The town of Soda Springs, Idaho, in the USA, lives up to its name.
Because here in Geyser Park, in the center of town,
there is a geyser that shoots soda water up into the sky.
As in: carbonated water, seltzer, sparkling water,
whatever you want to call it.
The stuff you'd find in a bottle.
The geyser here isn't boiling, that's not steam.
Underneath the town, there's a natural reservoir of carbonated mineral water.
But while the water is natural, the geyser is manmade and accidental.
- 1937, a group of local businessmen started talking about a pool for Soda Springs,
and they started drilling.
They were about out of money and about out of eight-inch pipe.
They were down 315 feet.
And they quit for the evening.
They were having dinner, and they heard this loud noise.
They saw this column of water shooting into the air and a crowd gathering.
The businesses downtown were getting kind of anxious
because water was going everywhere.
It was in the middle of December.
And then they had to figure out how to cap it.
It took them about two weeks.
When they stopped drilling, they were right next to the water,
but they were in a pocket of CO₂ gas and
as they stopped, they combined, and that formed the pressure that released it.
The CO₂ gas also cooled the water
to where it was not hot enough for a swimming pool.
- Turns out natural carbonated water is a thing that happens
in a few places around the world
where there's underground water and carbon dioxide held at pressure.
The geyser wasn't a complete surprise. ...I mean, in the moment, it probably was,
but the town had already been called Soda Springs for decades,
because there were natural carbonated springs near here that you could bathe in.
The first English-language accounts date from the days of the Oregon Trail,
which passed through this area,
although the springs were used well before European settlers ever got to the area.
- The pioneers would pick the warm springs out to do laundry,
and they would mix their flour to make their bread with the soda springs.
Because they didn't need yeast and their bread would rise.
And of the hundreds of springs that were here when the early pioneers
came through, there are five that I know of left that have soda water.
The majority of those springs were covered up in
1923 when they built the Alexander Dam.
The rest of them...
spring was in the way, it got filled in and covered over.
At one time, they bottled the water.
Not from any of the springs the city has, but they bottled it and sold it worldwide.
- So when this thing started, it wasn't so much a geyser as it was a blown-out well,
putting out enough water to flood parts of the town with seltzer.
The entire underground reservoir was pushing up through the borehole.
- The geyser ran continuously for a while and the officials at the Park
must have said something about some irregularities in Old Faithful.
And the Secretary of the Interior sent a telegram to the city offices telling
them to shut the geyser off immediately and notify them they had done that.
So they did. And then it was determined that had no impact on the geyser basin.
And so they gave them back the permission to operate the geyser.
When I was a boy in the 1960s,
a city employee would go into a little shed where the control for the valve was
and manually turn the valve on and manually turn it off.
If the wind was blowing towards town, he was not supposed to turn it on.
Now they have a electronic timer and it goes off every hour on the hour.
- Someone realized that if they put a timer valve on their new geyser, well,
that could be a pretty good tourist attraction.
And the result is this colossal 20 meter eruption,
for eight minutes, on the hour, every hour.
All the orange stuff around it is travertine, mineral deposits
that have built up over the years, because this is mineral water.
- You don't want to park your car where it might get overspray
from the geyser, because of the mineral in the water.
If you did that over time, you'd have a real problem getting that hard water off.
Some of the graves on the northeast corner of the cemetery
have been impacted by the overspray, as has the walkway around it.
It's all coated in a rock.
The headstones, some of them are not readable anymore.
- The town's publicity says that this is the world's only captive geyser.
That does depend on how you define it.
There's a couple of places in Germany that would probably take issue with that.
It does seem to be the only one in America.
And as far as I can tell, it's the only one on a regular timer,
where the public can just turn up and watch for no admission fee.
And I know the obvious question is, what does that water taste like?
I could try and stand over there with a glass for the next eruption,
catch the water, get soaked, but I don't need to.
Because at Octagon Springs on the other side of the railway tracks,
the city has thoughtfully provided a little ramp, and you can just get a glass.
That's really nice.
I don't know what I was expecting.
That's just nice, lightly carbonated water. It's not too fizzy.
That's...
I would happily buy that in a bottle.