STEAMBOAT GEYSER ERUPTION

June 7, 1982

During the summer of 1981, when I worked as a maintenance employee for the Park Service at Norris Geyser Basin, I became quite fascinated with the thermal features of the area.  Norris has so much to offer in its diversity of geologic activity, mainly due to the fact that at a three mile thickness, the earth's crust is thinner at Norris than at any other location in the world.  Its geologic instability is evidenced by the unique ability of several area geysers to throw small rocks several feet during a main eruption phase.  Much has made been made about the periodic “disturbances” which occur in the area from time to time, when several of the area’s features take on a personality of their own for a brief period of time.  Nature does not know the word “stability” in the Norris area.

Most of the time I spent in Porcelain Basin and in the Back Basin was either as a trash collector or boardwalk repairman.  Those mundane chores with paper pick or hammer and nails were softened by the unique events that were going on around me.  I loved to walk around the Norris area, and marveled at the variety of active features that the geyser basin held.  I loved to stroll around Porcelain Basin in the evening hours, and spent several hours taking notes on “Minute Geyser”, a frequently erupting fountain geyser just down the hill from the museum.  On occasion, I would take friends out to feel the pulsing activity at the “Carnegie Drill Site”, or sneak them off trail to view the “fire holes” on the backside of Porcelain Basin.

For most visitors to the Norris Basin, the one thermal feature that evokes the greatest interest and curiosity is that of Steamboat Geyser, listed in the Guinness Book of World Record's as the tallest active geyser in the world.  Although the walkway for observation is set back about a hundred feet from the geyser spout, even Steamboat's seemingly docile activity leaves each visitor with the hope that "maybe this will be the day it erupts".

For me, such hope was quite slim.  Steamboat's storied past has been a model of inconsistent activity, which is self-evident when examining eruption data from the 20th century.  It remained dormant from 1910 – 1955, and, most recent to my time in the Norris area, had erupted once in 1978 and 1979, the latter putting on a show for local naturalist Fred Hirschmann and a young group of Youth Conservation Corps workers. 

When I first arrived at Mammoth Hot Springs as a member of the road crew for the summer of 1982, one of the first flashes of information that I received over the Park Service grapevine was that Steamboat had gone into a frenzy, erupting every 4-6 weeks.  Employees from all over the Park had been waiting for the latest news of eruption, hoping to race to the Norris Basin in time to catch at least a final glimpse of the action.  But Steamboat had not been playing very long for its spectators, and often left these latecomers with a disappointing view of a fizzling steam phase.

On the morning of June 7, 1982, I reported for work as usual at the Blue Room maintenance shed at Mammoth.  There I soon greeted the two members of my maintenance crew, Vern Wagner and Scott Miller.  Vern, in his mid 50s, was a retiree from North Dakota who was in his second season of Park Service work.  He decided he wanted to drive a dump truck each summer between his other seasonal visits to check his home in North Dakota and joined his wife with the flock of “sunbirds” to the warmer air in Arizona each winter.  He was a short, funny man, who was always telling us the same jokes ("Did you here the one about the woman with a duck under her arm?), but was really quite enjoyable to work with.  Scott Miller, in his mid-late 20s, was recently married, and was trying to get on permanent with the Park Service.  A handsome, sandy-haired man, Scott spoke with a heavy New York accent that I had never been exposed to.

Our assignment that morning was to patch the numerous chuckholes on the road east of Mammoth, concentrating mainly in the Undine Falls area.  Because our small 5-ton dump truck was empty, we would first have to drive 20 miles south of Mammoth to the asphalt mix plant near Norris.  This would give us enough asphalt to patch roads for the rest of the week.  So we set off for Norris shortly after 6 a.m.

June 7 is still early in the summer, so morning temperatures were still in the mid 30s.  While the frost was no longer evident on our car windshields in the morning, the morning dew and thermal steam was plentiful in the Mammoth Area, and Jupiter Terrace, although having lost a great deal of water flow in recent years, looked quite active that morning with the columns of steam rising high in the air above its cascading streams.

