Upper Geyser Basin

Upper Geyser Basin contains a crazy amount of thermal features including the most famous of all geysers on earth in Old Faithful. It has the highest concentration of geysers in the world. It also has almost a quarter of all the geysers on earth. While Old Faithful is the highlight for most visitors, if you have the patience to see some of the other geysers I think they can be much more rewarding. There are many pretty pools, springs, and geysers. The trail is mostly a web of boardwalks allowing you to make your hike as short, or long as you want. In total there are almost 5 miles of trails to explore. I will include highlights of the things we saw. Be sure to start at the Old Faithful visitor center for info on geyser predictions you can plan your hike around. The trail starts out from the visitor center by crossing the Firehole River. The loop behind Old Faithful has a lot of pretty springs. My favorite of them was Blue Star Spring. There can be a lot of people here so please stay on the boardwalks. This interesting feature is called Beehive Geyser. It is very unpredictable but I found an old photo from when I was able to see it while on my honeymoon. Next is the area to the west of Old Faithful. We were able to see Grand Geyser go off and it was awesome. It was far more impressive than Old Faithful but it was hard to see because it was a cold day making a lot of steam. Grand Geyser is one of the tallest in the world and can blow water over 200 feet in the air, but just the sheer quantity of the water is what I found to be very impressive. Riverside Geyser is another popular one since it sits right on the shore of the Firehole River. I have never witnessed an eruption of Riverside Geyser. The crown jewel of the area to many is the Morning Glory Pool. It is one of the prettiest hot springs found anywhere. It used to have much more blue mixed in with the greens, and yellows. The pool is not as hot as it used to be because people have thrown so much trash in that it has partially plugged Morning Glory's plumbing. The park service drains and cleans the pool usually every year because people still can't control themselves throwing in trash.