Ten years ago, I wrote: Has it been ten years since we visited Yellowstone NP? So it has. Tempus fugit, dude.

I see that decade and raise it by another decade. The children who went with us are now grown. The green Sienna we drove across North America that year and the next, to the Canadian Rockies, is long gone, to a junkyard or just maybe still held together with wire and gum and puttering around some distant road in Mexico.

Less than a week after our visit, I wrote: Naturally we visited Old Faithful. Gotta go see Old Faithful, and wait for it to fulfill its impressive duty, which it did for us at about 6:45 pm on August 5, 2005, pretty much as the rangers predicted — at the information booth, they wrote an estimated time of eruption on a little whiteboard.

That exact eruption 20 years ago.

The geyser is still blowing regularly, according to the NPS, though a little more slowly:

“Old Faithful is one of nearly 500 geysers in Yellowstone and one of six that park rangers currently predict. It is uncommon to be able to predict geyser eruptions with regularity and Old Faithful has lived up to its name, only lengthening the time between eruptions by about 30 minutes in the last 30 years. Thermal features change constantly and it is possible Old Faithful may stop erupting someday.”