It’s impossible to comprehend that much power. What must it take to blast two streams of several hundred thousand gallons of water and steam 300+ feet skyward; to toss softball-sized rocks 200 feet upward; to shake the earth and completely awe and nearly deafen anyone fortunate enough to witness it all?

And how does it work? What is happening hundreds or even thousands of feet below us hidden in the thin earthcrust that founds Yellowstone’s Norris Geyser Basin? Will we ever understand what must be an intricate plumbing system of cracks and channels and tubes and maybe even enormous superheated caverns?

Ask anyone who has been there when it’s happened, and you’ll soon learn that no one seems to have enough words in their vocabulary to describe the experience. It’s simply impossible. And this violent phenomenon has suddenly, without explanation or reason, come back to tease us and amaze us and help us realize how very very small and insignificant we humans really are.

It’s the world’s largest active geyser. Rejuvenated. Resurrected. Awakened. Blasting again after nearly 50 years of relative dormancy.

Steamboat Geyser

I had been lucky enough to have seen it three times in 1966 and 1967. In fact, I’d been leading my very first guided walk for visitors as a brand new park ranger when, just after reaching Echinus Geyser at 10:15 on the morning of June 19, 1966, Steamboat erupted. So it was that when I heard it was back in action I simply had to try to see it again. A couple of days later I joined a small gang of geyser gazers who were holding daily vigil on two wooden viewing platforms that allow us to wait and watch for whatever will happen only about 150 feet from the geyser’s twin vents.

Then, at 9:04 on the warm sunny morning of Monday, June 4, after three days of waiting and watching and sunburning from sunup to sundown, we were rewarded. When I got there that morning, something was different. I can’t put my finger on it, but we all seemed to know. Constant minor eruptions which send water 10 to 20 feet into the air became more and more active, taller, and prolonged. Water was pouring instead of trickling down the drainage channel that runs south from the geyser toward Tantalus Creek. Then, more and more water began pumping upward from both the north and south vents. Taller. Taller. It climbed higher and higher. We popped out of the chairs we’d carried to the decks. Cameras began clicking and whirring. We were all screaming. Yelling. Jumping.

We had reaped the reward.

I waited another week while the geyser recovered. Minor eruptions began and somehow the gazers knew it would do it again. Once again we sat and waited. This time from sunrise to sunset in cold weather and wind and occasional flurries of rain mixed with snowflakes. But we were willing to suffer. It would be worth it.

It erupted again just a week later on Monday, June 11.

At one in the morning.

I was in the campground a mile away and thought I heard something. I listened, finally decided it was construction trucks hauling gravel to a road rebuild a few miles north, and went back to sleep.

When dawn dawned, a dejected gang of gazers gathered again on the platforms, cold and damp but still awed by the deafening roar of the geyser’s steam phase. It does that with each eruption. First comes the water phase for up to 30 minutes. Then, when water is exhausted from whatever reservoir lies beneath, steam continues to blast upward for as long as 48 hours with a noise that rivals a big airliner taking off.

But this time, something was different. There was an amazing amount of water — muddy, ugly looking — mixed in with the steam. No one who had seen it before recalled that much water in a steam phase. Disappointed as we were to have missed the water, this display still had us standing and watching and wondering.

Since returning home, I’ve found myself trying to understand what I witnessed. Trying to comprehend the nearly unbelievable forces I saw and heard at work. I’ve watched and re-watched my videos and I am still at a loss.

I spent many years as a firefighter in various volunteer departments, so I know a little about what’s needed to move water. I pulled out my old training books and tried to compute pump pressures, hose diameter, water flow, and lift. That makes it even harder to believe what I saw at Steamboat.

It would be absolutely impossible for even the most powerful fire department pumps to push that volume of water that high. To pump water vertically through just 50 feet of firehose only 2-1/2 inches in diameter to a height of 300 feet would require a pressure of nearly 700 pounds per square inch.

What does it take to blast two streams of water through openings nearly 12 inches across to that height? I simply can’t imagine it.

What is going on below Steamboat? We know that only a few hundred feet below the surface, temperatures exceed 400 degrees Fahrenheit. In 1967, a test well was drilled next to the brand new parking lot at Norris. Water was superheated to 450 degrees only a couple hundred feet down, and pressure was so great that when drillers lost control of the well, the rear end of the drill truck was lifted off the ground.

We know what happens in a kitchen pressure cooker. We know that one gallon of superheated water will flash instantly into 1600 gallons of steam. Pop the lid off that pressure cooker and kiss yourself goodbye. We understand that a geyser works when water is superheated at great depth. It’s kept in liquid state by weight of the column of water above it. It remains liquid until just enough water splashes out of the geyser’s vent to release just enough pressure to allow some of that deep water to flash into instant steam.

Suddenly, volume and pressure increase by 1600 times and with a huge blast, all the water that is still liquid above the steam is shoved violently up and out of the vent into the air above.

That’s how Old Faithful and Giant and Beehive and Grand and all the others work. That’s what happened in the old days when boilers on steamboats plying the Mississippi exploded and sent passengers and crew flying to their Great Rewards.

Just try to imagine for a moment what kind of deep reservoir is required to hold enough water to allow Steamboat to erupt those tall columns of boiling water. Try to imagine the immense pressures needed to do the work. Try to imagine what the structure has to be that is hidden down there. Is it a network of cracks? Could it possibly be some kind of system of open caverns — enough to hold perhaps a million or more gallons? How many megatons of energy is released? Why doesn’t it simply blow itself — and maybe the platforms we stand on — off the face of the earth?

I don’t know. I have no idea. And no one else really has either.

I kind of like that. Maybe there need to be some things we just can’t fully understand.

Maybe we need a few wondrous mysteries in this world to keep us humans humble.

But one thing I DO know. If Steamboat continues, I hope I can be there to see it again someday.