This story originally appeared in the 2025 Locals’ Guidebook featuring the Best of Jackson Hole. Pick up a copy today!
YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK — Yellowstone National Park (YNP) is known for its iconic wildlife watching, where viewers are able to witness everything from grizzlies and wolves down to the elusive pika. But for some, there’s a whole other park experience, what’s become a hobby for the most patient and observant of folks: geyser gazing.
Nathaniel Dodge, a guide in YNP and an aspiring “geyser gazer geezer,” says these individuals can often be spotted in the Old Faithful area with their camp chairs, waiting patiently for eruptions. He notes they usually get to witness “geysers that rarely go off or are on the bucket list,” sometimes even given a radio from a ranger so they can report information about potential eruptions to visitor centers.
While the pastime has been around since the 1800s, when fur trapper and explorer John Colter wrote one of the first descriptions of YNP’s geysers, the formalized Geyser Observation and Study Association (GOSA) was founded in 1983 to solidify the community as a cornerstone of informational dissemination.
“Every GOSA associate is a geyser gazer, but not all geyser gazers are GOSAs,” Micah Kippel, president of GOSA, explains. “What it really boils down to, pun intended, is that the geyser gazing community is just people who have a passion for geysers. Geysers are one of the more unique features on the planet that deserve attention; it’s important to watch them.”
“It’s more than just sitting and watching geysers erupt,” says Michael Poland, scientist-in-charge of the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory (YVO). “The folks that do this are really enthusiastic and collect all kinds of interesting information.”
Poland says he’ll often get anecdotal reports about geysers erupting that he can put a good deal of trust in.
“Because they’re so experienced with watching these things, you can put more trust into the observations,” Poland says. “The folks that spend time really observing Yellowstone geysers, they know the features far better than I ever will. They have that degree of credibility.”
In 2011, Jake Young founded website Geyser Times, a crowdsourced open database of geyser information. Today, with Young as president, Geyser Times has over 1.2 million observations in the database for the public to access.
“The ability to look up the recent activity of any geyser really helps people do their geyser gazing that day,” Young said.
For those interested in dipping their toes into the world of geyser gazing, Poland warns that it takes an incredibly high amount of patience, a level he admits even he sometimes doesn’t have.
“The level of patience is, I think, extraordinary, and very admirable,” Poland says.
But once that’s locked in, Poland recommends doing more than just waiting for the eruption.
“Think about the sort of observations or data that might be interesting if you were watching it again, and again, and again,” Poland says. “You could measure the height of the column, how long does the eruption last, what’s the time since the previous eruption, how much of an opening sequence is there.”
Kippel also encourages those interested to engage with the community, although he does ask that people be mindful that geyser gazers are all different and are all human.
“If you do have questions, some of us are introverted, so some people want to answer and some are not as prone to answering questions,” Kippel says.
“‘Dedicated’ is the word,” Young says of the community. “Quirky. Unique. A subgroup of people addicted to Yellowstone. It’s kind of like Pokémon — you’ve got to collect them all.”
