Old Faithful

Yellowstone National Park is my one of the favorite- this time it looked even better, because we spent time there with eleven people strong, hungry for adventure gang. We hiked, stared at the geysers and mud volcano’s, had breakfasts in our RV in shifts, and talked, talked, talked… (thanks to the absence of cell phone connection)

Upper Geyser Basin was our first stop- Yellowstone, as a whole, possesses close to 60 percent of the world’s geysers. The Upper Geyser Basin is home to the largest numbers of this fragile feature found in the park. Within one square mile there are at least 150 of these hydrothermal wonders. Of this remarkable number, only five major geysers are predicted regularly by the naturalist staff. They are Castle, Grand, Daisy, Riverside, and Old Faithful. “Old Faithful was named by the first official expedition to Yellowstone, the Washburn Expedition of 1870. They were impressed by its size and frequency. Old Faithful erupts every 35 to 120 minutes for 1 1/2 to 5 minutes. Its maximum height ranges from 90 to 184 feet. It is not the biggest or the most regular geyser in Yellowstone but it is the biggest regular geyser. Furthermore, it has been erupting in nearly the same fashion throughout the recorded history of the park. Through the years, it has become one of the most studied geysers. One result of this close observation is that the Park Rangers are able to predict its eruptions fairly accurately. This makes Old Faithful geyser one of the easiest geysers in Yellowstone to see”.