We arrived at the 4-way stop at Norris shortly after 7 a.m., and as we approached in the early morning sunlight, I pondered the scene to the west that I had become so familiar with from the summer before:  columns of steam rising high into the cold morning air from the hundreds of geysers and hot springs in the Norris Geyser Basin.  But this morning, something was strangely different:  the column above Steamboat, which is always the largest column in the area, seemed to be giving the appearance of billowing!

 I casually asked Vern if he wouldn't mind turning right and driving into the Norris Basin access road.  Like most Park Service employees, we weren't in a real big hurry; not very many visitors were around, and besides, why not?  Vern and Scott seemed a little confused as to why I was so interested in a column of steam, but they quietly acquiesced to my request.

As we drove along the half-mile long access road from the intersection into the geyser basin parking area, I strained to glimpse above the tree line to get a better look at the steam cloud emanating from Steamboat.  The closer we got to the parking lot, the more defined the activity became.  Wisps of steam were curling off in several different directions from a central source, refracting brilliantly in the bright morning light.  A few times I tried to imagine that I was seeing the tips of water plumes rising in the air.  The air was electric with excitement, and my heart pounded with the hope that maybe this was the moment I had dreamed of!

Vern gently pulled the dump truck to a stop near the walkway entrance to the basin.  My two co-workers just kind of looked at me as if to say, "Okay, now what's the big deal?"  Here was this crazy 20 year-old kid pretending to be some geyser expert, leading them off to an unscheduled break that could get us all in trouble.  But all I could think about was the fact that I was trapped in the middle between these two unbelievers!

I politely asked Scott to roll down his window.  The sound that soon rushed into the cab was like sweet music in my ears:  a constant, blasting roar, like thunder, shaking the forest floor for miles around.  I suddenly felt like the Geological Survey employee near Mt. St. Helens in 1980, who's last transmission read "Vancouver, Vancouver, this is it!"  Steamboat Geyser, the tallest of its kind in the world, had chosen this moment to erupt!

Scott looked at me blankly, not really knowing what to say.  I looked him square in the eye and growled, "Get out of the truck".  He quickly complied by opening the door and stepping off the running board to the ground.  Even before he was completely out, I took a full leap out of the truck and was sprinting down the walkway, with my co-workers now following in uncertain pursuit.

The ground was still covered with a half-inch of snow that had fallen the night before, and the quarter-mile walkway to Steamboat was quite slippery.  In my excitement, I nearly fell twice, for the great, thunderous roar was keeping me from my best judgment.  I had been over this path so many times during the previous summer, but now I had to hurry, for every moment lost could make a difference as to what I would be viewing.

As I ran up the last crest of the hill before reaching Steamboat, its features starting becoming more defined.  In the eye of the torrential steam cloud and roaring water vent was a plume of water reaching 300 feet into the sky.  As I stepped off the paved walkway onto the wooden observation platform, it became suddenly apparent that the ground was moving beneath my feet.  It seemed as if all of nature's forces were acting at once on this small plot of volcanic material.

I was soon greeted by the excited yells of two visitors farther down the boardwalk, who had quickly erected their tripods and were busy snapping off as many pictures of this historic event as possible.  The two men, who appeared to be in their early 40s, had arrived at Norris early in the morning to take some sunrise pictures of Echinus Geyser in action, and were nearly all the way down the walkway near Steamboat when they were greeted by a roar and a huge column of water rising in the air above them.  Unconcerned with the thermal mist in the air and the potential damage its deposits can cause to eyeglasses and camera lenses, they had quickly set up their photographic command post on a platform a few steps down from Steamboat’s main observation deck.

