With little warning, soot, rocks, and ash erupted hundreds of feet in the air on July 23 at Biscuit Basin in Yellowstone National Park due to a hydrothermal explosion beneath the pool. Longtime Oakdale residents Wendy Brown and Sabrina Harris witnessed the event – up close and personal – on their trip to Yellowstone and found themselves fleeing the scene with other tourists, scrambling to safety.
When arriving at Biscuit Basin, Harris said, “There wasn’t anything coming out of it, there was no steam, it was very dormant at the time.”
Neither Brown or Harris noticed anything amiss until about 15 minutes after arrival on scene.
While walking down the boardwalk to take pictures of Biscuit Basin, Brown said she noticed the pool was “gurgling.” The gurgling lasted, by her estimate, just about three to five seconds and then came the impressive yet very dangerous eruption.
A cloud of ash and soot flew into the sky, sending dozens of tourists fleeing the scene.
“I saw huge black rocks flying in the air,” Brown said, while she was trying to get off the boardwalk to safer ground.
Some of the giant black rocks were the size of grapefruits and they crashed toward the tourists; luckily, no one was injured during the event.
“As we got over the bridge, where rocks ended up sliding into, the steam came up underneath us, and both of our glasses steamed up,” Harris stated.
Brown and Harris escaped the dangerous event unscathed, avoiding harmful burns.
The unexpected event surprised not only the unsuspecting tourists but the National Park Service (NPS) officials as well.
According to the NPS, “water suddenly transitioned to steam in the shallow hydrothermal system beneath,” the basin, causing a hydrothermal explosion. The transition is difficult to predict, the NPS indicated.
After Brown and Harris fled from the active scene, Brown said they were “covered in ash and soot” from head to toe. This explosion was the second time in 15 years that Biscuit Basin has gone off, the last being in 2009. Yellowstone National Park is no stranger to hydrothermal explosions, since a couple of them happen each year. While the reaction on July 23 was relatively small, it still was hazardous, leaving the boardwalk that Brown and Harris had stood on in ashes. Larger hydrothermal explosions that reach miles in height occur at Yellowstone but only activate once every few hundred years.
“It’s all beautiful, but it’s nature, and nature doesn’t always tell you when it’s going to do something,” Harris said.
Brown and Harris stated that a trip to Yellowstone should not be erased from anyone’s bucket list even though hydrothermal events occur; Brown urges people to “just be cautious.”
Initially, Brown and Harris planned to take their trip to Yellowstone National Park with their friend and co-worker Heather Chraska, who recently passed away from cancer. Even though Chraska could not physically join them on the trip, Harris felt her presence.
“A part of me tells me that Heather was at that pool with us,” Harris said.
Brown agreed, noting, “She was protecting us a little bit.”
Yellowstone National Park remains a top destination for all national park enthusiasts despite the explosion. Biscuit Basin, however, will remain closed for the remainder of the 2024 season.
While exploring the unique landscape of Yellowstone, Brown and Harris advise tourists to do some research to familiarize themselves with the park before jumping right in.
