Old Faithful
— — a hundred and fifty feet of steam, on a clock.
Not only on a wall.
“A cone geyser in the Upper Geyser Basin of Yellowstone, erupting on a near-clockwork interval that has held for at least the hundred and fifty-five years it has been recorded. The Washburn party named it in 1870. The spray reaches over a hundred feet, the column lasts a few minutes, and then the basin goes quiet again.
Old Faithful, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Old Faithful sits in the Upper Geyser Basin of Yellowstone National Park, in the northwest corner of Wyoming near the Idaho and Montana borders. The basin holds roughly a quarter of the world's active geysers, fed by the residual heat of the Yellowstone caldera, an active supervolcano whose last major eruption was about 631,000 years ago. The geyser stands at an elevation of about 2,240 metres. Yellowstone was the first national park in the world, designated by Congress in 1872, two years after Old Faithful was first formally named and described.
Each eruption discharges between 14,000 and 32,000 litres of boiling water from a vent fed by superheated reservoirs deep beneath the cone. The column reaches between 32 and 56 metres in height and lasts from one and a half to five minutes. Intervals between eruptions average about 94 minutes but range from 60 to 110 minutes, lengthening slightly over the past century as nearby earthquakes have shifted the underlying plumbing. The geyser has never failed to erupt within a predictable window, which is why it carries the name it does.
The Park Service posts the next predicted eruption time at the Old Faithful Visitor Education Center, accurate to within plus or minus ten minutes. A boardwalk loop circles the cone at a safe distance, and benches along the southwest arc face the prevailing wind. The Old Faithful Inn, completed in 1904 to Robert Reamer's design, sits two hundred metres east, the largest log structure in the world when it opened. The geyser basin is open year-round, though winter access requires a snowcoach or skis from West Yellowstone.