Lone Star Geyser
— — a cone that keeps its own clock.
Not only on a wall.
“A nine-foot sinter cone in a quiet meadow along the Firehole River, reached by a level 2.4-mile walk on an old service road. It runs on roughly a three-hour cycle, and almost nobody is there for it. The plume goes up forty-five feet, then steam, then quiet, then the river again.
Lone Star Geyser, 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.
Lone Star Geyser sits in a small meadow along the upper Firehole River in Yellowstone National Park, about 3.5 miles south of the Old Faithful complex. The trail is a paved, mostly level former service road of roughly 2.4 miles each way, open to hikers in summer and to cross-country skiers in winter. The cone itself stands about nine feet tall, one of the larger sinter cones in the park, built up over thousands of years of silica deposition.
The geyser runs on a remarkably regular interval of about three hours between major eruptions, a rhythm logbook visitors have been recording at the site for decades. Each major eruption sends a column of water roughly 45 feet into the air for a few minutes, followed by a longer steam phase. The discharge drains into the Firehole River a few yards away, which carries thermal water all the way north to its confluence with the Gibbon.
From the Old Faithful area, the trailhead is just past Kepler Cascades on the Grand Loop Road. The walk is flat enough for most ability levels, and bicycles are allowed on the paved portion in summer. There is a small visitor logbook at the geyser; reading the last entry gives a useful guess for the next eruption. Carry bear spray, give bison and elk wide room, and stay on the boardwalk segment around the cone.