Guess the Geyser


Every year during our summer visits, Suzanne buys a Yellowstone calendar for the coming year. The new calendar went up in the hallway to the kitchen at the start of January, and the picture on the first month was labeled "Fountain Geyser".

"Fountain Geyser"

Except when I saw it, I immediately noticed it didn't look quite right. More like Morning. But with all the post processing going on with photos, I figured that maybe that was it, combined with color changes and a telephoto shot to make it look really close up. Artistic, but not realistic?

But the more I saw it, the more I was convinced that it was not Fountain, but what? Then a week or so ago, I noticed something in the upper left corner that proved that not only was it not Fountain, or anything in the Fountain Group, but not even in Yellowstone.

It helped that I'd seen the same geyser activity back in September. What I saw was a bench, just like the ones around Strokkur. At that point, it all made sense. The shape of the water, the color of the formation, the trees and hills in the background.

This sort of thing happened a lot back in the 19th Century. I have a whole series of mislabeled photographs, bought years ago when I was actively collecting such photos. Now I've got one more for the collection.