Old Faithful

I hope that you have enjoyed the posts over the past week. They were all posted in advance because Michelle and I have spent the past week taking pictures in Yellowstone National Park. I believe that this was our 7th trip to Yellowstone and despite some of the weather and other factors we had a very fun and productive trip.

Our typical day of vacation consisted of 12 to 15 hours of either shooting or driving or most often both. This did not leave me with much time to work on the raw images so I decided to start with something easy like Old Faithful. Old Faithful was named by the Washburn Expedition in 1870. The Washburn Expedition, which was headed by Henry Washburn the surveyor general of Montana, surveyed and named many of the landmarks in what is now Yellowstone Park.Old Faithful received its name because of its size and the frequency in which it erupted, however it is not the largest or the most regularly erupting geyser in Yellowstone. Old faithful erupts every 35 minutes to two hours. Because it has been thoroughly studied for many years it is pretty easy for the park staff to predict, with in a few minutes, when the next eruption will take place. Eruptions last anywhere from about a minute and a half to five minutes. From the first picture you can see that the eruption begins with small puffs of steam which emit from the geyser. Eventually boiling water joins with the steam rising anywhere from 90 to 184 feet above the ground, second pic. The flow of water and steam then begin to slow down until the geyser goes silent again, above.

Next to Old Faithful stand the Old Faithful Inn. The Inn was built back in 1903-1904 largely with local lodgepole pine logs. It is currently the worlds largest log hotel that is still in existence, at 700 feet in length and 7 stories high. The lobby opens up 65 feet to the ceiling with balconies lining its sides and a 85 foot 500 ton rhyolite fireplace standing in the center. The hotel was damaged during the Hebgen Lake earthquake in 1959 and was almost consumed by fire in the North Fork Fire of 1988 but it managed to survive and in 1987 it was designated a National Historic Landmark. Through the century plus that the hotel has been standing it has housed many thousands of visitors to the park as well as 6 US Presidents.