Lone Star Geyser Basin

This is the most easily reached waterfall in the district. A marked pullout just south of Old Faithful and a short walk from the car offers the visitor easy access to view this 125 ft cascade.

Built during the winter of 1903-04, the Old Faithful Inn is one of the few remaining log hotels in the United States. It is a masterpiece of rustic architecture in its stylized design and fine craftsmanship. Its influence on American architecture, particularly park architecture, was immeasurable. The building is a rustic log and wood-frame structure with gigantic proportions: nearly 700 ft in length and seven stories high. The lobby of the hotel features a 65 ft ceiling, a massive rhyolite fireplace, and railings made of contorted lodgepole pine. Visitors can stand in the middle of the lobby and look up at the exposed structure, or climb up a gnarled log staircase to one of the balconies and look up, down, or across. Wings were added to the hotel in 1915 and 1927, and today there are 327 rooms available to guests in this National Historic Landmark.

Built in 1897, this is the oldest structure in the Old Faithful area still in use. The "knotty pine" porch is a popular resting place for visitors, providing a great view of Geyser Hill. (The oldest building at Old Faithful was built as a photo studio in 1897 for F. Jay Haynes. It used to be 700 ft southwest of Beehive Geyser and about 350 ft northwest of the front of the Old Faithful Inn, but it now stands near the intersection of the Grand Loop Road and the fire lane, near the crosswalk.).

Yellowstone, as a whole, possesses close to sixty percent of the world's geysers, and the Upper Geyser Basin is home to the largest numbers of this fragile feature found in the park, including the iconic "Old Faithful" geyser. Old Faithful, the world's most famous geyser, has large eruptions occurring an average of about once every eighty minutes, although the timing between each eruption varies by as much as an hour and has been increasing over the years. Rangers are able to predict the geyser's eruptions to within about ten minutes, provided the duration of the previous eruption is known. In addition to Old Faithful, this basin contains an additional 150 geysers within a one square mile (0.25 mi2) area; of this remarkable number, the eruptions of Castle, Grand, Daisy, Riverside, and Old Faithful are predicted regularly by the naturalist staff. In addition to geysers the area is home to numerous hot springs. Boardwalks allow access to the most interesting areas. Do not leave the trails; the surface here is thin and unstable and has a real chance of depositing you in a boiling pool of water if you walk where you're not supposed to.

Shoshone Geyser Basin is reached by a 17 mi round-trip hike that crosses the Continental Divide at Grant's Pass. This basin has no boardwalks, and extreme caution should be exercised when traveling through it. Trails in the basin must be used. Remote thermal areas, such as this, should be approached with respect, knowledge, and care. Be sure to emphasize personal safety and resource protection when entering a backcountry basin.

This lake is on the Continental Divide at Craig Pass in 1891. Isa Lake is noteworthy as probably the only lake on earth that drains naturally to two oceans backwards, the east side draining to the Pacific and the west side to the Atlantic.