Little Dipper Allowed Scientists To Float On Scalding Grand Prismatic Spring

Only 12 people have walked on the moon and 22 have descended to Challenger Deep, the deepest point of the Pacific Ocean.

While the official number has never been calculated, a comparable number of people have ventured onto the surface of Yellowstone National Park’s scalding hot Grand Prismatic Spring. 

This feat was only possible because of a long-lost piece of Yellowstone’s history: The specially designed Little Dipper, the park's first and only thermal pool watercraft.

Lifelong Yellowstone employee, enthusiast and author Jeff Henry is one of the few who rode out onto the dangerous surface of Grand Prismatic in the boat built to the specifications of Rick Hutchinson, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey and lifelong Yellowstone scientist.

It was truly designed to go where no one had gone before or has been since.

“I always told Rick, ‘This is pretty cool,’” Henry told Cowboy State Daily, “and he’d always correct me by saying, ‘No, it’s not cool at all. It’s very hot.’”

Custom-Built Boat

While Grand Prismatic Spring has been one of Yellowstone’s most famous thermal features since the national park’s establishment in 1872, most people had to admire and observe it from the shore. Floating onto the surface of the 160-degree water was too dangerous.

Hutchinson wanted to change that. When he heard that researchers at New Zealand’s University of Auckland had built a “thermal pool watercraft” to safely study thermal pools while floating on the water, he endeavored to do the same in Yellowstone.

Working with Mark Poppert, a boat builder in Livingston, Montana, Hutchinson created the 4-by-8-foot watercraft in 1992. After a local name-the-boat contest, it was christened the Little Dipper.

“It was a wooden boat, but I don’t remember if it was any particular species of wood,” Henry said. “There was a porthole at the bottom of the boat so Rick could collect samples from the water, and the whole thing was held together with temperature-resistant glue.”

The summer 1993 edition of Yellowstone Science says the Little Dipper was made of plywood with a resin coating that Hutchinson noted was “a very good insulator.” Floatation chambers built into the frame ensured that the boat stayed upright.

Building the boat was one thing, but ensuring its safety in scalding water was another. Henry described Hutchinson’s highly scientific test regime to ensure the Little Dipper wouldn’t tip over.

“He took it to a cool water lake and literally jumped up and down on the gunwales of the boat trying to tip it over,” he said. “He couldn’t do it. It couldn’t be capsized.”

Craig McClure, the West District resource management coordinator, did the same. The Little Dipper didn’t dip at all.

There was no need for life vests on the Little Dipper. Hutchinson was known to say a life vest “is not going to be much use to you if you go in the drink.”

Steamy Surface

Between 1992 and 1996, the Little Dipper was used to study and clean up several thermal pools in Yellowstone. Hutchinson and other scientists acquired knowledge that would have been unattainable otherwise.

In July 1993, Hutchinson and National Park Service Physical Science Technician Tim Thompson measured Grand Prismatic's surface temperature at 160 degrees Fahrenheit and its depth at 122.7 feet, 50 percent deeper than any other thermal feature in Yellowstone. The porthole in the floor allowed Hutchinson to collect water and mud samples and clean debris from the bottom of multiple hot springs.

Henry was aboard the Little Dipper twice, assisting Hutchinson while he collected data and samples on Grand Prismatic Spring in September 1993 and July 1995.

“There was a large percentage of people who might have had the chance to go out in the Dipper, had they so chosen,” he said. “Many were too gun-shy to do it, but I trusted Rick. He’d been put on hot springs before, and nothing bad had happened.”

Henry described being on the surface of Grand Prismatic as “sobering,” given that there was “less than an inch of wood between your butt and 160-degree water.”

The view from the center of Grand Prismatic Spring wasn’t as spectacular as many might think. Often, there wasn’t much of anything to see other than steam.

“We were usually shrouded in steam,” Henry said. “I remember it being very moist to be out there, depending on the vagaries of the wind. The steam was a little, sometimes to the verge of being uncomfortable. It was hard on the nose to inhale the steam, but not to any extreme extent.”

What he could see was astonishing. For Henry, it was like stepping into a rainbow.

“The water was very blue and very beautiful,” he said. “The refracted colors of the spectrum were in the steam all over the lake. Very beautiful.”

During the 1995 float, Henry and Hutchinson were joined by Boyd Matson, then the anchor of National Geographic Explorer. Henry shot still photographs of Hutchinson and Matson while film crews watched the Little Dipper from shore.

Dipper Destroyed

In 1997, Hutchinson was on a cross-country skiing trip with visiting geologist Diane Dustman near Yellowstone’s Heart Lake when they were killed in an avalanche. Hutchinson was 49 years old.

The Little Dipper disappeared shortly after Hutchinson’s death. Nobody knows what happened to the remarkable boat, but Henry’s heard two prevailing theories.

“One version is that after Rick died, someone stored the boat under the eaves of a building with a metal roof,” he said. “Metal roofs in Yellowstone don’t slough their snow off, so you can have a 5- to 7-foot slab of snow come off the roof. That’s, supposedly, what happened to the Little Dipper.”

Henry said that in this version of the story, the Little Dipper was destroyed after several feet of snow slid off a roof and crushed it. He couldn’t help but note the tragic irony in its fate.

“Rick Hutchinson was killed in an avalanche, and then a pseudo-avalanche crushed his boat,” he said.

The other version, according to Henry, is that the Little Dipper was deliberately destroyed.

“That version is that the National Park Service didn’t want anybody else to ever use that boat again, so they intentionally destroyed it,” he said. “I’ve never been able to straighten it out, and people seem to be closed-mouthed about it.”

Regardless of which story is true, Henry is confident that this unique piece of Yellowstone’s history isn’t preserved in the Yellowstone Heritage and Research Center or any other museum or collection. The Little Dipper is long gone.

Never Again

There has never been another thermal pool watercraft used in Yellowstone, and there probably never will be. Henry believes the Little Dipper will always be one of a kind.

“I don't think anything like that will ever happen again, given the National Park Service’s concerns about safety,” he said. “Therefore, I feel doubly fortunate that I was able to do what I did with Rick.”

The Little Dipper was a legendary artifact associated with one of Yellowstone’s legendary figures. Henry was one of the few people who savored the once-in-a-generation opportunity to venture onto the steamy surface of Grand Prismatic Spring with Hutchinson, a treasured colleague and friend.

“All through my years in Yellowstone, I've been fortunate to get really cool jobs,” he said. “I've always been in the right place at the right time. I was very fortunate to run the Little Dipper twice, but more importantly, to know Rick and be his friend.”

Contact Andrew Rossi at arossi@cowboystatedaily.com

Andrew Rossi can be reached at arossi@cowboystatedaily.com.