Yellowstone, Day 2 — Upper Geyser Basin

Yellowstone is often associated with its volcanic activities and especially geysers, Old Faithful being the iconic geyser of Yellowstone. However, when you actually go there you see that Yellowstone is much more than just one big geyser that erupts every 90 minutes. There are so many geysers and hot springs that you soon forget about Old Faithful completely.

The second day of our Yellowstone trip started with a visit to the Upper Geyser Basin. We wanted to get to Old Faithful before the crowd started gathering. We came around 8 AM and tried to figure out when Old Faithful was supposed to erupt. Unexpectedly, it was not easy because we had no Internet and the visitor center was still closed. We finally found a spot with the reception and found out that we had another hour before the next eruption.

Instead of waiting by the geyser, we decided to take a walk around. There is a path that goes around the Old Faithful and leads to other geysers and hot springs.

As we were walking around, we saw a small crowd of people, and a woman there called to us saying that we should want to stay here because we are about to see something spectacular, an eruption of the Beehive geyser. I looked around skeptically. I did not see anything spectacular around and was doubtful that it would be better than the eruption of Old Faithful, which I definitely did not want to miss. The reason for my hesitation was that I heard a lot about Old Faithful but nothing about Beehive, and if I have not heard about something that something must not be very interesting. How arrogant of me. 🙂

The people in the crowd probably saw my hesitation and pointed out that the woman knew what she was talking about: this particular geyser erupts only once in 10 hours to 5 days, as opposed to Old Faithful which erupts every 1.5 hours. That settled it. I am always for seeing something rare.

It turned out that the woman knew about the Beehive eruption because of its indicator. The indicator is a little sidekick geyser near the main one, a small vent that spouts steam or an occasional trickle when the main geyser is about to erupt. We waited for about 5-10 minutes before the show started.

The eruption continued for about 5 minutes. Imagine a firehose continuously shooting a thick column of steaming hot water straight into the sky. That’s Beehive. We had plenty of time to take pictures of the geyser and even a few selfies in front of it.

After the eruption was over, we rushed to the site of Old Faithful and were just in time for its eruption.

Just before Old Faithful erupts, it starts to steam, teasing the waiting audience. It looks pretty impressive by itself, but there is no “power” yet.

When it erupts, the water column is not that huge but it is very prettily shaped. I took so many pictures and had a hard time selecting the one I like the most. So I am posting three. 🙂

After watching the eruption of Old Faithful from the observation deck at the ground level, we grabbed some bagels with cream cheese from the nearby cafe and went up the nearby hill to watch the eruption from the observation deck above. We did not go all the way up to the observation deck because the eruption was about to start, but instead found a nice spot where we can enjoy the eruption.

Our next destination was Morning Glory Pool, a colorful thermal spring in bright green and yellow colors. It was about a 40-minute walk among all kinds of geysers (active and inactive) and hot springs.

Morning Glory Pool is apparently not at its full glory at the moment. A small sign next to it informed us that the spring used to have aqua-blue color, but due to vandalism, that is people tossing objects inside the spring, the temperature of the pool lowered and algae colored the pool in its current color. Yellow color indicates lower temperature.

After the round trip to Morning Glory and back we were very tired, so we decided to go back to the hotel to rest. That was the first half of our second day at Yellowstone National Park.