West Thumb Geyser Basin sits on the shore of Yellowstone Lake, just past the junction where the tour turns left toward Lake. Its boardwalk follows the water in two loops totaling 0.6 mile, so 30 to 60 minutes covers it comfortably. The basin was the first Yellowstone feature described in print, in a trapper's letter of 1827. The Fishing Cone, out by the water, is the famous landmark, though cooking on it is long prohibited. A cluster of visitor buildings once stood here and was moved to Grant Village in the 1980s. Restrooms here have no flush toilets or sinks, and there is no gas.
On your right in a couple hundred yards, West Thumb Geyser Basin. Pull in. Allow thirty to sixty minutes for six-tenths of a mile of boardwalk, right along the lake. Turn right when you leave the lot. There are restrooms, though this is the one major area without flush toilets and sinks. This shore was the first thing in Yellowstone anyone wrote about in print. A trapper named Daniel Potts sent a letter to his brother, and the Philadelphia Gazette ran it on September twenty-seventh, eighteen twenty-seven. He wrote that one of his men, walking near a sulfur vent, felt the earth tremble, barely got clear, and heard an explosion like thunder. Potts heard that sound every day they stayed. Now find the Fishing Cone, at the lake's edge. The first recorded account is from eighteen seventy, when a trout came off the hook of Cornelius Hedges, fell into the spring and came to the top dead, and literally boiled. Superintendent Norris showed the trick to doubting tourists, Congress hooted at it in eighteen ninety-four, and visitors posed in cook's hats. It's prohibited now, because the practice was severely damaging the cone. The cone answered for itself in nineteen nineteen, erupting to forty feet. Look for what isn't here. West Thumb once had a gas station, a marina, a photo shop, a store, a cafeteria and cabins beside the hot springs. They came out in the nineteen eighties to protect the thermal features, and most moved to Grant Village. The heat doesn't stop at the waterline. In ten to thirteen feet of water, low-temperature vents dot the lake floor, and native cutthroat trout graze around them on amphipods and bacteria.
Photo: NPS Photo / Neal Herbert · Public domain