After sharing pleasantries with the euphoric visitors, I was rejoined by my co-workers Vern and Scott.  I was a little amused as I strained to view their reaction when they emerged from the forest canopy to view the awesome geologic sight in front of them.  They both kind of hesitated before continuing silently and open-mouthed as they approached me on the observation deck.  There is not a whole lot to be said in the light of such a violent force of nature.  If nothing else, the look of wonderment on their faces was worth the time we had taken to make this stop.

It was just a matter of minutes before Steamboat’s massive water column soon subsided to sporadic plumes of 40-60 feet in height.  Soon the water rising from the geyser’s cone was swallowed up by huge clouds of steam pouring from the large breach in the earth.  As the visitors’ interest in their photography equipment waned, they soon joined the three of us on the observation platform as we witnessed this even more powerful example of Steamboat’s explosiveness.

We were huddled in a small area near the protective guardrail, all yelling excitedly as we attempted to communicate above the thunderous roar of steam billowing from Steamboat’s cone.  It was if Steamboat was trying to fit millions of cubic feet of steam into an opening that just couldn’t possible accommodate this task.  It soon became evident to all of us that we were feeling shock waves in the ground underneath us.  We watched in nervous anticipation as Steamboat continued the show for which I am sure its name was derived.

In my 21 summers as a kid growing up near Old Faithful and as a park employee, I have witnessed much of the power and majesty that Yellowstone has to offer, highlighted by:  (1) The thunderous roar of the Lower Falls as viewed from the bottom of Uncle Tom’s trail, (2) the uncertain crust around “Graceful Geyser”, a 60 foot spouter which emerged from Porcelain Basin in 1981, (3) the surprising change of nature which was evidenced by the angular eruptions which emerged from “Minute Man Pool” in the Shoshone Geyser Basin in the mid-70s, (4) the encompassing mist blasting at the base of Lower Colonnade Falls in the Bechler Region, and (5) the fully fury of wind and waves crashing into the gnarled shoreline of Yellowstone Lake in the Park Point area.  But suddenly, with Steamboat Geyser, I was in the presence of a feature that I perceived knew no reasonably safe observation distance.  It was simply the most awesome sight of nature that I had ever seen, whether in Yellowstone or any other place I had visited.

The steam continued to pour from Steamboat at a dizzying pace as we continued to watch in amazement.  We were soon joined by a female NPS ranger who emerged from the forest trail, breathless from her pursuit of Steamboat which had started when she heard the first radio reports several minutes earlier from Canyon (source unknown), and had raced over to catch what remainder of the eruption that she could.  I immediately recognized her as one of the naturalist rangers that I had worked with during the previous summer at Norris; my best recollection was that her name was Lisa.  Maybe Fred Hirschmann will read this someday and help jog my memory as to the specific name of this ranger acquaintance.

After another fifteen minutes, it was evident that there was little more to be seen from Steamboat that day.  The steam continued to billow out in massive proportions, but not quite to the same intimidating proportions as it had several minutes before.  Soon more visitors arrived in larger numbers, clicking off whatever pictures they could take from the epilogue of Steamboat’s tremendous eruption that day.  It was not long before the three of us returned to our dump truck out in the parking lot to resume our road patching duties for the day.

I remember visiting Yellowstone with a couple of friends in 1993, and stopping by the “Steamboat Last Erupted On…” sign near the geyser.  In the background, I heard more than one person utter the words “just think if it went off right now!”  My friends both looked at me and made eye contact; I knowingly smiled back.  I knew what they were wishing for. It goes with being a member of a small, unofficial fraternity of individuals who have had the thrill of watching Steamboat’s great dance.

I have returned to that same observation platform near Steamboat several times since that cold morning in June of 1982.  I often spend several minutes watching the gentle wisps of steam and occasional spouts of water that emerge from the cone of this massive thermal feature.  In my mind’s eye, I try to project my memory of the huge proportions of that eruption several years ago over the humble scene in front of me.  Yet it is useless; my imagination cannot even begin to rise to the challenge.  Yet, if I close  my eyes, and listen closely, and can still hear the roar…