West Yellowstone Geysers

Fountain Geyser...or is it Morning?

A few years ago we visited the geyser portion of Yellowstone...including Old Faithful.  Today we decided that since Cooper was once again himself we would take him to his most favorite daycare, Bark City.  Then we could head into the park and visit the geysers without him.  For whatever reason Cooper enjoys Bark City…no idea what they do that is so different, but he jumps out, heads inside and goes away with them happily.   Once inside Annie greeted him with “Cooper, you’re back”, gave him a quick rubdown…and off he went happily.  After his experience at Three Dog up in Whitefish, MT this was good to see.




Hot Cascades





Random growth in hot pond



Sediment colors in hot pool

 

We hit the park 90 minutes later…the first stop was in the Lower Geyser Basin.  It is one of the busiest areas of the Park…traffic and lots of people.  We decided to ignore them and concentrate on the geysers.  It must have worked because we traveled only 10 miles before we turned around to head back to Bozeman…it took us 6 hours to travel that 10 miles.  We hit a new record for picture taking on this one trip…we took well over 200 pictures each.

Random mud pot

In our opinion the Lower and Midway Geyser Basins are far more interesting than Old Faithful.  Still has large crowd of people, but they move quickly past and you can spend a good bit of time watching the geysers in action. There are numerous mud pots and spouting boiling water geysers spread out along a raised boardwalk.  You certainly would not want to step onto the ground in the thermal areas. 

No waiting for the action…Old Faithful has bench seating, huge crowds and crazy parking that shifts every 60 minutes that the geyser goes off.  It is not an area that we particularly care to see again.  We've seen it once and that is enough.  The other thermal areas have a more varied terrain and are much more interesting to photograph. 

 

After the boardwalk we headed down Firehole Lake Drive for more geysers…though we failed to time the largest one quite right.  It isn’t quite as regular as Old Faithful and we didn’t spend the time to wait it out.   There were still plenty of others to watch spew hot water and steam. 

 

Our 'private' show

We were fortunate to find one overlook on the Firehole River devoid of people.  No people in a huge parking area is pretty unusual for Yellowstone.  Overlooking the Firehole River we were treated to a geyser going off just as we arrived.  It went off for a couple of minutes then quiet returned as if nothing to see here folks.  Maybe that’s why it was unnamed and no one pulled into the lot.

Quiet returns

 

Draining from Sapphire Pool

Our last stop was at the Midway Geyser Basin…another boardwalk around steaming water.   Had it not been so late in the afternoon we may have hiked out to Mystic Falls as well.  Hard to believe that we arrived at the park at 8:30 AM and drove only 10 miles by 3:00 PM…may need another week at this rate.

Upon return to Bozeman Cooper was happy to see us and their reports were that he ‘was his usual self…calm and quiet’.  Tomorrow we plan on doing a few necessary chores around camp…take a day off and sleep in until at least 7:00 AM.

 

Mud Splats

 

Sapphire pool



"River" of color

 

 

Island Geyser