Yellowstone NP --- Fairy Falls Hike

Today we backtracked down near the Midway Geyser Basin.  Just south of the basin is the turnout for the Fairy Falls trail, which leads right past the Grand Prismatic Spring.  But in order to see a bird’s-eye view, you have to hike off trail up a hillside. 

It’s pretty steep and not for small children or anyone who has trouble with their balance.  But the view of the Grand Prismatic Spring is pretty spectacular.  It’s the largest of Yellowstone’s hot springs – 330 feet across and 120 feet deep.

A couple miles further down the trail, we arrived at Fairy Falls.  The spray from the waterfall felt good on a hot day.  While we were sitting admiring the falls, a woman came up and told us that if we hiked a little further down the trail, we’d see an impressive geyser.

We took her advice and followed the trail to a fork in the road.  We came upon a “steaming hole” (as Kevin likes to call them) but it wasn’t very impressive.  We wondered if maybe we’d taken a wrong turn or something.  This didn’t look much like a geyser to us.  Yellowstone has four types of thermal features:

• mudpots - which look like boiling mud
• fumaroles - which is a steam vent, that hisses and sometimes fumes as the groundwater turns to steam
• hot springs - superheated pools of water; the colors vary based on mineral content and heat-tolerant micro-organisms living in the water
• geysers – a hot spring that has a constriction somewhere in the chamber below the earth.  Pressure builds up and eventually the water and steam shoot out into the air.  Only some geysers are predictable (Old Faithful is one, but there are several others in the park).

Anyway, we saw a nearby stream of hot water that smelled of sulphur, so we followed the trail alongside it to see whether it lead to a geyser of some sort.

Jackpot!  We had found Imperial Geyser.  It seems to erupt continuously, so there was a steady fountain of water spraying into the air.  All four of the thermal features were on display nearby, and the cool thing was that you could walk right up to them (if you wanted).  There were no boardwalks here, and no other people.  (The seven-mile round-trip hike is a deterrent to crowds, I guess). 

We were glad someone had told us to keep going – it was only about a half-mile past Fairy Falls,  On the walk back, we paid it forward and told another group of hikers who was unaware of the geyser that it was definitely worth going the extra mile.