Sometimes you end up so deep into the Wikipedia web that you don’t even remember what started it. That’s what happened today.

From the Wikipedia: Old Faithful

Old Faithful is a geyser in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. It was named by explorer Nathan P. Langford because its eruptions happen so regularly, and because, presumably, it is quite old.

In a guide to Yellowstone Park written in 1883, Henry Winser wrote:

Old Faithful is sometimes degraded by being made a laundry. Garments placed in the crater during quiescence are ejected thoroughly washed when the eruption takes place. Gen. Sheridan’s men, in 1882, found that linen and cotton fabrics were uninjured by the action of the water, but woolen clothes were torn to shreds.

I don’t really see how that’s degrading the geyser. The geyser couldn’t care less if you threw some clothes down there. It’s just good use of a natural resource, that’s all.

I’ve been to Old Faithful and I was a bit disappointed. Not by the eruption — that part was cool — but by the geyser’s relative lack of faith.

When you get to Yellowstone, you’re all, oh man, I’ve got to get to Old Faithful in a half hour, she’s about to blow. And then there’s a buffalo on the road in your way, and at first you’re like, “Oh, hey, cool! Buffalo!”

But then in a couple of minutes you’re all, “hey, get out of the road you stupid buffalo, I got places to be.”

Because you think you need to get to Old Faithful right quick.

Not the case. You get to Old Faithful and they tell you the estimated time of eruption, and then say, essentially, “give or take 45 minutes.”

45 minutes! What is this? I came for Old Faithful, not Old Every So Often. I had been led to believe by too many science teachers to count that this thing went off every 90 minutes, like clockwork. But that’s not even close to the case.

Yellowstone Park is really cool, I should add, and there are plenty of sights to see that are way more awesome than Old Faithful. Like the big smoking puddle of yellow stuff, for example, because what is that stuff?

Did you know that Yellowstone Park is really just a giant volcano?

Actually, that understates the case. It’s often considered a supervolcano.

Supervolcanos = Awesome. Less awesome would be said supervolcano exploding. Really not awesome, actually. Like “maybe we all die” not awesome.

And it turns out, the Yellowstone Supervolcano generally erupts about once every 600,000 years, and it hasn’t erupted in about 640,000 years. So that’s a little bit frightening.

But luckily, based on what I know of Yellowstone Park’s sense of timing, it’s probably really 600,000 years plus or minus 300,000 years, so we could have up to 260,000 years left. And unless I somehow unlock the secret of immortality, I probably only need about 80, tops. My kids can deal with the whole thing with the ash blocking out the sun for years.