Bill-on-the-Hill

From here on for a few days, it's geysers, geysers, geysers, so if you're not interested in the subject, I suggest you give this and the next few entries a pass. For that matter, I suggest you seek therapy, because if you can't get into the idea of staring, jaws a-gape, at the spectacle of boiling fountains of incredible scenic beauty bursting from the ground in quantities unparalleled anywhere else on earth, there's probably something wrong with you, IMO.

Not much to say of the trip north; we just kinda ... drove. US highway 191 is the main approach to Yellowstone National Park from the south (in this case, Rock Springs, Wyoming), and for its southern half, one passes through relatively pedestrian ranchland of no particular scenic distinction, although there are mountains on the horizon that promise more interesting stuff to come. Eventually the valley narrows and the mountains draw nigh, and the northern half, along the pretty Hoback River, is much more scenic. There are plenty of hiking and other recreational opportunities through here, but on this trip we didn't stop to enjoy them, we just kept going, through the well-known town of Jackson (a vacation mecca to some, but a noisome tourist trap to us) and Grand Teton National Park -- the latter a most appealing place to spend some time hiking and photographing wildlife, but not on this trip.

So what was the rush? Well, for a glimpse of what's ahead, check out today's Web Site du Jour: http://www.geyserstudy.org/, home page of the Geyser Observation and Study Association, or GOSA. This outfit, which we have recently joined, is dedicated to just what it says it is, the observation and study of geysers not just at Yellowstone but world-wide. Of course, since most of the world's geysers are at Yellowstone, it's the centerpiece of GOSA's activities, and you can learn more in their web pages about Yellowstone geysers than you thought possible to know. It's not really a "professional" organization in a rigorous sense, but more a labor of love among the "geyser gazers" who will go to sometimes really extraordinary lengths to see these things -- as we would experience ourselves in a few days.

Our quarry on this particular trip was Giant Geyser, described on a GOSA sub-page here. Giant is, at this writing, the tallest and most powerful active geyser in the world, the even larger Steamboat Geyser (also at Yellowstone some 40 miles away) not having erupted since 2005 and never being particularly active. Like most of Yellowstone's, and the world's, geysers, its eruptions cannot be "predicted" with enough fidelity to allow one to simply show up and see it; indeed, in most years there are only a few eruptions all year, and scheduling a visit around the hope of seeing Giant is entirely unrealistic. However, Giant has been in an unusually active phase since late 2005, with eruptions averaging about once a week and intervals between eruptions ranging from about 4 to 14 days. We knew, courtesy of the geyser-gazer network, that the most recent one had been the Thursday morning before we left. We were due to arrive Sunday afternoon. Do the math; although peak time was still a couple of days in the future, the window was opening.

In the event, we didn't get to see Giant today, but no matter. Conditions were gorgeous in the Upper Geyser Basin, where not just Giant but Old Faithful and literally hundreds of other geysers ply their trade, and there was plenty of other stuff to look at. Shots of Old Faithful are easy to come by, so here's one of nearby Lion Geyser, a medium-to-large fellow that's in the "background" behind Old Faithful as seen from its usual viewing benches, therefore seen at a distance by millions of tourists who barely notice it:

Lion Geyser

Eventually darkness came, and so we hied ourselves off to our lodging in West Yellowstone, Montana, the "gateway" town just outside the west entrance to the park. We'll pick the story up there tomorrow.