[Geysers] Geyser Report Labor Day weekend

[Paul Strasser]

A few comments about Labor Day.

 

The bison are back.  Labor Day morning, a large herd (I counted 63 at one
point, and it was only part of it) moved into the area from Grotto to Daisy
to Giant.  They lumbered back and forth, took great interest in the
boardwalks at Daisy for a while, effectively blocked all tourist and gazer
migration patterns in that part of the basin, and grunted like noisy, rabid
pigs.  We also saw them go from 0-to-40 in about twenty feet on a few
occasions.  Fortunately, they weren't too interested in the fine bison sport
of tourist-tossing.  I saw them forgo many opportunities to give some folks
the clean-and-jerk.  So just be aware that they are about.  

 

Fan and Mortar are frustrating.  In our four days, we heard via radio and
saw innumerable Bottom Vent or Main Vent splashing events.  Some of the
splashing in Main Vent was astonishing, and Scott mentioned the bizarre
activity on 9/6.  Yes, East Vent really did splash after River, Gold, and
High were off and Angle was in powerful steam.  The Fan vents never locked,
though, even with 20+ minutes of water.

 

To me, the big difference this weekend to early August was the utter lack of
activity in Upper Mortar.  Only once was a small splash seen, and an
occasional rumble was heard.  But it never offered the 1-2 minute interval
surging after an event cycle (or any cycle, for that matter).  When we left,
the interval was only 4.7 days, which in the grand scheme of things isn't
that long.  I surely hope someone is there when it finally goes. (IF it
goes..)

 

Re:  Giant.  When we arrived the "common knowledge" was that it was having a
"good" hot period once a day.  Giant would have a pretty good hot period in
the morning and everyone would ask everyone else "Was that the good one for
today?"  By early Sunday (no intervening Marathons, BTW) after absurdly long
waits into wee hours, we saw that the "good" hot periods were coming at
intervals of 7-10 hours.  This frequency is short enough to make me (if I
was still there, darn it all) want to see every large one, even in the
middle of the night.  But that's just me.

 

The only problem that I saw was that the recoveries were for the most part
anemic, despite hot period durations often over 8 minutes and fine surging
in Mastiff.  We saw only one hot period that had a strong recovery, with
nearly instantaneous return of water in just about every vent on the
platform and decent play in Giant.  But with this frequency of strong hot
periods I think what you really need is for the "stars to align" - either
have the large hot period come at the right time, which is typically the
first few hours of a marathon, and to not be preceded by a bunch of smaller
hot periods; or to simply have one of these typical strong hot periods, but
instead of Mastiff surging to 4 feet and then diminishing, have it just keep
rising.  The former occurred on August 2, the latter on May 30.

 

Probably the most impressive thing about Labor Day was the number of gazers
about.  Mary Ann Moss, a fixture in the late-season geyser basin for many
years in the 80s and 90s, showed up after a few years absence during which
personal matters kept her busy elsewhere.  Welcome back.  The presence of so
many gazers made the weekend truly memorable for Suzanne and me.

 

Paul Strasser

  

 

  _____  

From: geysers-bounces at wwc.edu [mailto:geysers-bounces at wwc.edu] On Behalf Of
TSBryan at aol.com
Sent: Tuesday, September 07, 2004 8:22 AM
To: geysers at wwc.edu
Subject: [Geysers] Geyser Report Labor Day weekend

 

 

I was surprised to see this morning that there were no weekend reports
posted as yet. I have not been doing so as my "office" is the spare bedroom
that has been thoroughly occupied by relatives until about an hour ago.
Well, so this will be only a summary and is as of about 17:00 on Monday,
September 6.

 

Giant did not erupt, despite outstandingly good hot periods (roughly) every
8 to 13 hours, with lesser hot periods between.

 

Fan and Mortar had not erupted since 23:22 on Wednesday, September 1.
(Thanks to Jens Day, who downloaded his recorder and passed along the facts
of the recent nighttime eruptions. I post them here: Tuesday, August 17 was
at 03:31; Thursday August 26 at 00:53; Sunday, August 29 at 04:19; and then
the above)... It must be noted that F&M have been doing really odd things --
such as yesterday afternoons double-pause cycle in which the vents tried
(but failed) to go into lock, then suddenly went into an Angle Vent steam
phase that was accompanied by splashing in _East Vent_, a combination never
seen before (at least, not by anybody who was there, including Tara and
Paul). Also, I heard second hand that Jens Day said his recorder indicated
some sort of different pattern to the minor activity since September 1 as
opposed to before September 1. So.......

 

Meanwhile, Beehive continues to be quite regular, for it, with intervals
during the past week all between 13 and 18 1/2 hours. All Indicators have
been between 13 and 20 minutes except for September 5, which saw a 2-minute
Indicator.

 

Plume reactivated on September 1 and is having intervals mostly around 1 1/2
hours. Back in July, Plume reactivated about 1 1/2 days after activity by
Bronze was first seen. This time it began more like 5 (maybe 9) days later
(Bronze on 9/22 was claimed by somebody, denied by others).

 

Grand, though often still under 7 hours, has had a few longer intervals,
near 9 hours and one (with electronic data) of 10 hours.

 

Daisy -- poor thing. On Sunday, September 5, admittedly a very windy day, it
had an interval of just under 4 hours. With this we again witnessed strong
convection, some bubbling and perhaps some bursting in Splendid's main vent
(plus lots of action in side boiler). Maybe the system is trying to do
something from Daisy to Splendid -- and maybe this accounts for the 5 to 6
hour intervals electronically recorded -- but some of us also feel that we'd
rather be seeing shorter rather than longer intervals if Splendid was to
reactivate. Whatever, there are different things happening on that hill.

 

People have largely lost accurate track of Great Fountain, but it appears to
be holding to an average close to 12 hours (maybe a bit less than that, as
it progressively backed up on the clock three consecutive days). Same can be
said of Fountain -- it's reported but usually just one time per day.

 

Enough for now.

 

Scott Bryan -- 9/7/04

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: </geyser-list/attachments/20040907/284c2dd3/attachment.html>