Skiing to the Lone Star Geyser

During our one full day at the Old Faithful Nick and I decided to ski out to the Lone Star Geyser. The first segment of the trail led to the Kepler Cascades and was marked as intermediate in difficulty on the map. While the rating made me worried, Nick remained confident in our skiing abilities. The second half of the trail was marked as easy and was pre-groomed.

From the start, skiing the intermediate trail seemed very difficult to me. On top of many uphills some brilliant soul decided to walk on the skiing track without skis leaving enormously wide and deep gashes in the track. The holes actually did not matter so much on the uphills, but whenever I was going downhill I was afraid that the tops of my skis would get stuck and that I would flip over. Luckily no flipping happened.

I was relieved when we finally reached the Kepler Cascades. We went out to look at them (together with over a dozen of snowmobilers)—we were here the night before, but we more heard them than saw them because it was completely dark.

The rest of the trail was extremely well groomed though slightly uphill all the way to Lone Star Geyser. We saw an American Dipper in the Firehole River, and a pheasant flew from under a tree near our path.

Lone Star Geyser is supposed to erupt approximately every 3 hours, and the eruptions last about 20 minutes. Unfortunately, the geyser finished erupting shortly before we arrived. So we decided not to wait for another eruption, but we did break out a picnic lunch.

Taking skis off was out of the question—any step with a boot dropped you about 2 feet into the snow. So instead we worked on compacting the snow right next to the trail, and half laid down in this “clearing” in order to keep our weight spread out as evenly as possible. It was sunny and warm, and our peanut butter and jam sandwiches tasted like the best food ever.

Skiing back to Kepler Cascades went by a lot faster, probably because it was now mostly downhill. We took another peak at the cascades, as they looked different in the afternoon light. Nick tried to avoid part of the intermediate trail back from the Cascades by skiing along the road. I was too afraid of and disgusted with the snowmobiles to share the road with them. So I braved the ups and downs, as well as deep holes, on the intermediate trail. Eventually we met up, scaled a couple more uphills together, and we were back in the comfort of the Old Faithful Snow Lodge.