No need. We were upwind from the eruption and just enough distant that the mist spray that it cooled sufficiently from boiling hot to just very-warm to hot. If you had a spray bottle with almost boiling water and sprayed a mist of it at someone ten feet away, the heat dissipation before feeling it is significant.
Had we been downwind, that would be another story.
Illegal hot potting is like that as well. What was fine yesterday is a death trap today. There are no legal places to “bathe” in hot pools inside Yellowstone; preservation of the area and the obvious danger of scalding and death. But that never stopped anyone from trying.
I was taken on a hike by one of my mentors once in a hidden area north of the Old Faithful area. We drove up one of those locked off service roads a bit, then got out and walked into a very large thermal area. My mentor (and supervisor) was an old hand at this and he delighted in showing some of the hidden places, and to teach us as well. We came up on several rather large and shallow hot pools, perfect for illegal hot potting. Two were right next to each other, probably separated by no more than a yard or two. One was delightfully warm and would make a perfect place to slide in and enjoy. Right then and there. At that moment. The other was very hot, just below boiling. Since most illegal hot potting occurs at night, it’s rather easy to mistake the pool on the left for the pool on the right, jump in and become an instant boiled chicken. When I said one pool was just the right temperature, at that moment, means tomorrow it could be a different temperature. It could be boiling hot, and the pool next to it also boiling, or at a nice temperature. Geothermal activity is unpredictable like that.
He also showed us several hot pools that on the surface appeared relatively quiet and tranquil. But drop a tiny rock, stick, small animal, (or large animal) into it and it immediately changed to a rolling boiling pool. Several of those pools had bones (coated in mineral deposits) in the bottom. Most were animal in origin. Some were not, but that’s where the conversation stopped. No doubt there are many of those hot pools where people jumped in and boiled to death, never to be found again. That the Park Service knows the existence of these pools and never acknowledges them, speaks to the futility of any investigation since any remaining evidence may be a few coated bones that cannot be retrieved safely, let alone identified.
Sure, when you were ten feet away. But just a few seconds before that, you said, the geologist was taking water samples, which presumably means he was much closer, possibly even with body parts directly over the opening. Was he that confident in his timing?
“Pretty regular” if you mean “more or less kind of regular, I guess, but don’t bet your life on it.” According to Wikipedia:
*Intervals between eruptions can range from 35 to 120 minutes, averaging 66.5 minutes in 1939, slowly increasing to an average of 90 minutes apart today, which may be the result of earthquakes affecting subterranean water levels. The disruptions have made earlier mathematical relationships inaccurate, but have actually made Old Faithful more predictable in terms of its next eruption. *The time between eruptions has a bimodal distribution, with the mean interval being either 65 or 91 minutes, and is dependent on the length of the prior eruption. Within a margin of error of ±10 minutes, Old Faithful will erupt either 65 minutes after an eruption lasting less than 2 1⁄2 minutes, or 91 minutes after an eruption lasting more than 2 1⁄2 minutes.
Would depend on your risk tolerance, I’d imagine. People who study things like geysers and volcanoes and other geothermal stuff understand there is a real risk of being caught in an eruption. If you can’t tolerate that risk you find a different job.
An Australian who tires of the “everything in Australia is trying to kill you” meme need only cite to this thread to show that the U.S. has at least one place where it’s as stupid-easy to die as Australia allegedly is. :eek:
Yeah, I mean, in Australia is seems to be living things are out to get you, not so much the landscape. Sure, you can die of exposure in the desert but really, it’s the plants and animals that seem hazardous Down Under.
In Yellowstone you not only have hostile wildlife and a few wild plants that can kill you, the weather (winter has taken a toll) and the ground itself can freakin’ kill you.
Really, the book Death in Yellowstone was a really interesting read, especially the geothermal chapter.
Also have to love the “warning label” names of some the American landscape. “Death Valley”, for example, although not a part of Yellowstone, would sort of hint there are some issues with going there. Yellowstone has such charming names for locations as “Death Gulch”, “Stinkingwater River”, “Firehole River”, “Colter’s Hell” (I have no idea who Colter is or was), “Devil’s Den”, and “Black Dragon Cauldron”. Even some relatively innocuous names have a sinister background - the “Belgium” hotpot is called that because a gentleman visiting the park from Belgium fell into it and died.
To be fair, a lot of the wildlife in Yellowstone will kill you, too. Yeah, yeah, the bears and wolves will get you if you give them a chance, but most people already know that they’re dangerous, and so won’t give them a chance. But the bison, elk, and moose? They’re just as dangerous if you’re stupid, and a lot of people are stupid.
Agreed. I got the Kindle version after that thread back in November 2016 about the guy who died in June 2016. The book had been updated to a second edition, published in January 2014, to include a number of additional stories.
The first chapter, involving all the known hot-water deaths, was unspeakably horrifying, especially the story of John Mark Williams’s death in 1988. In fact, why am I even thinking about this again?
Truth.
Moose, especially, are lethal. They’re the least-tractible of all the ungulates. Of course, if I looked like a moose I might have a bad attitude, too.
The predominant species in Yellowstone is Lodgepole Pine. And comparing the two, I would be more worried about Lodgepoles just falling over than any dropped branches from other species.
More than once I’ve had Lodgepoles fall across the road just before I passed that spot, most often when the winds picked up. Prior to the 1987 conflagration fires, it was easy to find areas of mass blowndowns of trees in many areas of Yellowstone, almost all Lodgepoles. Lodgepoles have no center tap root so they are easy to fall over (relative speaking). All they need is a push caused by heavy winds. Poor soils and damaged root structures (bugs and diseases) just hasten the process when the winds blow.
I understand how nucleation might come into play (but I can’t really see it in a chemical pool with degrading and reacting solid matter), which would account for the boiling, per se, but how do the taps get turned on? Or is it the gigantic heat rise from the boiling mass above previous smooth surface and not one of temperature change?
