On July 8, I needed to head up to Gardiner, Montana and drove through Yellowstone. I wanted to stop at Norris Geyser Basin to photograph the area in the early light but the fog most of the way up was pretty thick. As I came to the entrance to the geyser basin, the fog thinned out so I decided to go ahead and check things out. I met a family from California and we walked down to Porcelain Basin together and talked about the park. They mentioned they hoped to see Steamboat Geyser erupt. Steamboat is the largest active geyser in the world, reaching heights of almost 400 feet. It’s been in an active face for the past few years but had only erupted once since early May. They started to head off and I started to photograph when the ground started to rumble and a roar broke the stillness of the morning. I looked south and over a quarter mile away, the huge water column of Steamboat could be seen rising over the landscape. I yelled to the family that Steamboat was erupting and we all headed in that direction. The water phase can last for almost an hour so we had plenty of time to enjoy the show. This photo is from the south side of the geyser and the low morning sun illuminates the geyser. Mostly steam is visible and the foreground waterfall is completely made up of water from Steamboat. Most the moisture in the left side of this image is water falling back down from the geyser. I had to walk through that a couple of times and was quite drenched from the experience. It was also important to make sure none of that got on any of my camera equipment as the minerals would damage the glass. Over the past couple of years, I’ve seen Steamboat in both water eruption and steam phase but this was the first time I had been there from the beginning and it was an experience I’ll never forget. I’ll share some more images of the largest active geyser in the world in a few more days.