Yellowstone: Old Faithful

Our first morning at Yellowstone, I woke up hearing someone loudly coughing and hacking and groaning.  It took me a minute to figure out that someone was me.  I woke up with some kind of bronchitis/cold/crud that wasn't helped at all by the high altitude. 

Frank was up at dawn to go out to take pictures in the morning light, and didn't return for several hours.  I was beginning to worry a little that he might have been Smokey the Bear's breakfast, but then he came bounding in and was enthusiastic about his photo excursion.  I told him I felt like crap on a stick, which I'm sure was quite a downer for him.  Just call me "Mrs. Buzzkill" henceforth.

We are staying in the historic Old Faithful Inn, built in 1904.  They've modernized it quite a bit, but the rustic beams in the four-story atrium are signs of a bygone era.  The hotel was nearly destroyed in the 1988 wildfires, but a great deal of work by firefighters saved the Inn.  It's a marvelous place, and you have to book reservations at least 6 months in advance.  The first time Frank called in February, they were booked solid, but he was persistent and got one from a cancellation on the second or third try.  We had to settle for a suite (bummer, I know), which was more than we budgeted for, but the only thing available.  The suite is a spacious, two room mini-apartment, with a fridge and complimentary soft drinks and a box of chocolates.  For this price, you can bet we will be sucking down those soft drinks with wild abandon.  My dentist will certainly not be pleased.

We ate at the all-you-can stomach buffet in the Inn, loading up on scrambled eggs, french toast and breakfast meat.  We decided to venture out to one of the other lodges for some shopping and to see the morning eruption of the Old Faithful geyser, just across from the hotel.

We could see the smoke rising from the geyser hole from our hotel window, and could tell when the crowd was gathering. There is a large perimeter around the geyser, set up with benches for people to sit and wait in a large semi-circle around the geyser hole.  Every 90 minutes (plus or minus 10), Old Faithful puts on a show, first steaming, then sputtering, then surging water about 100 feet in the air.  It's a pretty amazing site, and the regularity of the spouting is legendary (hence the name).  There are other, larger geysers in the park, but none as famous as Old Faithful.

There are 10,000 thermal features (geysers, mud pots, steam vents, hot springs) in Yellowstone.  There are more geysers in Yellowstone alone that the rest of the world combined, but none is as famous as Old Faithful.  I remember seeing black and white pictures of it in our encyclopedias as a child, the representative geyser of all geysers.

Hundreds of people lined up, waiting patiently for the show to start, all with cameras pointed toward a large hole in the ground.  When it finally started, it did not disappoint.  It was a cool site to see, with the steam plume rising hundreds of feet off the ground.  The water was a little harder to see, but the steam rising into the cloudless blue sky made a beautiful site.

Alex attempted to take a video of the Old Faithful eruption, and while his narration is quite good, his camera work looks like "The Blair Witch Project" shot mostly up his nose and featuring a lot of footage of the gravel in front of him.  We'll have to work on that so we can post something later.

After our morning adventure, I was wheezing and coughing so much that I decided to return to the room for a nap.  Frank was disappointed that we weren't going touring, and refused to go without me.  He and Alex relaxed for a while, then ventured out to the General Store across the way.  Alex returned alone a little while later, which alarmed me.  He said that his dad was right behind him, but Frank did not show up for another ten minutes.  I pretty much knew that Frank was probably searching for Alex, and sure enough, he came back and was steaming mad.  Alex got a stern lecture about not running off, and was put on time-out from any video games for the rest of the night.

Frank and Alex decided to go out to see Old Faithful in the moonlight, hoping to catch a good shot of Old Faithful with the full moon behind it.  Unfortunately, this was one of the rare occasions that Old Faithful let the crowd down.  It didn't erupt at the appointed time, just some anemic steam came out of the ground, as if to say, "I'm tired and you people need to go to bed now."

They came back disappointed.  I guess Old Faithful, isn't as quite as faithful as we'd like.

Posted using the Sprint Compass™ 597 by Sierra Wireless, generously loaned to me for the trip by Sierra Wireless. 

Comments

[ResearchMom]

Gosh, I forgot what a poet you are! Glad to read that you are having fun in the great blue yonder!

[Funjet Vacations]

This is certainly a site to see and everyone should have a chance to see it!

[Google]

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