[Geysers] Pygmy Geyser

[Gordon Bower]

I am not 100% sure everyone in this thread has been talking about the same feature. Not like any of us know how many holes are hidden under the loose gravel on Geyser Hill.

In particular, Jeff Cross's post of seeing gravel sputter during Bronze Spring reminded me of some moderately ancient history: in the fall of 1987 we took some friends on a Yellowstone weekend. On our Geyser Hill walk, we heard a sputtering noise under the boardwalk in this same general area. Peeking underneath there was some bubbling in loose gravel to an inch or so high. (One of the friends was sufficiently impressed by a 12-year-old predicting Old Faithful for her that she tried to name it after me; we told her you couldn't name geysers after people, so she substituted "Gordwalk Geyser" for it.) We made a note, in the margin of our old copy of Scott's book, of the location: it was some distance east of the bend in the boardwalk. I'd put it south of the "u" in Sulphide Spring on the map. For the short time we stood there, it seemed to be continuously active.

On our next visit to the park, the site was filled in with fresh silt and flooded by runoff. (I forget, at the moment, if this is Dome's runoff or the easternmost runoff channel from Giantess - but it creates a big swamp that oozes under the boardwalk and joins with Bronze Spring's runoff channel.) Every now and then I returned to the spot in the early 90s; I never saw any activity again. But if that swamp dried up, no reason why it couldn't have broken out again.

>From the description, I wonder if Jeff saw a later incarnation of this feature (which appears not to be the same as Pygmy as described by everyone else in this thread.)

GRB




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