Thursday, June 5

Today I got my second wind. I’ve found a great website for Yellowstone, and I’ve been getting lots of info about the geysers. And I’ve taken the Yellowstone map and found all of the spots where I want to spend time. And today was that first trip.

As always, the trip was eventful. I came across some more buffalo walking down the road. So I’m in the line of traffic, and here come these buffalo. They walked RIGHT NEXT TO MY TRUCK (first picture above). If I had a passenger, they could have reached out the window and touched the buffalo.

Also took a lot of pictures at Gibbons Falls. As I’ve mentioned, the rivers are just swollen, and it made these falls just fantastic (third picture). Stopped at Norris Geyser Basin, which is suppose to be the “hottest” basin in the park.

It is amazing. The landscape looks like you are on the moon – only with water and steam (see second picture). I can’t imagine what the first explorers thought when they found Yellowstone. I didn’t see many geysers erupt. Some of the little ones spout water all the time – very HOT water. And others could erupt in 30 minutes to hours to days. So unless you want to spend a whole day just sitting and waiting, you take a picture and move on.

The highlight of this area is the Steamboat Geyser. It is the world’s tallest geyser, sending water 380 feet into the air (Old Faithful goes about 150 feet). Actually the walkways and platforms are very close – I’d be afraid to be there when it erupted. But not to worry, the last time it erupted was May 5, 2005. It is a very infrequent and irregular geyser. But it spews out hot water fairly constantly – probably 10-15 feet. It’s still fun to see (last picture).

I did see one geyser erupt, but only about 10 feet and just for less than 30 seconds. It was called “Constant Geyser” – not sure why because it didn’t seem very constant to me. I sat for a while with a German lady, both of us waiting to see it erupt again. The brochure said it could erupt several times quickly, but might take hours to erupt again. So I’m on my way.