I started out today visiting Old Faithful. The geyser is well known because of its consistency. It erupts every 40 to 126 minutes for a few minutes. While it doesn’t spew as high as Grand Geyser, the world’s tallest predictable geyser, it still puts on a good show. Old Faithful is located in Upper Geyser Basin along with 125 other active geysers. In fact, Yellowstone is home to 200 of the 500 active geysers found in the world!
While waiting on Old Faithful to work its magic, I wandered along the boardwalk past a variety of springs, pools, and geysers including Chromatic Pool, which I found to be the one of the prettiest as I breathed the rotten egg smell of sulphur. Chromatic Pool’s colors are created by microscopic lifeforms. Incredibly, these organisms can survive conditions that would be lethal to most other living creatures, including humans.
From the Upper Geyser Basin we headed north to the Midway Geyser Basin. Here, Excelsior Crater, which last erupted in 1985, now shoots its scalding fluids into the Yellowstone River. Next to it is Grand Prismatic Spring, Yellowstone’s largest hot spring. From afar, the steam radiating from the spring glowed a shade of blue. Up close, the brilliant blue spring more than 200 feet in diameter was ringed in bands of yellow, green, and orange algae. The water, which is heated by magma beneath the surface and seeps to the surface through fissures, has a temperature of 160 degrees. This spring pours 500 gallons of hot water each minute into the Firehole River.
After visiting the Midway Geyser, we took a one-way, three mile loop through the Lower Geyser Basin and then another two mile drive through Firehole Canyon along Firehole River. The canyon walls tower 800 feet above the river that got its name from naturally occurring Jacuzzi blasts below the surface that keep the river from freezing in the cold Wyoming winter.
Further north we found Obsidian Cliff, a 180,000 year old lava flow. The lava flow in this location cooled at a rare, high-speed which makes it look different from other formations in the park.
My final stop before exiting the north entrance of the park was at the Mammoth Hot Springs Terraces. The terraces are formed from “calcium carbonate that has been leached from limestone beneath the earth’s surface and deposited above as a white travertine.” The terraces grow, some as much as eight inches a year!
We exited the north entrance into Montana heading north through Charlie Russell Country. We quickly ran into an intense thunder storm. I had planned on making one stop at Gallatin Petrified Forest, but I didn’t see any signs for the specific location and opted out of a wild goose chase in a rainstorm. We ended the night at the Wal-Mart in Bozeman with countless other campers! ETB
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