Eight-Six Minutes, Give or Take – Our Wyoming Adventure, Part Six

The theme for our fifth day in Wyoming was… water vapor. Having seen the northern end of Yellowstone National Park and several tons of animals (literally) the day before, it was time to head south and see that great American treasure, Old Faithful. But we had to get breakfast first.

West Yellowstone, Montana, just west of the park entrance, is a pleasant home base for exploring Yellowstone. It’s just thirty minutes away from the main loop around the park, it has some good restaurants, and the hotels are reasonably priced. However, on Thursday, July 9th, we discovered that it’s surprisingly difficult to get a blueberry muffin in West Yellowstone.

We stopped at the coffee shop just down the street from our hotel. They had bagels, but no muffins. They had lattes, too, but I passed, figuring I would get one wherever we ended up finding blueberry muffins. We drove by a coffee… shack? I think that’s the best word for it. Shop implies too much. I wasn’t sure I wanted coffee from a shack, so we kept driving. Google Maps led me to a third breakfast stop, but it was closed for inventory. And the fourth place had a very long line, but no muffins.

My conclusion: Montana mountain men don’t eat blueberry muffins. The eleven-year-old was very disappointed. So was I, because that fourth place didn’t have lattes.

As we headed out of West Montana for the last time, without muffins or lattes, I briefly considered stopping at the local IMAX theater. Two years ago, we wrapped up our visit to the Grand Canyon with an IMAX movie about the canyon, and it was a lot of fun. But one has to make tough decisions when vacationing, and I decided that we wanted as much time at Old Faithful as we could get. It erupts every 86 minutes, give or take, and I was thinking that if we were lucky, we could see it do its thing twice before heading south to the rest of our vacation.

But first, we had some Junior Ranger patches to earn. You may recall that the night before, I opted for visiting Lamar Valley instead of catching a fireside ranger talk. That turned out to be a good choice, after the herd of bison crossed the road in front of us in Lamar Valley, but it meant that the girls still needed to attend a ranger talk. It was one of the requirements for a Junior Ranger patch, and, by this time, they had completed all the pages in their books they needed to, so it was down to the talk.

We headed for the ranger station in Madison, since we had heard the day before that one of the rangers on duty there was crazy about wolves. (Good crazy, not howling crazy.) Alas, we arrived in time for a talk by one of the less engaging park rangers. Nice guy, but not a great storyteller. Fortunately, wolf ranger was there, so I poked at the girls until they went up to her and asked her to tell them about wolves. She knew a lot about wolves. The girls had fun, maybe learned something, and earned their Junior Ranger patches. This made them Junior Rangers three times over, since they had done the same in Sequoia and Grand Canyon National Parks two years ago.

Parents, visit your National Parks. Sure, you might get a nice old ranger who stinks at telling stories, but, on the whole, the park service does a fantastic job welcoming and educating visitors, especially younger ones. The girls were beaming when they got their patches, particularly Lily, who completed extra pages in her Junior Ranger book so she could get the older kid patch, because it featured a bear.

Next, we made a stop at the Midway Geyser Basin, midway, I’m guessing, between Madison and West Thumb. There was a photo in my travel book of the Grand Prismatic, a hot spring with a stunning rainbow of colors. The photo was an aerial shot, looking down at the blue pool of the Grand Prismatic from above. I figured the hot spring wouldn’t be quite as impressive from the ground, but I knew we had to take a look. When we got close to the Midway Geyser Basin, the cluster of geothermal features that includes Grand Prismatic, and saw people parking along the road a quarter mile from the actual parking lot, I had a feeling we were about to see something special.

You can’t see the Grand Prismatic from the road (where we parked) or the parking lot. It’s up on a small hill, out of sight. You take a boardwalk up the hill, and the first thing you see as you near the summit is the Excelsior Geyser Crater. According to my travel book, the geyser was big back in the 1880s, like 300 feet high big. Then it stopped erupting for century, before reviving in 1985 at less than half its previous size. These days, it’s a spring, discharging 4,000 gallons of heated water every minute. That’s a lot of heated water, and it makes for a treat for the senses. The spring itself goes from pretty to brilliant blue, depending on how the light hits it, and it’s topped by an enormous cloud of water vapor. We visited on a cool day, so when the wind blew the steam our way, we had cool weather at our backs and warm steam in our faces. The girls and I spent a good fifteen minutes just enjoying the sensation.

Finally tearing ourselves away, we came to the top of the hill just as the sun escaped from some clouds. The Grand Prismatic lay in front of us, and it was amazing. Deep blue at the heart of the spring, fading to light blue at the edges, surrounded by bright orange rocks. We were in awe. Naturally, we took a ton of photos (Hannah even got a good shot of me, and that never happens), but we also took some time just taking in the sight. The people, too. There were visitors from all over the world there, all drawn by the natural wonders of Yellowstone. My favorite were the Buddhist monks, happily posing for selfies alongside the German and Japanese and American tourists.

