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As a Montana native born and raised just a few hours from Yellowstone National Park I don’t think I really appreciated what we had.   I remembered going to Yellowstone as a kid.  I also remember my “Landform” class in high school that had us visit the park for its geologic wonders as an end of year trip.  It wasn’t until I had graduated highschool and decided to accept a summer job with the park concessionaires that I really fell in love with the park but more importantly I fell in love with the geysers.  I worked at Old Faithful each of my summers in college and between 1982 and 2004 I would say I probably only missed visiting Yellowstone during the summer on 5 or 6 occasions and I made up for those by staying longer in the years that I did get to go.

My weeks in the park were predominately spent watching the geysers… for hours on end I would sit at the same thermal feature and watch the subtle changes that led up to the eruption.  And with each year and with each thermal feature I would learn something new and notice changes in behavior from prior years.     I think it was my wife that told me that it was boring and didn’t understand how I could watch a hole in the ground with boiling water for hours in hope and anticipation of an eruption.   Over the years and after meeting many other “geyser gazers”  it became quite apparent to me that we come in all shapes, sizes, colors and commitments… There are gazer purists where everything is “black or white” and intervals and durations are tracked to the closest second.  There is also the other extreme with the casual observer who thought the eruption was pretty cool and if he happened across another one he would sit and wait.   I would guess that most “gazers” are somewhere between the two extremes.

When I can’t be in the park I rely on what others have to say about the features and their observations.   The Internet has helped this tremendously with websites like GOSA (Geyser Observation and Study Association) , and email lists that keep me updated.  I have also found the webcam to be invaluable… You can see below the first image is what we’ve had for many years… clicking on it will bring you to the page that updates every 30 seconds or so…. but if you have the bandwidth I recommend you click on PLAY in the media player… A live image from the boardwalk at Old Faithful will begin.   I’m not sure who has control of this camera but it has incredible zooming capability and they can zoom right up to the boardwalk at Lion…they can also direct this camera down basin so you can see the steam clouds of Daisy, Grand, Giant, etc…

 Enjoy and if you have other links that might be of interest or comments let us know!!!

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