I am a long-time Yellowstone geyser gazer. One of my friends, who was a ranger there, told me about one afternoon when they were at the Norris Museum, up on top of a hill, when they saw a huge fountain of black mud mixed with uprooted trees shooting above the ridgeline across the valley. They immediately ran…towards it. By the time they cleared the ridge, the explosion was over, but they were looking down into a boiling cauldron of mud about 100 yards across, in which entire pine trees were swizzling around like cocktail toothpicks. Now that there, that’s a hydrothermal explosion. And of course you’re not allowed into that area.
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