As the next party of explorers were leaving the basin, ascending the river, this grand old geyser, which stands sentinel at the head of the valley, gave them a magnificent parting display. "With little or no preliminary warning," writes Dr. Hayden, "it shot up a column of water about six feet in diameter to the height of 100 to 150 feet, and by a succession of impulses seemed to hold it up steadily for the space of fifteen minutes, the great mass of water falling directly back into the basin, and flowing over the edges and down the sides in large streams. When the action ceases, the water recedes beyond sight, and nothing is heard but the occasional escape of steam until another exhibition occurs. This is one of the most accommodating geysers in the basin, and during our stay played once an hour quite regularly."
Old Faithful stands alone, though surrounded by a number of old geyser hills, whether built up in past ages by one spring shifting its position from time to time, or by a group of springs, now almost exhausted, it is impossible to tell.
Just across the river, and close to the margin, stands a silicious cone, very symmetrical, slightly corrugated on its exterior surface, three feet in height and five in diameter at its base. Its orifice is oval, with scalloped edges, and two feet by three in diameter. Of this unpretending cone Mr. Langford writes:
"Not one of our company supposed that it was a geyser; and among so many wonders it had almost escaped notice. While we were at breakfast upon the morning of our departure a column of water, entirely filling the crater, shot from it, which, by accurate triangular measurement, we found to be 219 feet in height. The stream did not deflect more than four or five degrees from a vertical line, and the eruption lasted eighteen minutes. We named it 'The Bee-hive.'"
A hundred yards further from the river, near the centre of the large group of spouting and boiling geysers, of which the Bee-hive is one, is a large oval aperture with scalloped edges, the diameters of which were eighteen and twenty-five feet, the sides corrugated and covered with a greyish-white silicious deposit, which was distinctly visible at the depth of one hundred feet below the surface.