Yellowstone's Old Faithful Self-Guided Walking Tour

We’re walking along the Old Faithful Observation Deck. But the benches and boardwalk here are just part of the 14 miles of boardwalk that snake through this part of Yellowstone.
Thousands of visitors trek through this park every year.

Buy once, use for one year! Ideal for extended visits and return trips over the next 12 months. This isn't an entrance ticket. Check opening hours before your visit.

The tour is over 2.5 miles long, with more than 35+ audio stories, and takes about 1-2 hours to complete.

You’ll see a sign for Observation Point Trail. If you’d like an elevated view of Old Faithful erupting, this path will take you to the perfect spot for it. It’s an uphill trek of about a mile out and back, and should take around 30 minutes.

It gets its name from geologist Arnold Hague, who thought the vents looked like the petals of the anemone flower.

It looks like a big innocuous beehive just sitting on the ground. That is, until it sends boiling water shooting 100 feet into the air!
The Beehive spews water for 5 minutes every 10 to 20 hours.

This area is called “Marmot Cave Geyser.” A yellow-bellied marmot used to live in that little cave, but it moved out years ago. I can only assume spewing water heated by magma isn’t ideal for marmot dens!

Off to our left, do see a lion, a lioness, and two cubs. Okay you got me—they’re not real lions. They’re cone geysers! To make things more confusing, they’re not actually named because they look like lions at all!

It looks a lot like a bluish hot spring, but it erupts! And when it does, it sounds like a whirring sawmill. It’s connected underground to a whole complex of thermal features, which makes its eruptions very hard to predict.

Off to your right is a geyser that puts on quite a show. It’s called “Grand Geyser,” and it’s the single most powerful predictable geyser in the world! It’s a fountain-type, so no cones to see—just a pool. And if you think Old Faithful has impressive eruptions, just wait until you see one of these.

On our right is a hydrothermal feature so beautiful people named it “Beauty Pool”! It’s that blue-green hot spring with a thick ring of orange heat-loving microbes—known as thermophiles—around it.

This is Beauty Pool’s sister, Chromatic Pool. It’s a smaller hot spring at only 30 feet in diameter, but the colors are still so vivid! This pool is around 133.1 degrees—too hot for a shower, too cold for a cup of coffee.

Giant’s cone is geyserite or sinter, and it’s about 12-feet tall. Some say it even looks a bit like the Coliseum in Rome! This is one of the tallest geysers in Yellowstone, but it’s far from the only geyser in this cluster.

Dead ahead is Grotto Geyser. This was almost the site of disaster during the 1870 expedition!

The Morning Glory Pool gets its name thanks to the passing resemblance to morning glory flowers. Green ones like it hot. Yellow ones like it pretty hot. Orange like it warm. And red like it kinda warm.

Daisy Geyser is one of Yellowstone’s most predictable geysers. It erupts every 2 to 4 hours for about 4 minutes. And this one is unique because its fountain streams out at an angle to the ground!

Crested Pool is 42 feet deep and has an average temperature of 191 degrees! That’s just about as hot as your hottest cup of coffee.

Castle Geyser stands out thanks to the massive calcified cone that surrounds it. This one erupts every 10 to 12 hours. Eruptions last about 20 minutes, and the spray can reach 90 feet high. After the main eruption ends, steam hisses out of Castle Geyser for around 35 minutes.

This is no ordinary inn. The building’s designer, Robert Reamer, wanted it to be part of the park. So he used rhyolite for the inn’s foundation. Rhyolite is formed in Yellowstone’s caldera! And for the inn’s walls, he used local lodgepole pine trees!