[Geysers] Trip report part 2 (25-27 May)

[Gordon Bower]

Standard disclaimers apply: preliminary info quickly written up the day after on a laptop, Sput editors please contact me before using information from the report, etc etc.

This second half of the trip I spent quite a bit less time in the Upper Basin / watching the usual suspects, partly because of Firehole Lake Drive being open and partly because there were so many of y'all in the park... somehow I never find geyser gazing to be as much fun when there are dozens of people all watching the same thing.

Sorry for being so little help to the logbook while I was there, but a) my name has dropped off the list of approved book-writers after missing too many years in a row, and b) apparently my radio receives well, but doesn't transmit more than about 100 yards. I think I had a total of two of my transmissions all week actually received by someone.

Going around in 'textbook order':

Old F had two shorts while I was there. Not enough to cause me to actually anticipate the possibility, but enough to leave me scratching my head once when I didn't see one between 80 minutes and 125.

Little Squirt, again, on 26 May. First saw it at 1856ie, and think I would have seen it 1830ish had it been on. It was still going at the time of the 0533 Beehive's Indicator call on the 27th, but done before 1000. An interval of 3 1/2-ish days. I still have seen no water in Silver Spring, and Bronze was consistently well below overflow (some days 2cm, other days 5cm) anytime Little Squirt wasn't pouring water into it.

There were no additional short Plumes seen with the latest Little Squirt like there were on the 19th. The pattern continued to be 70ish in the morning and 60 or a little above the rest of the day. Interestingly the long eruptions are not necessarily long all night: on the 27th, the first three plumes of the day were 0635, 0736, and then 0848. 

Beehive is remaining easily anticipatable if not quite predictable. I assume there was a missed night eruption between 0916 Monday and 1429 Tuesday (it had to be after midnight Monday night or I'd have seen/heard it, but I didn't hear anyone discuss the overnight eruption on Tuesday.)

I finally saw a Depression up close: 1250ie on the 27th, started while I was waiting at Lion, so I got to see the last minute and a half of it. Only the second Depression anyone rerported all week.

Little Cub remained stable in the 38-45 minute range. Lion had a couple of series-of-one cycles. Scott reported the 1235 single on the 26th; I forget if he reported the following 1949 and 2114. (That was my longest first-to-second interval of the trip. The range was 76 to 82 except for that one.)

I didnt try waiting for Aurum again, but did see a few more from a distance. On the 26th Scott reported the 0831 and 1324 eruptions; I am suspicious that the one I saw at 2138 was an 8-hour interval (at 2100 there was so much water sitting around that I think it had to have been splashing for a couple hours or more) but I can't be sure.

One Plate seen, 2029 on the 26th. 7 1/2 minute duration, average to small height compared to its 1990s activity. There was standing water in the crater again an hour later.

Castle minors have already been covered on the list. I suspect my spectacular Tilt on the 22nd was a last gasp: by the 26th there was brownish-green bacteria starting to grow inside both vents though the water was still pulsating.

Penta and Churn, and the superlong Grand intervals, are also already covered. Another Tardy cycle was beginning the afternoon of the 27th as I left. 

Oblong turned out to be much less regular than it looked the first couple days I was there. Daisy on the other hand has settled down, almost as clockwork as in the 80s and 90s: 1021 1227 1440IE 1652 1901 from the 26th was typical of the week. I watched one up close and got a 3m36s duration.

The two Grotto Fountains I saw were measured to be 20 feet (the normal 2-minute headstart) and 35 feet (first after marathon on the 26th, 9-minute headstart). Pretty, but not exceptional. Somewhat surprisingly to me the one on the 26th did not continue to grow in height after about the 6th minute; once upon a time the rule of thumb was "Grotto Fountain just keeps getting bigger until Grotto starts."

We finally have a perhaps-closed interval on Artemisia, with steam clouds at 1734ie on the 26th and 1400ie on the 27th. A number of people walked back there so it's possible that a start time exists for one or both of these eruptions.

