by Matt, Updated June 2022
Norris Geyser Basin is one of my favorite places in Yellowstone because it is such an unusual place. We ranked Norris #9 on our list of things to do (video) in Yellowstone.
In our Yellowstone guide, we allocate a few hours for you to visit Norris on your trip.
Norris Geyser Basin is one of about 11 major geyser basins in Yellowstone National Park. Norris is the closest to the magma below the earth and contains, therefore, the hottest geysers in the park. It also changes the most.
Norris is unusual in a few ways:
Norris is one of the largest geyser basins, and it contains the four major geothermal formations:
It’s named after Philetus Norris, who was the 2nd superintendent of the park. The first superintendent was unpaid and didn’t really do much to stop the poaching of animals in the park.
So the government brought in Norris, who was a fur trapper and had visited the park before, to try to bring some law and order.
He hired Harry Yount as a “game warden” to help police the poachers. As a result, Yount is recognized as the first Park Ranger ever. Fittingly, the Museum of the Park Ranger is located near this area.
Yellowstone is massive, and the two quickly figured out that there was no way they could police the entire area themselves. A few years later, the government used the Army to manage and police Yellowstone. You can learn about this time period by visiting Fort Yellowstone in Mammoth.
Norris couldn’t stop the poaching but had a much easier time of naming places in the park after himself. Norris had already founded the town of Norris, Michigan, so he was used to naming things after himself.
He named Norris Geyser Basin after himself, as well as a mountain peak. He tried renaming some features like Gibbon Falls and the Gibbon River, but someone finally stopped him before he named the entire park after himself.
He served as superintendent for about five years, getting paid $10,000 per year, before being let go.
Norris is located in the center of the park on the west side of the Grand Loop Road.
To get there, you will drive to the intersection of Grand Loop Road and Norris Canyon Road, which is a four-way stop. The entry is actually the intersection. Just turn west and enter the parking lot.
The parking lot has 143 spaces, 17 of which are for oversized vehicles.
Parking tends to fill up quickly. If you can’t find a spot, you may need to park on Grand Loop Road.
You can drive north about half a mile, park on the Grand Loop Road, and enter the park on a walking path that leads into the basin.
In short, it’s unlike any place in the world. Because it’s the hottest basin, trees don’t grow well there. So while much of Yellowstone is lodgepole pine forest, at Norris, you walk around in awe of this desolate wasteland.
It also has the tallest geyser in the world: Steamboat Geyser. Steamboat Geyser used to erupt very infrequently. It would erupt once or twice per year, and once went 50 years without erupting at all.
Suddenly, in 2018, it erupted over 30 times. In 2019, it erupted over 40 times. In 2020, it kept up the pace, erupting over 40 times.
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It does not erupt on a predictable schedule, but it is common for “geyser-gazers” to gather and camp out for hours, waiting for it to blow.
These geyser-gazers record eruptions for just about all the geysers in Yellowstone, so you can check Steamboat’s recent eruption patterns on geysertimes.org. Perhaps it will erupt while you’re there!
When you enter the basin from the parking lot, you’ll see a small bookstore, which was originally a resting center.
Then you’ll see a small visitor center. These were built around 1930!
This is one of many “trailside museums” located all over Yellowstone. These were built to help people understand what they were seeing since Yellowstone was too big and had too many entry points to have one big visitor center explain the park, as many national parks have today.
Once at the visitor center, there are two directions you can go: to the Porcelain basin on the north, or to the Back Basin on the south.
The Porcelain Basin trail is about a one-mile loop.
It is named Porcelain for a reason — it looks white like porcelain. But there is color throughout the basin.
Here you will find many steam vents, blue springs, and green and orange water runoff.
The colors are actually millions of bacteria that can only live in very hot temperatures. Obviously, you should not walk off the boardwalks — you actually kill these living organisms, and you may injure or kill yourself.
In 2016, a man left the boardwalk in the Porcelain Basin, fell into a hot spring, and died. He was the 22nd person to die in a hot spring in Yellowstone, but he was the first whose body was not recovered. By the time the rangers found him, it was too futile to try to recover his body.
The Back Basin trail is about 1.7 miles long. There is a cut-off about halfway through, shortening the trail significantly.
I recommend doing the longer loop. This is a scenic trail with many different features along the way.
The Back Basin has Steamboat Geyser. It also has Echinus Geyser, which used to be a very regular geyser. There are viewing stations built around this geyser because it was so popular. But that stopped in the late 1990s, and now it is a very infrequent performer.
Porkchop Geyser once erupted and blasted rocks over 200 feet away. Fortunately, no one was hurt. But the park service changed the boardwalk route around the geyser to make it more safe.
You can’t go wrong with either trail. I really think they are equally great.
The Back Basin has more trees than the Porcelain Basin, which makes it both more and less visually appealing. The variety is nice. It feels like you’re in the Old West but with more white background than red. Yet, the visual appeal of Porcelain is the starkness of it all.
In the video above, I recommended doing both loops, which is a 3-mile hike. However, you do run the risk of geyser burnout if you spend too much time in the geyser basins! Many people tend to think they get boring after a while, which I understand.
So if you’re at all worried about burnout, I would choose the shorter Porcelain Basin because it is more unusual.
There are quite a few things to see and do near Norris:
Norris doesn’t have any lodging, but it does have a large campground nearby with 112 campsites. It is run by Yellowstone National Park, unlike some of the campgrounds in the park, which are administered by Xanterra.
To reserve a campsite at Norris, use recreation.gov.
There are NO restaurants near Norris Geyser Basin. The closest restaurants are 12 miles east at Canyon Village, 21 miles north at Mammoth Hot Springs, or 28 miles west at West Yellowstone.
However, there is a picnic area near Norris, and we highly recommend eating picnics in Yellowstone! Read our article Where to Get Groceries and Eat Picnics In and Around Yellowstone to find out more about some great picnic spots.
Depending on how much time you have, you’ll want to do some of these but not others. Yellowstone is huge, and you can easily get caught at lesser sites and miss the more awesome sites if you don’t have a good plan.
That’s why we’ve created a great game plan for you! We’ve been visiting Yellowstone for over 30 years, and believe me, we’ve had plenty of frustrating, inefficient trips. But we’ve learned from those mistakes, and you can learn from our mistakes as well.
I’m also a history professor, and I’m interested in telling the stories behind the park. I’m preparing an audio guide companion to the itinerary. Check it out and have a GREAT TRIP!
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