Between the Excelsior and the Grand Prismatic, we had seen some pretty impressive water vapor already, but we weren’t done. Next stop: Old Faithful.

Back at the hotel that morning, I had followed @GeyserNPS on Twitter. That’s the account the National Park Service uses to announce upcoming Old Faithful eruptions. The geyser erupts roughly every 86 minutes, but that time can vary ten minutes or more, depending on how big the previous eruption was.  When Old Faithful goes off, the park rangers estimate when the next eruption will be, posting the time to Twitter and signs around the park. As we were leaving the Grand Prismatic, I caught a bit of cell signal, so I checked Twitter. If we kept our stops to a minimum, we were right on schedule to see the next eruption.

“Stops to a minimum,” for our family, means bathroom trips at least once an hour. I’m pretty sure I spent at least five hours of the trip to Wyoming just waiting outside women’s restrooms. That included a good ten minutes outside the bathroom at the Old Faithful complex. I was worried we would miss the eruption, but I had nothing to fear. Old Faithful was taking its time. We found our way to the benches in front of the geyser, grabbed some good seats, and checked and double-checked our cameras. Then we waited. Like a good ten minutes or more. There was a friendly ranger not far away on education duty. He looked at his watch, finished his story, and then said, “Hit it, Steve.”

I would like to say that Old Faithful went off just then, but it actually took another three or four minutes. When it finally erupted, it was indeed impressive. I tried to imagine those mountain men, like John Colter, who explored Yellowstone in the early 1800s, hiking along and seeing a waterfall that fell up. I’ve seen pictures of Old Faithful my whole life, and I was still amazed. Those mountain men must have thought they were going crazy. The girls thought it was amazing.

Maybe fifteen years ago, before Hannah was born, her mom and I were deciding where to go for vacation. We ended up visiting Europe, more than once. We said at the time, “Let’s travel abroad now. We can explore America later, when we have kids.” I’ve never forgotten that, and I think I’ve been planning on it ever since. I’m a little sad that I’m not traveling around America with the girls’ mom, but I’m thrilled that I get the chance to see sights like Old Faithful with the girls. It wasn’t just their first time to see the geyser, it was mine, which made the trip special for all three of us.

After the eruption, we had lunch. We were in great spirits, and the girls took a dozen silly selfies with my phone when I left the table to get seconds. We took our time at lunch, enjoyed our dessert, and browsed around a convenient gift shop for a while. I checked Twitter again and saw that it was almost time for the next eruption. It had started raining while we were at lunch, so we staked out a spot on the covered porch around the restaurant to stay dry and wait for Old Faithful. We waited. And waited. And waited. It was at least 25 minutes after the projected eruption time, and the girls had to go to the bathroom. I figured that we had seen it once, we didn’t have a great view at this point, and we needed to hit the road soon, so I told the girls to run to the bathroom. I waited for them in the atrium, where I could see both the bathrooms and the spot where the geyser would be.

You can probably guess what happened next.

I got to see Old Faithful erupt twice while we were in Yellowstone. That’s one more time than the girls got. Oh, well. I tried to tell myself that the view from the atrium wasn’t that great. And that Old Faithful in the rain isn’t nearly as cool as Old Faithful in fair weather. But I still felt pretty rotten for not making the girls wait just a bit longer. There wasn’t anything I could do, however, so we headed out. Fortunately, there was a nice waterfall not far away to check out, with a stick-figure-falling-down-a-cliff warning sign out front that the girls found just too silly. Plus some crazy mammatus clouds in the sky overhead.  (More water vapor!) So we were good.

The sun came out as we left Yellowstone (crossing the Continental Divide!) and headed into Grand Teton National Park, where we were staying that night. We checked into our cabin at Flagg Ranch, the first of two nights actually staying in one of the national parks. We ate dinner there at the restaurant, where I had one of the best burgers I’ve ever tasted and the girls enjoyed Shirley Temples as a special treat. We broke out one of the games I had packed for the trip, Love Letter, the family favorite, and played it while we waited for our food and again later in our quiet little cabin. That evening, we had a little taste of a different kind of vacation, one where we didn’t try to see or do anything, just relax together as a family. It was nice to have a little downtime, after seeing such amazing sights in Yellowstone.

A do-nothing-in-particular vacation sounds appealing, but I prefer our explore-everything approach. Bears and bison and elk, rivers and canyons and rainbows, hot springs and mudpots and geysers — I don’t think we’ll ever forget our three days in Yellowstone.