Daily Archives: April 27, 2018

Old Faithful!

Old Faithful Geyser, Yellowstone National Park

We finished our meetings early and by 3:30 were headed for Old Faithful in the Upper Geyser Basin of Yellowstone National Park. I mean, who can be that close to Old Faithful and not go see it. We did not anticipate how long it would take to travel the 60 miles or so through the park. Road construction and 35mph speed limits kept us from our goal until 5PM. We even considered turning around until I searched the Park paper and found that the park gates are open 24 hours. When we got to the Old Faithful Visitor Center we found that we had arrived 15 minutes after the last eruption, and that another was not expected for over an hour. The trail guide showed some interesting small geysers behind Old Faithful on what is called Geyser Hill. There is boardwalk surrounding the hill so we climbed up and walked through a landscape of boiling springs and smoking cones. While we were still finding the trail up to the boardwalk we saw our first eruption, from one of the Lion Group over the brow of the hill, and the Anemone Geyser, a small geyser that erupts only about 6 feet, but does it every 7 to 10 minuets gave us our first lesson in the dynamics of geysers. It was a strange landscape for sure and our hour went fast. We decided to stay up there for the projected eruption of Old Faithful and photograph it from there, from a distance, to maybe get a better impression of the size of the plume. It turned out to be a good choice, and Old Faithful performed on schedule. Amazing! And what more can you say. I have several 10 fps sequences the I will stitch together into little movies, but this is a typical still shot from early in the eruption. The eruption lasted maybe 6 minutes start to finish. Sony RX10iv at 217mm. Program mode with action modifications. -.3EV. Processed in Polarr.