Old Faithful
(posted from Wall, SD on July 25)
Yellowstone is a big park. Like…much bigger than the park
you go to so you can play Frisbee with your kids. It’s big like Texas-fairy
tale big. It’s big like cosmic big. It’s
just big. So you can’t see all the cool
or awesome things easily. It’s takes some planning.
We decided to see Old Faithful – the geyser that blows it’s
top on a sort-of predictable schedule – this morning. It would take about 45
minutes to get to Old Faithful, not counting any possible “bear-jams” – traffic
jams caused by rubber neckers staring at wildlife despite ENDLESS signage and
warnings to pull over if you want to look at wildlife. Note, many of these inconsiderate boobs I
would probably like in real life.
Anyway, bright and early we got up, made pancakes, served
with Huckleberry syrup – more on that later – and took off down the two lane
highway through Yellowstone to Old Faithful.
Old Faithful has been a mainstay park attraction for a
hundred years. The beautiful Old Faithful Lodge is nearby and another entire
geyser basin made up of lots of geysers and other hydrothermic fun.
We arrived and went to the Ranger desk and the kids were
offered the opportunity to get a Young Scientist badge – both signed up. It appeared that Old Faithful was set to
erupt so we headed outside with the thin early morning crowds and waited.
The geyser didn’t disappoint – sure enough, within a minute
of the prediction (9:30am), she/he/it went off, spouting hot water and steam
high into the air. With the crowd oohing and aahing, it was akin to daylight
fireworks.
Hot Enough To Burn
You
Armed with 2 workbooks and souvenir pencils, we set off
through the geyser basin. With the notebooks, the kids also got a cool infrared
temperature sensor which looks a lot like a gun and a tricorder combined. Each
kid spent some time reading the temperature off of spouting, steaming,
bubbling, hot springs. The highest we
read was 189 degrees – hot enough to cause some pain if you fell in.
Beehive and Grand –
Geyser Gazers
We passed a geyser called Grand Geyser and there was a crowd
gathering. Apparently this geyser goes off irregularly but you know it’ll pop
when its basin fills. The basin was overflowing. Sure enough, within a few
minutes a giant column of water and steam erupted from it, lasting a few
minutes until it receded.
There were some folks in front of us on the benches who were
commented that the basin hadn’t drained. These folks are regular visitors to Yellowstone,
who the rangers affectionately call “Geyser Gazers”. And sure enough, after a moment, there was a
tremendous explosion of water from the geyser which then fell silent, its basin
draining like a flushed toilet.
Just as we were walking further to a new area, a geyser
about 100 yards away on another path started to erupt – very very high and
loud. We could see folks on a path near the geyser getting soaked. It went on
for more than 5 minutes. We learned later this geyser was called beehive and
erupted irregularly between every 10 hours and 5 days – making us lucky to see
it.
Young Scientists
A calm settled over the geyser basin and the two younger
kids sat on a bench in front of (not kidding) “Economic Geyser” and worked
diligently (with prodding) on their Young Scientist notebooks. Max and I discussed Morder and made fun of
passersby.
Binh and I used the binoculars to look deep into a nearby
hot spring and saw decomposing coins tossed in by unthinking clods who probably
also cause bearjams.
Finally, homework done, we hiked the mile or so back to the
Visitor Center and our Young Scientists got their badges.
End of Tourism For
the Day
We were beat. And so we drove back to the campsite, which
was supremely and awesomely quiet – the other campers all out fighting traffic
and elk for pictures of themselves making faces at bison.
We napped, played catch and generally did nothing. The fact
that our cellphones had no service and the ipads were out of power probably
helped.
Huckleberry jam
Huckleberries are some kind of local berry that Binh says are so valuable that people fight each other WITH FISTS for the rights to harvest them by hand. Unfortunately, several of our party do not equate huckleberry syrup with "regular" syrup - meaning either awesome maple syrup or fake maple syrup. And, weirder still, we couldn't even find "regular" syrup in the campground store at Old Faithful. Much hand wringing was done over this injustice, but vows were taken to buy normal syrup at the earliest.
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