Hey You Geysers!

I'm turning back to my recent trip to Yellowstone National Park -- specifically, our second full day in the park.

We began by heading to the Norris Geyser Basin. My husband and I already noticed on the day before that Yellowstone seemed a lot more crowded than when last we visited (in 2014). Today was the day that really drove that home. Parking was a challenge everywhere we went. Most of the time, you had to stalk someone walking back to their car so that you could take their space as soon as they left it. Here at Norris Geyser Basin, you had to park out on the main road and hike a quarter mile in to the actual parking lot.

We came up with some theories to explain the larger crowds (which I'll come back to later), but in the case of Norris Geyser Basin, there may be a specific reason for the surge in popularity. The area is home to Steamboat Geyser, the tallest active geyser in the world. It's totally unpredictable, and has generally erupted only at exceedingly rare intervals. It has gone over two decades between eruptions, multiple times since recording began. It erupted just once during 2014, the year we'd last visited, and didn't erupt again for 4 years after that.

But Yellowstone is always changing, and in 2018, something about Steamboat Geyser did change. It erupted 32 times that year, and 48 times each the following two years. This period of increased activity seems to be slowing back down again, but by no means has returned to the old "normal." Steamboat has erupted 5 times so far this year (including less than two weeks before this trip). I think more people are trying to "buy a lottery ticket" to see this special event in person.

Nope, we didn't "win." But Norris Geyser Basin is still a neat place to visit. It's separated into two sections -- with the Porcelain Basin section especially beautiful in my opinion. Among the many terrains of Yellowstone, this area rides the line between strange alien landscape and conventional Earthly beauty. And if you walk the whole area (which we did), odds are you will see some geyser going off at some point (which we did -- the poor Minute Geyser, which has become choked over the decades by people treating it as a wishing well).

We stopped for lunch in one of Yellowstone's many picnic areas, dipping into the deep store of snacks we'd brought along for the trip. After that, we tried to go to Grand Prismatic Spring. The parking situation here was simply impossible, and we resolved to try again early the next day. Here's where the theories on the crowds at Yellowstone fully developed. One notion was that people might still be taking their first "post-pandemic" vacations, with Yellowstone just one of many possible destinations. But our second notion seemed like the correct one -- tourism is probably being driven by those Yellowstone television series (which I've never watched), making people want to see in person whatever they saw on TV.

Anyway, we moved along to the Upper Geyser Basin, where you can find Old Faithful. Crowds were huge here too, of course -- but we had to fight to park, because we had a dinner reservation at the Old Faithful Inn. But we bookended that dinner with watching the park's most famous geyser. First, we hiked a trail to an overlook behind Old Faithful to watch from a distance. While the vantage point was great in theory, the direction of the wind made it a bit less majestic than hoped for -- the spray obscured the view of the spouting water itself.

After a nice dinner, we joined the throng on the boardwalk near Old Faithful and watched up close. And here we had the "awkward encounter" for the day, as we happened to sit next to a guy who was staggeringly drunk and supremely talkative. (If you're a fan of Letterkenny, he sounded a LOT like McMurray.) We weren't personally engaged in conversation with him, thankfully -- but he'll always be a part of our memories of the day, because his voice is all over the videos we took of the eruption.

We had one more full day in Yellowstone before the drive back home... which I'll come back to recount in a future post.