Travelogues
2017 Summer Trip

Tuesday, May 23

Old Faithful

Today started with blue skies and wispy, cirrus clouds and ended with puffy cumulus clouds. How can you beat blue skies and temperatures in the mid 70's? I was concerned about cold weather this week, but I should have been more concerned about getting sunburned today.

We managed to get through another bisonjam on the way to Old Faithful. Bison have an interesting habit of traveling from one meadow to the next by parading down the middle of the highway. And since no one is going to argue with a bison, bisonjams are a common occurrence. Old Faithful waited for us to arrive before it erupted. By Old Faithful standards, it was a bit of a dud. We'll shoot it again later in the trip.

Our second stop was Grand Geyser, which is one of the best in the Upper Geyser Basin and one I haven't photographed. To our chagrin, it erupted just a couple of minutes before we could get there. We continued down the path toward Morning Glory Pool and River Geyser. We were 90 minutes early for the eruption of River Geyser, so we ate our sack lunches and joined a large group of Japanese tourists at Morning Glory Pool. They provided plenty of entertainment. They put a great deal of effort into posing for their family pictures, and each had his or her own style.

Old Faithful Grand Geyser Morning Glory Pool
Old Faithful Grand Geyser Morning Glory Pool

Riverside Geyser erupted right on cue. We shot our images and I created a couple of movie clips before we hustled back up the path to reach Daisy Geyser. Daisy was supposed to erupt 15 minutes after Riverside Geyser, but after waiting for 45 minutes, we finally gave up and walked back to the car. We hiked about 3.5 miles but only got images of one good geyser eruption. I guess that balanced out our last trip when we seemed to hit every geyser eruption as we hiked down the geyser basin.

Riverside Geyser

We made a couple of stops to photograph the Firehole River, and Firehole Falls before returning to camp. We were still pretty wiped out from yesterday and decided a shorter day would be a good idea. Eating dinner at 11:30 again didn't seem like a good plan.

River Firehole River
Firehole River Firehole Falls