expected, and it's pleasant out. The Moab weather has caught up with us. Meanwhile, it's over a hundred in Moab, and the temperatures in Salt Lake City are climbing to the century mark as well.

Today, instead of head north-east, we'll head south to the main attraction, Old Faithful. A quick stop by the ranger station in Madison shows us the times that the other geysers may go off. I'd never realized how many geysers were in the park. Apparently, two-thirds of the world's known geysers are here.

Some geysers are predictable -- if you call a 2 hour window predictable. But Old Faithful keeps to a plus-or-minus 10 minute schedule every 65 or 92 minutes. There's a walkway starting at Old Faithful and its geyser-ettes (there's a brood of them just to the north) that heads roughly north-west. At the northern most end of the trail is the Riverside geyser, and it's the next one that is to go off. (I should mention that most of the others are a once-a-day thing, unlike Old Faithful.)

So we start out from Madison by car to the Old Faithful visitor center, and before we got there we started seeing plumes of steam. At first, I thought we'd come across some of the geysers near Old Faithful. Instead, we were seeing the Fountain Paint Pot area. More specifically, we are seeing the plumes of steam from the Fountain Geyser and the Clepsydra Geyser. Corey and Becky are in the right-hand picture somewhere. The water from the geyser has an interesting quality. It's crystal clear and is mixed in with pure white steam. The droplets we can see seem to scintillate a bit. It might have something to do with the fact that the water is boiling.

The area also contains other interesting features like the Silex Spring (beautiful blue) and the Fountain Paint Pots. Again, the mud paint pots don't transfer to still pictures well, so I'll include the information sign.

The hotter the pool, the more steam we see from them, and the steam has a sulfurous smell. Some pools have a very strong smell others hardly have an odor at all. And the steam is warm and humid -- on a cool day wearing shorts, the warmth is welcome, but when the cold comes back in fits and starts, it is startling!

Then we passed up the Middle Basin; we are on a schedule, now.

We get the Old Faithful visitor center, but Riverside Geyser is the next to go off, and should be going in about 20 minutes, so we skip OF and head along the path. We should be able to do 1/2 mile in 20 minutes, right? Well, to make a long story short, no. They make them miles longer in this part of the country, apparently. However, do not be saddened dear reader, because even though we hit none of the predicted geysers except Old Faithful, it turns out there are plenty of other non-predictable geysers -- some of which are continuously venting -- as well as hot springs, and fumaroles.

The most fun one is the Sawmill Geyser at the bridge over the Firehole river. It is going almost continuously, the the kids (and me, and Kelley) can stand on the boardwalk and have the water splashing on us. By the time it gets to us, it's not very warm. But the kids think it's great fun (middle right of right-hand picture).

Castle geyser (left) is impressive, but it just steams gloweringly if that's possible. No fun there. The Grotto geyser (right) is more fun, because it's constantly spurting. I've two pictures to give it some perspective, 'front' and 'side'.

Here we are taking a break to talk to Catherine and Ruth. Hi guys!

Walk, walk, walk. We reach Great Fountain, it's done and gone too. Beauty and Chromatic pools are pretty cool. Have to stop here at Beauty pool. By the way, the color tells a lot about the temperature. The blue or clear ones are the hottest, just short of 199 (F). Wait you say, isn't it 212? Nope, not at 6,000+ feet above sea level.

And Riverside? Well, you already know the story. But what is really wild is all the fumaroles and small geysers along the river. Yes indeedy, the river is warmer past this point. (As we find out on day 3!)

Well, Riverside may be a bust, but the Morning Glory pool, so named because of its shape is remarkably like the flower. The colors really are this bright, and it's fairly deep. Ok, end of the trail, time to head back and capture Old Faithful ... however the length of those half-miles is almost our undoing again. But we make it!

[This day will be continued when we reach our next destination. I'm afraid this connection is just too sloooooow to upload the pictures. And it's getting too late. But tomorrow is another day!]

Back to Old Faithful. On the way we see Anemone Geyser that slowly fills, erupts to about 3 feet, and then the water drains back in and disappears. Then the process is repeated. By the time we reached Old Faithful, Kelley and Scot are huffing and puffing a bit. That air is thinner here.

But we finally get back to our starting point. There's a walkway that goes almost all the way around the geyser. We were going to watch the geyser from the east until we realized that the steam and plume would be drifting straight toward us; we relocated to the south with the rest of the crowds.

It looks like we needn't have hurried, the geyser is going to take all of its +/- 10 minutes. Plus, the geyser 'burps' several times, sending water up a few feet before quieting again. Folks around us start wondering aloud if this is going to be the first time the geyser fails. But of course, a few minutes later, it starts in earnest. Interestingly, the expected roar is a loud hissing as the plume reaches somewhere around 80 feet(?). Corey timed it at 4 minutes 28 seconds 15 milliseconds. Very cool. (Unfortunately, there's very little around it to give the plume perspective in the pictures.)

After lunch, we get to see it again while looking for ice cream. This time, though, the kids have found somebody with 2 dogs to pet, and they hardly look up. Tsk tsk, blase already :-) We walk over to the Inn.

The Yellowstone Inn is supposedly the largest log building, and it is very impressive. Three floors of logs, and it is very pretty. It is also quite a tourist destination apparently. It's very busy even this early in the season. We could watch Old Faithful from the second-floor balcony, but it is getting late and the trip back is long (30 miles at 45mph or less) -- time to head out.

Yesterday we at at Mooseberies, a little ice cream and hot dog hole-in-the-wall. Very friendlly and good food. Tonight? Everybody is bushed from walking, so Scot walked out and got a 'bowl' of soup. It was 'ok'. [Turns out, we never find a good restaurant in West Yellowstone ... ah well, this is a constant problem on our trip, But we do hit good restaurants elsewhere. -ed]

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

hi guys!!

i don't think i was there when you called i was...somewhere?

is the geyser the green and yellow thing? seriously?

when it said middle basin i thought it said middle brain (i just woke up people! 10:15!) so yeah.

me and liz got into a weirded out discussion on where yellowstone was, in the sense that we are both nowhere near functioning yet.
me: anyone know where yellowstone is?
liz: ummmm, nebraska?
me: no i think it's in washington?
dad:*he knows where it is and is not saying anything*.......
me:..french toast anyone?

so now you're apparently in montana. liz says it's very cold there because it's closer to canada, and that they live in igloos too. i had to remind her that it's summer.

anyway have fun! come home soon!