Steamboat Geyser

There was a roar in the air as we stepped out of the car. “What was that?” I said.

My mom turned to look at me and said, “Steamboat Geyser is going off.”

The four of us, my parents, brother, and myself, hurried down the boardwalk with the rest of the crowd. We were all headed in the same direction.

A geyser is a cone in the ground that emits steam. Water feeds into the geyser and boils under it. Once the pressure builds up enough, the steam shoots out of the ground, sometimes hundreds of feet into the air. Old Faithful gets its name, because the pressure causes the geyser to go off after hour and a half or so.

Steamboat Geyser, meanwhile, has a reputation for being one of the world’s tallest geysers, but it doesn’t erupt that much, at least until now. Recently, the geyser has been going off every few weeks or so. I actually got to see Steamboat in action a few weeks ago. On August 20th, my family and I happened to arrive as Steamboat was going off.

It was truly a magnificent sight. Steamboat wasn’t erupting at its full height, but it was still going up at least a hundred and fifty feet in the air. At its initial eruption, it went up an estimated three hundred feet. Everyone was just staring at this force of nature. The interesting part, though, was that the ground was vibrating from the force of the eruption.