Yellowstone Live: Old Faithful
Watch Yellowstone National Park's Geyser in Real Time
Beneath Yellowstone, a super volcano is building pressure. It has been for 640,000 years.
Every 35 to 120 minutes (92 minutes on average), the vents at Old Faithful blast roughly 8,400 gallons of boiling water 184 feet into the air.
Did You Know: Yellowstone gets its name from the Yellowstone River, which runs through it. French fur trappers called it 'Roche Jaune', meaning 'yellow rock', after the yellow sandstone cliffs lining the river banks.
Watch Yellowstone National Park live
Old Faithful fires around 20 times a day. The stream runs 24/7 and includes a real-time eruption countdown, live seismic data, temperature, wind, humidity and UV readings, and the time of the last eruption.
The feed is operated by the National Park Service, the same agency that manages over 400 protected sites across the United States.
What’s the best time to watch? Daytime believe it or not! At night it’s pitch dark.
So, make sure to watch the stream during daylight hours...unless you enjoy watching darkness for hours.
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What’s below Old Faithful?
Yellowstone sits on top of one of the world’s largest supervolcano systems. The magma chamber beneath it stretches 55 miles long and 18 miles wide.
The last full eruption happened around 640,000 years ago and buried much of North America in ash.
The energy released from Yellowstone was the equivalent to 18,000 Tsar Bombs - the most powerful nuclear weapon ever built.
Old Faithful draws its power directly from this system. Rainwater and snowmelt seep deep into the ground, get superheated by the magma below, and build up pressure until the geyser has no choice but to blow.
The same cycle, roughly every 60 to 110 minutes, for as long as anyone has been counting.
Yellowstone has more than 500 geysers in total - more than half of all the geysers on Earth.
Old Faithful sits in the Upper Geyser Basin, which alone contains roughly 150 of them.
It gets the name not because it’s the biggest or the tallest, but because it’s the most predictable.
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Who else lives in Yellowstone?
Around 150 grizzly bears roam inside the park alongside other wildlife. More than 700 live across the wider Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.
Wolves were hunted to extinction in the region by the mid-1900s and reintroduced in 1995 after a 70-year absence.
Their return reshaped the entire ecosystem, triggering a chain reaction that changed river courses, restored vegetation, and brought back species that had disappeared alongside them.
As of 2025, Yellowstone is home to roughly 84 wolves across 8 packs.
Bison herds have roamed Yellowstone continuously for thousands of years. The park now holds one of the last genetically pure bison populations in North America.
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Yellowstone Park Fun Facts
Old Faithful has been erupting on roughly the same schedule since at least 1870, when the first written accounts were recorded by the Washburn Expedition.
Each eruption lasts between 1.5 and 5 minutes. Longer eruptions are followed by longer intervals before the next one, which is how rangers predict the next eruption time with reasonable accuracy.
The water that erupts is around 204 degrees Fahrenheit at the surface.
Yellowstone is the world’s first national park, established in 1872. It predates the existence of several US states.
The park sits across three states: Wyoming, Montana and Idaho.
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