Today was our “free day” to explore the park. Tour guide Mike was not with us. We started off by going to Norris Geyser basin to look at the Steam Boat. This geyser usually only erupts every couple years at the least but this last year it has already erupt 19 times. We did not actually see it erupt however. We walked around a bit in the rest of the geyser basin, then headed to lower geyser basin to see Old Faithful. We got there right as it was erupting so we parked the car and walked around for a bit. Old Faithful erupts about every hour. As we were waiting it started to snow really heavily and all the roads in the park ended up getting closed down. We were stuck at Old Faithful for a little over 2 hours. Once a few roads got opened back up, we took a long way back to the hotel which was about 3 hours long. While our day was not exactly how we would have liked it, it was still not too bad.
Morgan Gentzkow
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Wow, I can’t believe that you’ll were stranded there for over 2 hours waiting for the roads to clear up! Did you go anywhere else other than Norris Geyser and Old Faithful? And were you planning on going anywhere else before you were stranded at Old Faithful?
Hey Katie,
We did not get to any other places that day. It takes some time to drive to those locations from where we were staying and by the time we got done waiting for the roads to open, most of us just wanted to go back to the hotel. We didn’t have a set plan for the day, but we probably would have found a trail to hike or something if we didn’t get stranded.
Hi Morgan,
I am sorry your “free day” was impacted by the snow and I hope you were able to stay safe. I wanted to ask you about the beginging of your day when you went to the Norris Geyser basin. Do you know or did you learn what has changed or caused the geyser to erupt 19 times this year opposed to once every couple of years? It is crazy that there was such a big change in the geysers eruption patterns over such a short amount of time.
Hey Emilee,
We did not learn why Steamboat geyser has erupted so much in the last year. Yellowstone lies on top of a super volcano that hasn’t erupted in a very long time, that is why there are so many hydro thermal features in the park, such as the geysers. They are gas release chambers for the magma that is under the ground. Scientists aren’t sure why some of these features have been more active recently.