Geyser Day

 Friday, July 2

One of the coolest things to see at Yellowstone are the geysers. Old Faithful is obviously the most famous one but there are hundreds of other active geysers at Yellowstone. The thing that makes Old Faithful so popular is it's predictably; it's eruptions can be predicted closely enough to easily sit and wait on it. So, it might be predicted to erupt at 5 pm, plus or minus 10 minutes, whereas some of the others might be predicted for a certain time plus or minus 45 minutes to 2 hours. Which leaves you sitting on a bench waiting for quite some time!

Our original plan was to leave Yellowstone sometime Saturday, drive to Rapid City for the night, and then take Sunday and Monday to drive home. By Thursday night, we had decided we would just leave Saturday and do two long days of driving, since Monday is a holiday for Chris and Isaac. 

So, suddenly we were on our last day! We designated it Geyser Day. 

We really wanted to try to see another geyser erupt besides Old Faithful, and so we chose the Grand Geyser, which was predicted to erupt at 12:30, plus or minus forty-five minutes. We arrived Friday morning in time to watch Old Faithful again. 

We came prepared for lots of waiting, with legos and games and sudoku puzzles in our backpack!

Then we hiked down the boardwalk to check out Grand and to see the sights along the way. 

It was a beautiful morning, with a nice cool breeze. 

So many things to marvel at... 

Pools of water, boiling away like a kettle on the stove...

Geysers, quietly letting off steam...

Different colored rocks, beautiful trees and blue, blue skies...

After checking things out, we walked back to the van and found a place to spread out our picnic under some trees. 

We spotted a geyser erupting in the 

distance while we ate

We had plenty of time for lunch and a bathroom break (with seven people in our group, the dad sometimes felt like he had taken a trip west just to check out all the bathrooms along the way) and then we headed back to Grand to stake out our spot on the benches and settle in for our wait. 

We played Uno and did Sudoku puzzles and waited. 

This child had become the world's best shade seeker by this time, stopping under every shade tree along the trail we were walking, but there was no shade beside Grand and that made it a pretty Not Fun Thing. I finally showed him that there was a little shade under the benches, so there he lay. 

We weren't the only dedicated wait-ers, so there was plenty of people watching to entertain ourselves with as well. It was funny to watch people walk up, "Oh, there's lots of people sitting here, must be going off soon." So they'd stand around a bit and then they'd ask when it was predicted, and when they heard it was 12:30 plus or minus 45 minutes, they would look at their watches and say, "Oh." And then most of them would move on. 

I don't have a good picture of Grand when it wasn't erupting but basically it's a big pool of water -- at least the pool is big right before it erupts. Afterward the water goes way down, and then gradually builds back up again in the 4 - 8 hours between eruptions. Grand is the tallest predictable geyser and shoots up to 200 feet in the air. 

When you're waiting on Old Faithful, it will start sending out bigger puffs of steam as it gets closer to erupting and little teasers before the real thing. Grand is not like that. At about 12:28 there was suddenly a little stirring in the water, and then, boom. There it went!

It erupted for 12 minutes, shooting and spraying and boiling! At one point it abruptly paused, and everyone thought that was it and then it came back with more force than ever! It was definitely worth the hour long wait. 

After that, we trekked back to the van and headed back to camp. We stopped to take some pictures on the way out...

Lillian's trusty selfie stick/tripod 

came in handy more than once!

Back at the camp, we had some discussion to decide what we should do with the rest of the day and when we should leave. We decided we didn't want to go back to Yellowstone but would rather take one more swim. We weighed the pros and cons of sleeping through another chilly night and getting up at 5 to take down tents and finish packing up or packing up everything in the evening and driving through the night and decided on the latter. So, Chris headed into town on some errands and the rest of us headed to the river. 

We weren't there long till the sun disappeared behind the clouds and swimming didn't seem that appealing after all. It had done this Thursday too, but we only got sprinkles. Sure enough, here came the sprinkles.... and then it kept on! 

We hunkered down under some trees on the bank, figuring it wouldn't last long, but instead it came harder and Isaac reached out and found a little piece of hail! We finally ran through the rain up to the roof beside the bathroom. Some of us were laughing and some of us were nearly in tears. 

And then, it stopped as abruptly as it started and Chris picked us up and took us back to camp to assess the damages. I suppose our adventures wouldn't have been quite complete without a little rain while camping, right? The one tent had some puddles and a wet sleeping bag or two, the other one had only a few damp spots. We hung up everything that was wet,  and then we set to work packing up. What a job!

It probably took a good two hours till everything was tucked away. The tents dried quickly, so we went ahead and packed up everything. 

Best way to take down a tent? Carry it out to the road! 

We ate up our leftover lunch food and cereal and packed our dirty, unshowered-for-days selves into the van. Chris treated us to one, last splurge -- watching Yellowstone at the IMAX. We headed out around 7:45 pm. It felt a little crazy and surreal, driving toward the Great Tetons in the gathering darkness. 

It felt unreal that the much anticipated adventure was almost over and we were heading home.