Tag: Old Faithful

American Northwest Trip, 2017: Upper Geyser Basin in Yellowstone

Michael Rappa

These photos are from my hike of the Upper Geyser Basin in Yellowstone National Park, a geyser-rich geothermal area that includes the Old Faithful, Beehive, and Castle geysers, along with more than four-hundred others. As I may have mentioned in previous posts, walking among all of these cones, boiling springs, bursting geysers, and steam plumes really drives home the reality that you are standing on top of a super volcano. I didn’t have time to explore the entire basin, but I saw a good portion of it. Toward the end of my hike I caught the eruption of the Lion Geyser from a distance, documented in a couple of the photos.

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Castle Geyser (background), Lion Geyser group (foreground)
Lion Geyser (left)
Sleeping bison.
Boiling water in geyser.
Spasmodic Geyser
Firehole River and geysers in background.
Firehole River, geysers, and Old Faithful Lodge
Firehole River and numerous geysers visible along the banks.
Boiling hot spring.
Castle Geyser
Hot spring.
Castle Geyser
Castle Geyser with boiling smaller geyser in foreground.
Eruption of Lion Geyser.
Eruption of Lion Geyser.
A brief green respite before hitting the mostly barren basin.
Hot spring with Old Faithul Inn in the background.
Old Faithful between eruptions.
Castle Geyser
Beehive Geyser
Minor eruption (foreground), Firehole River (background)
Castle Geyser and Firehole River

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American Northwest Trip, 2017: Old Faithful

Michael Rappa

These photos are from my two visits to Old Faithful to watch the famous geyser erupt on its reliable schedule. I took shots at various stages of eruption and the final one has a nice rainbow alongside the geyser plume. The birds in some of the photos were actually very large, which helps put the size of the eruption in perspective.

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Large crowd gathering for the eruption.
The eruption grows…
…and grows.
Peak eruption.
Eruption waning.
Probably wouldn’t want to be standing under that shower of steam.
Steaming water, no big deal for this guy.
Keeping in mind that these are very large birds helps provide a sense of scale to the size of the eruption.
Looks like a steaming tea kettle.
Old Faithful and a rainbow towering over the crowd in the distance.

View More Photos from Yellowstone National Park

American Northwest Trip, 2017: The Movie

Michael Rappa

This compilation of the videos I shot on my trip last summer includes footage of Mount Hood, Yellowstone National Park, Grand Teton National Park, Devils Tower, and drives through Shoeshone and Bighorn national forests, Spearfish Canyon, and Custer State Park. I sped up the driving videos for effect and time—I wasn’t really driving that fast. 🙂

View Photos from Yellowstone

View Photos from Grand Teton

View Photos from Oregon

View Photos from Wyoming and South Dakota

American Northwest Trip 2017 – The Panoramas

Michael Rappa1 Comment

At last, nearly five months after returning from my trip out West, I finished processing my final batch of photos (sometimes this photography hobby is like having a second job). This collection of horizontal and vertical panoramas feature photos from my visits to Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks, as well as Mount Rushmore and Portland, Oregon.

Uncharacteristically for me, I took almost no real panorama shots on this trip. In fact, only two of the photos below were shot as panoramas. The rest were created by stitching together pairs of similar shots that I thought would look better combined than as individual photos.

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Mormon Row – Grand Teton National Park – August, 2017
Cathedral Group – Grand Teton National Park – August, 2017
Brink of the Upper Falls – Yellowstone National Park – August, 2017
Grand Teton National Park – August, 2017
Old Faithful – Yellowstone National Park – August, 2017
Snake River – Grand Teton National Park – August, 2017
Lake Yellowstone – Yellowstone National Park – August, 2017
Hayden Valley – Yellowstone National Park – August, 2017
Grand Prismatic Spring – Yellowstone National Park – August, 2017
Excelsior Geyser Crater – Yellowstone National Park – August, 2017
Dragon’s Mouth Spring – Yellowstone National Park – August, 2017
Grand Teton National Park – August, 2017
Grand Teton National Park – August, 2017
View of Mount Rushmore from a scenic lookout on Iron Mountain Road – South Dakota – September, 2017
View from my apartment- Portland, Oregon – August, 2017
Lamar Valley – Yellowstone National Park – August, 2017

Photo of the Day: Old Faithful Rainbow

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Greetings readers, and long time no see. It’s been ages since I’ve posted, in part because I got super busy at work, but also because I spent several months culling and processing all of the photos I took during my two-week trip out west this past summer. Hopefully now that I’m mostly caught up, I’ll be able to start posting more often and maybe get back to updating my trip journal again.

In the meantime, here’s a photo taken during my stay in Yellowstone National Park of Old Faithful erupting and producing a pretty rainbow in the process.

Date: 8/28/2017
Camera: NIKON D5100
Click for larger view

You can view more featured photos at my Photo of the Day Collection.