Yellowstone Day 2: Part 3

By the time we finished with West Thumb Geyser Basin, the weather had improved dramatically.  It was still a little chilly, but it felt perfect to me.  Our next stop was Old Faithful--you can't go to Yellowstone and not see Old Faithful!

Old Faithful was erupting when we arrived at the basin, so we had 90 minutes to kill before the next eruption.  The problem with that is 90 minutes doesn't give enough time to do the full tour of the Upper Geyser Basin...but we certainly tried to see as much as we could!

We saw the most people at Old Faithful.  I couldn't believe how many people were there, especially because we really hadn't encountered any big crowds throughout the day.  It just goes to show how big the park really is!

As we started out our walk around the geyser basin, we saw a geyser beginning to erupt--and it was pretty high.  As we continued walking toward it (but not to it--we were already on a different path) it continued erupting.  In fact, it probably erupted for a good twenty minutes or so (most likely longer).  By the time we reached it, the geyser--named Castle Geyser--was ebbing but still had quite the height and spray.  It was beautiful and amazing to watch.  Sadly, after seeing Castle, Old Faithful was a bit of a letdown.  Castle just put Old Faithful to shame.  We did see many beautiful geysers though!

















Note: All of these geysers have water in them; the water was just very clear in some of the geysers



Firehole River--it is amazing to see the hot water flow right into the river.  This river also runs through our next stop, and it also has the geysers right at shoreline.








I can't remember the name of this geyser, but the small one was erupting and the bigger one was due to erupt between 7pm and 10pm that evening.  We seriously debated going back to see it, but in the end the three hour window and exhaustion won out. 


 








Old Faithful erupting!



This pool/geyser was fascinating to watch.  It is located next to Castle geyser, and the bubbles would rotate in a half circle around the edge of the pool.  There wasn't a sign to explain the phenomenon so I don't know why it does that.  Even still, it kept us entertained!


This is the back of Castle Geyser as we were headed to Old Faithful.  I thought it was a pretty cool picture because you can see the spray from the eruption


The front of Castle and you can also see a small spurt from the smaller geyser in front