Yellowstone’s Old Faithful webcam is a hit

Can’t make it to Yellowstone National Park today? No problem. You can watch the Old Faithful Geyser steam and spurt in real time on a webcam on the park’s website and, if you’re lucky, glimpse passing wildlife. And unlike the hardy wolf-watchers who haunt Yellowstone in winter, you won’t have to shiver in 39-degrees-below-zero temperatures.

Heavy traffic: Up to 12,000 people each day visit the home page of the webcam, which recently switched from still images to live video and has a voice-over by park ranger George Heinz, said Tom Cawley, the park’s visual information specialist. Heinz, who sounds a little like local TV personality Huell Howser to me, tells you how geysers work. Old Faithful gushes up to 180 feet in the air about every 90 minutes, he says.

Weather worries: The site’s camera, mounted 24 feet in the air, is equipped with wipers and doesn’t seem fazed by the cold. But sometimes blowing snow sticks to the glass, “and it totally obscures the view,” Cawley said. Or silica from the geyser’s steam and water droplets builds up on the glass. Park officials have ordered a ladder to help them service the camera, he added.

The bugs: Here’s a problem any computer user can identify with: “Occasionally the Windows media encoder software that we use to put out the stream to our servers quits inexplicably,” Cawley said. But it usually comes back up within an hour, he added. The park has put up FAQs to help users access the webcam.

The fun factor: Sometimes park visitors wave to the webcam. Cute.

— Jane Engle, Los Angeles Times Assistant Travel Editor

[Image: nps.gov website]

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 4, 2008 at 10:37 pm by Jane Engle and is filed under Eco-Travel, Family & Kids, National Parks, News, Tips & Advice, Outdoors & Adventure, Rocky Mountain States, Travel Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.