At Biscuit, Wall Pool is a bit less murky than it was a week ago, overflowing more than it was a week ago, and the disturbed bacteria mats are beginning to heal. I don't believe it has had any eruptions large enough to splash outside the immediate pool area. Perhaps in another week it will clear enough that someone who knows where the vents are can offer some further insight as to whehter they think the eruption of the 17th was from the same place as the Black Diamond eruptions in years past. Shell Spring was once again dry as a bone and barely even gurgling at depth. 

Water levels in the river continued to fall all week, though the Sawmill shelf is still far underwater, East Sentinel is an island (but overflowing, the vent isn't submerged), and the Firehole was still slightly out of its banks at Biscuit Basin. You will get your feet wet on the Daisy-to-Mystic Falls cutoff trail. Island Geyser has not been submerged again since last week.

For those who like to see water coming down and not just going up, Mystic Falls is roaring nicely, a quite impressive temporary waterfall is coming down the side of the canyon and across the trail just before Mystic Falls, and -- if we needed any more evidence of what a hot dry spring this has been! -- "Unfaithful Falls", described in Lee's book as appearing in mid- to late-June, started flowing on the 26th this year.

Lynn has covered Till, Great Fountain, White Dome, and the Pink Cone group well already. I can only add that I have several more A-0 intervals, all 26-29 minutes, another Logbridge interval of 45 minutes on the 25th, and one Logbridge eruption preceded by at least 70 minutes of inactivity on the 26th. There are two tiny geysers near Logbridge, one about 1 1/2 times as far from the creek and one 3 times as far from the creek. The former is on almost all the time; the latter I saw for about two minutes, once on each of two days. I have a good long set of Botryoidal Spring data which I will compare with past years when I have some spare time. 

Farther up White Creek, Tuft is active, but doing an odd tradeoff with Eclipse that I haven't seen before. I am accustomed to the water level in Tuft rising and falling with more or less continuous sputtering, building up to a full eruption when the water is at its peak. Instead, on the 25th I saw Tuft erupt, and then both Tuft and Eclipse both fill to the brim bubbling only slightly. Eclipse had lots of flickering bubbles and the bottom and dribbled water over its rim, enough to fill about six feet worth of its long-since-crumbled-away-to-gravel runoff channel. Over the next half hour they rose and fell together, and either both were silent or both were bubbling gently. On the 26th Eclipse's runoff channel was again wet but I didn't have time to stay and watch. As Scott reported, Spindle is weak - I watched 4 eruptions on the 25th, all with beautiful bubbles, but only 2 of which actually broke the surface of the pool. Intervals a few seconds shy of 3 minutes.

People are seeing lots of Fountains right around 7 hours apart. I was struck by two things in the Fountain group, walking around it for the first time in 5 years. One is the amount of erosion that has taken place (Super Frying Pan's crater is bigger; a new hole has opened up between the boardwalk and Spasm to act as a drain for SFP's runoff; but meanwhile, SFP's satellite vent, and the third vent of Bearclaw, have both disappeared under the sand.) I don't know at what time during the last 5 years any of those things happened. The other is how low the water levels were. Five minutes before an eruption of Fountain started, there was not a drop of water in sight in Fountain's crater standing on tiptoe on the boardwalk. Or in Spasm. Or in Jelly. I would've sworn Fountain had erupted 1 hour before if the terraces hadn't been dry. 

The one eruption of Fountain I saw from the boardwalk featured a very weak eruption of Morning's Thief, six minutes into Fountain, lasting only 30 seconds and not reaching more than maybe 6 feet. Jet did its usual every minute-and-a-half routine. Spasm never started, SFP never started (in the 90s I never once saw a Fountain that didn't include SFP in the middle), Jelly never filled. 

I was at Crater Hills Monday, watched the geyser for a while (noticing it is considerably more variable / "interesting" than it was the last time I went there circa 1991), noticed that only one other spring in the area has a trickle of overflow, and that the perpetual spouter and mud pots farther back around the corner from the geyser had dried up. I was surprised to see other boot prints near the geyser - which made much more sense once I saw the mailing list and learned David Monteith had been there one day previous.

I don't know how many times I said to myself "gee, this is a holiday weekend, but it looks like the fourth of July, not Memorial Day." Hot sunny weather, midsummer water levels in seasonally-variable thermal features all over the park, exceptionally dry easy-to-walk-across meadows all over the park.


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