Hitting the road bright and early at 11am! It’s good to be on a loose schedule. We started off by grabbing sandwiches in town from here:
Saw some elk closer up than before. Note National Geographic-style photography. This mom and child (not in pic) ended up crossing the road shortly after.
Here we are at the start of Fairy Falls, our first point of interest. We’re going to hike up to see Grand Prismatic from the top. I picked up a trip mascot for the journey, but June was quick to scold me and she warned me of the dangers of interacting with creatures of the wild so as short as our relationship was, we bid you goodbye, Fuzzy McWoo. Hope you don’t have to get put down due to unnatural human interaction or stepped on or end up in a refuge for caterpillars.
Here we are at the top of Grand Prismatic before we reach the falls. Immense and beautiful in person.
On we continue to the Fairy Falls; (should have been) 1.6 miles to this:
However on the way over we missed the turnoff while avoiding a mud pit and soon realized there was no one else on the path except us and the clicking grasshoppers, much less the mountains or valleys required for falls to happen. Later we found out that if we continued on, we’d eventually reach the Upper Geyser basin, an area most people would drive to. Time to U turn.
There were lots of friendly chipmunks waiting at the end, plus a waterfall. They were running all around the place begging hikers for food. It was like a domesticated chipmunk convention was going on. Hudson loved it.
Next stop, back to Old Faithful to see it again in the sun this time and walk around to see some of the other geysers. This was around 545pm on a Saturday. Here are the crowds 15 minutes before. Old Faithful is lined with a circular crescent of benches. Do not cross the line!
Old Faithful erupts approximately every 92 minutes plus or minus 15 minutes. When you pull into the parking area with no internet service, a good initial way to tell how close it is to erupting is by how crowded the parking lot is. If you’re circling around looking for a space, chances are she’s going to erupt soon. After parking you head over to the visitor center to look at the whiteboard, which gets updated all day long with the next predicted eruption times of Old Faithful as well as for a few of the other predictable geysers in the upper basin.
Along with Old Faithful, we got to see the eruptions of some other geysers like Riverside, Grand, and Grotto (our favorite). If you hang around for a few hours, you should be able to check a few out. Bring snacks and drinks! The visitor center has a pretty large souvenir shop with lots of chips, drinks, and snacks along with the usual expected trinkets.
How predictable is nature?
Grand geyser had a window of around 2 hours, and Grotto never stopped in the hour or so time span that we walked back and forth past it. The other geysers seemed to last 3-10 minutes each. I realized Old Faithful was given that name for a reason; its accuracy only varied by 10-15 minutes before or after, which is pretty dang good for a tube in the ground connected to water heated by a volcano.
By foot or car, it’s no wonder the first settlers to set eyes on this place thought of brimstone and fire. Even driving around the park in this area, you could see steam mystically rising up out of the trees.
We wrapped up the night at 11pm with some pizza from Wild West (nothing special but the only place open) and some geocaching. I guess late shifting our days by a few hours is mostly working out after all!
…aaand more geocaching.
The WOO family page 