Location Taken: Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming
Time Taken: October 2012
I’ve mentioned that one of the great advantages of hitting Yellowstone right at the end of the season is that there are very few other people around doing the same thing.
Which is why we had front-row seats for watching Old Faithful go off. Usually it’s standing room only on the large platform right by the most famous of geysers, but on a cold Halloween day, everyone who wanted to sit could, with lots of room to spare.
People gather about fifteen minutes before the predicted time, for the simple reason that the geyser timing has a ten-minute margin of error plus an extra five minutes to find a spot to watch.
So there we were, people just chatting lightly and waiting for Old Faithful to waken when we heard the fwoosh of a geyser going off in the distance. The Beehive geyser had decided that it was time for one of its three eruptions a day.
As people spotted the tall spurt of water in the distance and the news spread, the whole crowd rose to their feet to get a better view of the surprise show. And it was quite the show, too. A nice high spurt of water vapor, the wind pulling the steam away at a rather nice angle.
And then Old Faithful woke up as well.
It wasn’t quite as good a show as the Beehive. The winds weren’t quite right there to clear away the building steam clouds, so it was a bit of a blurry mess. But it was as strong and tall as expected, and right on schedule.
And the Beehive geyser kept on showing off as well. I’m not sure what the probability is of two geysers doing their thing at the same time, but it’s probably not that high. I heard a few comments along the lines of “I’ve been coming to see this for years, and this is the first time I’ve seen two at once!” I could do the math, but I don’t know all the tricks for figuring out a two-factor probability like this. Whatever the case, for my first (and possibly only) viewing of Old Faithful, it was quite special.
In case you’re wondering, the Beehive geyser is the one on the far left of this photo, and Old Faithful is on the far right. This was the closest I could get to having both in one photo without putting together a panorama. I did take the photos needed for that, but it does take a lot of time to stitch together photos, so I haven’t done it yet.
