The First And Last Time We Left At Eight AM

Today is the day we get up at 7:00am! Hurrah! Let us rejoice in the early morn! Once again the family of the Reid genre begins their day on the road to Old Faithful. Since our marginally earlier start aloud us to be out before the tour buses and such, we are able to stop at the Fountain Paint Pots, and find a parking space. But coming back was totally worth it. The Paint Pots were extraordinarily cool. I’m sorry Paint Pots of Banff, but Yellowstone wins on this one my dear old friend. We got there right on time to witness the eruption of Fountain Geyser, which is one of the geysers that has an irregular schedule and can’t be predicted quite as accurately as some of the others. It was much more violent than Old Faithful, erupting in brief surges and burst. It had a rather large opening, so it was dislodging hundreds of gallons of water by the minute, sometimes spraying the onlookers on the boardwalk. It went on for quite a while, and we didn’t end up staying long enough to see the end. There was another that went off in the Paint Pots as well, but I can’t remember it’s name for the life of me. Ah well, it was cool though, it looked like it was going off almost continuously, as it didn’t stop the entire time we were walking around and it looked like it was having a temper tantrum. Ironically, it was next to a geyser called Spasm Geyser and I think the names of the two should be switched around, although, I don’t know, maybe Spasm is even more freak showy. After that little arrête we once again went to visit Old Faithful. Our time of arrival was approximately one hour preceding that of our arrival the day before and the show was set to start at about 11:05am and once again erupted ten minutes before it’s due time. There was a mile long hike around the area called Geyser Hill and we took the liberty of going on it after hanging around at the Visitor’s Centre for a little while. There were some interesting formations. One in particular was aptly named Beehive Geyser (as it resembled an old fashioned beehive) and it has an indicator pool, which will start to become agitated shortly before the geyser erupts, which is quite helpful as it is unpredictable. There was a clump of around four or five geysers which I preformed a handstand in front of. The are was called Lions Geyser Cluster or something of the like. We left right after the completion of our little tour, the last half of which was spent with Mum demanding I plan our next vacation here and, based on the approximated time of the eruptions of various geyser and such, choose our hikes with precision. Thanks Mum. We were then heading back to the water hole in the Firehole River we had visited yesterday and made a stop at another boardwalk, Midway, where we observed two very large hot springs which were, hence the name, extremely hot, close to boiling. One of them, Excelsior, was a geyser crater, whose eruptions in the late eighteen hundreds were so violent they ruptures it’s underground systems. It’s last eruption was almost one hundred years later in 1985. When it blew, the entire area had to be closed off because of the massive amounts of scalding water being blown into the air. We then got back to the Foretold Canyon Drive and had to circle back around for a third go in two days when we found out the swimming area was so crowded we couldn’t get a parking spot. We ended up having to walk a click because that’s where the closest spot we could fit in was. It was worth it though. The water was warm thanks to the numerous hot water spouts emptying into it upstream and there was a little spot where you could jump into the current and body surf down. There were even some people cliff diving! I did not, in fact, join them as the likelyhood of death was kind of too much for my fragile self. Can you believe our family accomplished all this before even three o’clock in the afternoon? It’s like a freaking Christmas miracle. We didn’t really get much else done though. We had a trail ride planned but Isaac decided to go to the crappy mini golf area instead because, ya know, that’s more fun than HORSES. But oh well, we still have many chances. Well, time to settle down to some RV with Robin Williams and baby Josh Hutchinson. Peace out m8s.

Look it me upside down (the website decided it looked better this way and I happen to agree)

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