YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK — When Ralph and Donna Friz came to Yellowstone National Park in 1949, their purpose was to work in the Hamilton Store near Old Faithful Lodge.

This lasted until 1951 when something else started drawing the Ogden couple back to the park each year: geyser gazing.

"(I love) the variety of being outdoors and the beauty everywhere," Ralph Friz said. "I'm fascinated with something coming up from the depths of the Earth and going 75-200 feet in the air."

Donna Friz agrees.

"(I like) the unpredictability. You learn patience because you don't know exactly when (the geysers) are going to erupt," she said.

Over the past 50 years, the Frizes have become two of the park's "geyser gazers," people who become fascinated with geysers and come back to the park for a certain period of time every year to spend hours, days, sometimes weeks or even months observing the park's geysers to discover patterns and characteristics of the ever-changing systems. Gazers sometimes spend an entire day sitting beside a single geyser waiting for an eruption or observing it after a sudden period of activity.

The geyser gazer community is a collection of people from all walks of life who share a passion for geysers. Gazers come from all over the United States and the world. The only qualification to become a geyser gazer is an interest in geysers, said Ralph Taylor, president of the Geyser Observation and Study Organization.

Many gazers spend their days at Upper Geyser Basin, which has Yellowstone's largest collection of predictable geysers, including Old Faithful, many of which erupt daily or several times daily. Members of the geyser-gazer community share observations with the National Park Service through radios, which they use to report eruption times and other details that the park staff may not have sufficient time to watch.

This year, gazers' information is especially important because the new Visitor Education Center is under construction, and the location of the temporary quarters is such that staff can't see the geysers, not even Old Faithful. The geyser-gazer presence adds a collection of anywhere from two to two dozen knowledgeable observers to provide reliable information for the Park Service to answer visitor questions and predict some of the geysers, Taylor said.