Twenty Trip--In Which I See for the First Time, a Geyser

Friday, September 7th, 2012

Friday was sunny and clear, and just warm enough. If you sat in the shade it was rather cool, but in the sun was perfect. Just thinking about it makes me miss spring, and summer, and oh yeah. Yellowstone.

We arrived in the parking lot a little before noon and sat in the car to eat. (I believe smoked string cheese and crackers are the typical diet of vacationers.)

Unfortunately, that delay caused us to miss one eruption of the geyser! We were walking towards Old Faithful when we heard the crowd suddenly fall silent and the loud hiss of steam. Running forward, I snapped the picture above.

It

Was

SO

Cool!

After "oooing" and "aaahing" over the last blub of geyser, we walked back to the Old Faithful visitors' center to kill the next hour.

I looked at some of the books and postcards and notebooks (such neat notebooks! I do so love pretty notebooks...) and then just sat and people-watched.

If I ever go to Yellowstone again, I want to have a free hour or so to just sit and people-watch. It's fun to spot out the foreigners, newlyweds, home-schoolers, people you saw at the last place, people from your hotel....

It's also fun to surreptitiously eavesdrop. Foreign languages are interesting, especially when you manage to pick up a word or two. Parents explaining sights to children. People exclaiming over the buffalo stampede they saw. (Yes, we missed a buffalo stampede!! And why were they stampeding? Perhaps because of the wolves chasing them! Oh, I was so disappointed to miss that.)

What fun national parks are! 

But back to the trip.

Ranger Landis Ehler told us and the crowd around about the geological make-up of Old Faithful. That spot he's pointing to is about 22 feet under the surface of Old Faithful, and it's only 4 inches wide. The steam from the boiling water underneath builds up in the large chamber at the bottom of the picture. As the steam collects, pressure builds and builds until it finally bursts up, through the pipe, and into the air as far as 185 feet! He would have told us more, but the geyser started and everyone lost interest in him. ;)

As the fountain died down, Ranger Ehler radioed in to find out the height and duration of that eruption, and also for the approximate time of the next 'show.'

^Proof that all three of us were there.

Old Faithful Inn occupied our time for the next hour or so (more on that in the next post), and we left just in time to see a third eruption. Third time through, it was still incredible.

This is on my List of Places to Return To. We didn't get to wander around and look at the other geysers at all! There must be so much more to see!

~Kiwi

Twenty Trip--Artists' Paint Pots

To begin with, I'm confused about the punctuation in Artists Paint Pots. Oughtn't there be an apostrophe in there, as in Artist's Paint Pots? But that implies they belong to only one artist, and then we'd have a fight over which artist they belong to, so Artists' Paint Pots is most likely the correct form.

Google gave me no assistance in this matter, as every link on there punctuated it differently.

Friday, September 7th, 2012

After the Grassy Stream and before the day's official destination, we made a quick stop at the Artists' Paint Pots. My mother and her parents and sister visited 25 years before, so once again it was neat seeing what they saw.

I'll admit, I wasn't quite as impressed with them as I thought I would be. I always imagined lots and lots of colors, but it was mostly this off-white-gray color.

They were still pretty neat, though! Mom made the mistake of giving Dad her camera, so he sat there with it on 'continuous shot.' We could print a flip-book with all the pictures he took, and then sit there to watch the paintpot "bloop."

See, they weren't all the same gray color! This one, while not as paint-pot-ish as the others, was bright.

A view of the Artists' Paint Pots area from above. I believe the parking lot was behind those trees. I remember it was absolutely packed in the parking lot, but the trails weren't too full. 

  Oh look! More color!
I must say, some of the prettiest blues I've ever seen were in that park.

 A hearty thank you to the unsuspecting tourists for loaning me their shadows. Mine is second from the left.

Mother!

Me, Mom, Dad.

(Shadows are fun to play around with.)

Mom and I continued down the trail while Dad took (even more) pictures from the top. After sitting for a while with no sign of Dad, we began to speculate on what was taking him so long. He must have forgotten we were there, and that's why he wasn't down yet. Maybe he fell in one of them? Or he could have gotten lost...

Just in case he was lost, I whistled for him.

We have a dog named Bear. Sometime early last year, I came up with this little five-note tune to whistle whenever I called him, and now Bear knows that whenever he hears that whistle, he is to come. This also works on family members! It is quite convenient. Nobody else whistles in that fashion, so when we hear it we know it's one of us.

Anyway, about 2.5 seconds after I whistled, we heard Dad laughing right around the corner of the trail. He took this picture when we came in sight.

~Kiwi~

(I apologize for the poor formatting of this post. You-all may or may not care, but it's bugging me that not everything is centered. I tried, Blogger refused to change it.)