Yellowstone Park: Day Two

Our morning (July 13th) started out with a drive around Yellowstone Lake on our way to visit Old Faithful. It was a beautiful drive. We ended up in the Upper Geyser Basin around lunch time so we found ourselves a bench, sat down, and ate our packed lunch. It was still over an hour until the next eruption of Old Faithful was predicted, but already the benches were filling up.

The picture below shows as I look left a few minutes before the eruption. It is said that sometimes up to 8000 people gather to watch the famous geyser do it's thing. On an average, around 2000 spectators show up for each eruption...
Old Faithful didn't disappoint...
Eruptions can shoot 3,700 to 8,400 gallons of boiling water to a height of 106 to 185 feet lasting from 1.5 to 5 minutes. The average height of an eruption is 145 feet. The highest recorded eruption was 185 feet high. Intervals between eruptions can range from 45 to 125 minutes, averaging 66.5 minutes in 1939, slowly increasing to an average of 90 minutes apart today.*

We watched the eruption 4 times that day. While walking on the boardwalk behind Old Faithful, we watched the second eruption. Here is a video I took of it...

Too many pools, geysers and mud pots to share all of them on here, but here is a neat heart-shaped one that the girls wanted me to take a picture of. The really blue look in the water means the water is REALLY hot...

As we were enjoying our walk on the board walk viewing all the other geo-thermal features, a storm started brewing. You can see it building in the picture below...

It wasn't long after that picture that the rain and then the hail started pelting us. We started to run back to the lodge as fast as we could go. By the time we got back to the covered veranda, the camera and all of our faces, including Lita's, were dripping wet. She was still smiling though. :)

Handfuls of hail...

Waiting out the storm...

After the storm we walked around and saw some more geysers, visited the new museum, watched the eruption again, saw a film about geysers, ate supper and watched the eruption one more time.

Then we left and headed back to camp the long way, through the Firehole River valley. We just couldn't get enough of the evening beauty and perfect lighting. The kids were very patient with us as we played photographer...

(above picture by Randy)

(above picture by Randy)


(above picture by Randy)

(above picture by Randy)

Somewhere along the way we picked up a bicyclist. He had promised his wife he wouldn't ride after dark and as the darkness fell he still had a bit of a ride ahead of him. Turns out he was from Pennsylvania and he had ridden his bike most of the way from Washington D.C. and was headed to Astoria, OR. He wrote in his journal about his ride in the back of our pick-up to Canyon Village. You can read about it here (about halfway down the page).

Needless to say, we got back to camp quite late. We were glad to be back "home" to our own bed's for the night!

And, another day to follow,
Alison

*this information comes from Wikopedia