2012/07 Western USA trip - Yellowstone's geysers |
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Monday July 9th
We made an early start, hoping to find a campsite in Yellowstone. This is doubly difficult as the park takes advance reservations and of course we didn’t have one. We aimed for Grant Village as it’s far from all the other entrances. We
arrived early enough get in, though we had to endure about an hour in the queue. The checking-in process seems to be amazingly slow and difficult. We ended up with two days at one site and one at another, fitting in around other 
reservations. We couldn’t camp right away as the previous occupants were still in, so we went to nearby West Thumb geyser basin.
West Thumb doesn’t have the biggest or most beautiful springs and geysers but its location on the edge of Yellowstone Lake is just perfect on a sunny day. There are even a few springs visible in the lake itself. Phil and I had kayaked over them in 2000, wondering if we were going to be hard boiled. Certainly I appreciated the sunshine; I remember walking around in ’87 with the family in late August in driving snow, our signal to leave before we were snowed in! Yellowstone’s valleys are at almost 8000 feet, so it’s a severe climate.
The springs at West Thumb are not much different from the other geyser basins’ so I’ve just included pictures of the prettiest, with its very hot water and blue algae, and the ugliest with its curdled milk look.
Back at the campsite we queued up again and got a hard time for having “two sleeping compartments” on a single site; it was against the rules. I pointed out that using an entire campsite just for the trailer and me made no sense, particularly as there was already a bunch of people on standby for a site. We got a “special dispensation”. We were in!
Yellowstone is a big place and it’s impossible to see even the most famous sights properly in a couple of days, so where to go? John and Edna had been there twice, me maybe a half-dozen times, and it was hard to remember what they’d already seen. I suggested we make this a geyser day, and go visit the Old Faithful area and work our way along the Firehole River until we were thoroughly geysered out. Visible in this picture, the river takes the runoff from a string of geyser basins and dozens of springs.
The parking lot at Old Faithful is enormous and it was well filled; this is the busiest place in the park. We arrived just in time to miss the eruption so we walked to the other end of the geyser basin to avoid the crowds and worked our way back towards Old Faithful, hoping to pick up the next eruption. There are so many other spouting geysers, like Grotto, and colourful springs, like the Morning Glory, that we missed the next eruption too. Grotto, on the left, huffs and puffs continuously. Morning Glory was entirely blue thirty years ago, just like the flower, but idiots throwing in cans and coins have partially blocked it and cooled it down, allowing the yellow and brown algae to dominate the spring.
The period between Old Faithful’s eruptions can vary from 60 to 90 minutes. John and Edna made it to the seats around the boardwalk but I ended up with a distant view, still impressive though.
Surprisingly, some wildflowers seem to thrive amongst the hot water and the fumes and we saw these stonecrop sedum and fringed gentians at most of the geyser basins.
There are geyser basins all along the Firehole River, but it would take days to see everything. We stopped at the Grand 
Prismatic Spring as its runoff channel into the river was very colourful. The edges of the spring are great orange whorls, framing the bright blue water. The spring is so big that to see the whole thing you need to climb one of the nearby hills. I did this once but haven’t been able to find the old picture.
Finally we drove through the Firehole geyser basin at sunset, and headed back to Grant Village.
It had been a long day, but we stopped briefly at Kepler Cascades on our way back.
Up in Okotoks, Sandie, Karen and the boys had had a day at the local lake, watching the storm clouds passing them by.