Mile 3823 - Yellowstone Geyser Area, WY

Glacier was beautiful, but our next destination was the grand daddy of all the national parks: Yellowstone. A fact you might want to remember the next time you're playing trivial pursuit is that Yellowstone was the very first ever National Park established and it was because of President Theodore Roosevelt. The Saaron had never been to Yellowstone, but we have heard good things.

We started by going to see Old Faithful; we felt that with all his faithfulness, he deserved to be the priority. We were not alone in this thinking, we found a few hundred others waiting in anticipation.

We discovered the best job in the National Park system: the geyser predictor. There’s a master control station in the visitor center where rangers all over the park are radioing in the times of geyser eruptions and the specially trained geyserologists use their geyser knowledge to predict the next eruption. This info is posted on all sorts of tourist boards throughout the park so not only can you plan your time to see Old Faithful, but also Grand, Daisy and Castle among others. We strolled out of the visitors center three minutes before the prediction and then, right on cue, geyser!  

Before entering the park, we found these awesome free video podcasts on iTunes to help decide what we wanted to see. One video was about the eruption of Giant Geyser and how spectacular it is. It has erupted over 250 ft tall for lengths of an hour! We learned only the lucky or the dedicated get to see it's greatness, as it's eruptions are totally unpredictable. We discussed bringing a book there and just hanging out for the day in hopes of experiencing the great Giant, but were glad we didn’t when we discovered it last erupted in 2008. I guess our video was slightly dated. 

Most of us think of Old Faithful when we think of geysers, but really it's quite abnormal in the geyser world. A geyser goes off because there are super-heated pockets of water underground that finds its way up through weak fissures in the rock. These fissures are continuously changing so most geysers go through periods of high activity and then become irregular or inactive. Even a small earthquake could turn a consistent geyser into a dry hole in the ground. This makes Old Faithful even more impressive as he has been erupting every 45-95 minutes since first recorded in 1870, and who knows how long before that!

Near Old Faithful is a very informative visitor center with the always helpful rangers, as well as a crazy big hotel and lodge for those who wish to watch the eruptions in their PJs. While we did have our PJs on hand, we were planning on getting away from the crowds and heading into Yellowstone's back country. At the visitor center we learned that if you hike off the beaten path, or boardwalk in the case of Yellowstone, you might fall through a thin crust of earth into a hot 500 degree hot spring and die.  Apparently they lose a few hikers each year. While this was a tempting dare, we discovered that most of the must see sites in Yellowstone have boardwalks built around them to keep you from actually stepping foot on the earth. And since neither of us had been to Yellowstone before to have any idea of its grand size, we realized that we could "boardwalk" for 5 days and still not see everything.

So fear not mothers, we survived without falling into a hot spring, but have promised to return to see the lesser viewed areas of Yellowstone someday soon.