One of Yellowstone National Park’s most famous attractions is the Excelsior Geyser.
While the geyser is mostly dormant these days and its waters simply boil over into the Firehole River, Excelsior used to erupt frequently sending water as high as 300 feet into the air. The geyser’s ‘internal plumbing’ broke down over a hundred years ago, but the eruptions used to be quite the spectacle.
John Muir wrote in his book Our National Parks– “Near the Prismatic Spring is the great Excelsior Geyser, which is said to throw a column of boiling water 60 to 70 feet in diameter to a height of from 50 to 300 feet, at irregular periods. This is the greatest of all the geysers yet discovered anywhere.”
Excelsior is still a popular attraction, and it appears that Yellowstone’s park rangers have a unique way to recover articles of clothing that blow into the geyser’s crater- a fishing rod.
Check out the video below of a ranger trying to recover a lost hat:
Not a bad job description, right? You get to walk around the rim of one of the most famous geysers in the world using a fishing rod to recover articles of clothing. Seems kind of fun.
Let’s just hope that the rangers don’t use this method for recovering idiot’s lost body parts that disobey park rules and end up falling into Yellowstone’s thermal waters…
