Trip Journal: Feel the Burn (Yellowstone Day 2)
Ugh.
Got too much sun yesterday. Everyone except the twins, that is. They perversely insisted on wearing their hoods up even when hiking through warm geyser basins, and as a result, they're the only ones not hurting today.
Scooter and She Who Puts Up With Me went whitewater rafting, while I took the twins back into Yellowstone to watch geysers. I got nice video of both Old Faithful and the Great Fountain Geyser. The latter was worth the wait: Great Fountain only erupts about twice a day, but it is (In My Humble Opinion) far more spectacular than Old Faithful. You can get a lot closer, too. But it isn't as predictable, and I waited about 45 minutes for the show.
Other highlights of the day included the Grand Prismatic Spring (stinky, but really cool and colorful), and two different eruptions of the White Mound Geyser.
Yellowstone Safety
At this point, a digression into the safety of Yellowstone seems in order. The phrase "National Park" may conjure up bucolic visions of baby deer frolicking in the woods, but Yellowstone is not so benign. In a very fundamental sense, Yellowstone Park is Not Safe.
At one level, there are the everyday hazards of Yellowstone. Large animals such as bison and bears simultaneously attract human attention and may attack if visitors get too close. Despite the constant reminders that "Wild Animals Are Dangerous," every appearance of a charismatic megamammal brings out throngs of tourists who apparently cannot find the zoom lens on their cameras and compensate by getting as close as possible.
Hydrothermal features--geysers, hot springs, steam vents, and the like--pose additional hazards. There are many places where the apparently solid rock is merely a thin crust concealing boiling water, and while safe paths are provided, a surprising number of people seem determined to tempt the laws of evolution by trying to get just a little closer to the hotspring or geyser vent for that snapshot. Today I witnessed one person who posed within two feet of the edge of Excelsior Geyser Crater, which with a little unstable ground would have resulted in parboiled college student.
But beyond these relatively comprehensible risks lies the fact that Yellowstone National Park sits on top of one of the largest active volcanoes know. Granted, it hasn't erupted for over 600,000 years, but when it erupts it is a doozy. Past eruptions have blown entire mountain ranges into smithereens, and the current caldera measures something like 30 miles by 40 miles. That's how much land was blasted into the stratosphere in the last eruption.
This is no Mt. St. Helens.
Nobody knows when the next major eruption will be (if ever), but the past three were all at intervals of around 600,000 to 650,000 years. That means that we're "due" for another eruption. There are a few crackpots with web pages who insist that this eruption will be sometime before next Tuesday, but there's no good reason to believe that it will happen in our lifetimes. Sometime in the next fifty thousand years is the best current guess.
But when Yellowstone erupts, you won't want to be anywhere near. The moon might be the best place to watch, as most everything inside the park itself will be instantly vaporized, including both the famed herds of bison and the tourists who stop traffic to photograph them. Cities within a hundred miles will be buried in rock and debris within minutes (assuming that they aren't flattened by the shockwave of the blast first). Tens of thousands will die instantly, but on the bright side, the cloud of volcanic ash will provide a nice antidote to global warming for a few years.
Cataclysms like this are beyond comprehending on a personal scale. So we continue to visit the natural wonders of Yellowstone, without worrying much about the risk that the entire area will go up in smoke. Instead, we focus on the more mundane hazards of angry bison and boiling water, keeping our offspring safely inside the boundaries marked by the park rangers, and only occasionally thinking about the fact that Old Faithful is only the visible surface manifestation of incredible violence just beneath our feet.