[Geysers] Short spring geyser report

[Gordon Bower]

Our first trip into the park this year, April 22-23, was just a quick one to see what was open and get a feel for what to expect on the rest of our early-season weekends. So far it was a pleasant surprise. ALL of the trails in the Upper Basin and Norris, as well as the Black Sand, Biscuit, Midway, and Fountain Paint Pots trails, were open. The grizzly bear that had been frequenting the Upper Basin hadn't been seen since the early morning of the 21st. It sounded like they were closing trails the day a bear was seen and reopening them within a day when the bear moved on. I remember lots of springs where you couldnt go ANYwhere in the Upper Basin until after the first of May.

The NPS logbook is already in "2 pages per day" format, and the visitor center staff were all very friendly about access to the book and did a good job monitoring the radio for geyser news. Rather curiously, there were a lot times that were in the webcam log but not in the logbook and vice versa. The two together form a nearly complete picture of Plume, Lion, Depression, etc in daylight hours, but there doesn't appear to be a mechanism in place for combining the two data streams, which is unfortunate. 

On the Hill, Little Squirt splashed a couple times but failed to start Saturday afternoon; water levels acted as they usually did "the day of Little Squirt", e.g. Silver Spring dropping almost out of sight and boiling hard. This presumably is the explanation for the earlier than expected Beehive Saturday (and, perhaps, also for the way Plume was running 80 minutes Friday but 60 minutes Saturday?) Aurum is very, very full of water: substantial discharge from the main vent and the satellite vent by the 3-hour mark, lots of times standing water is visible in the main vent gently boiling a few inches below the rim; at least 4 other cracks in the formation besides the prominent satellite vent bubbling and oozing. Little Cub is less fortunate: its durations are down to 5½ minutes, on 40-45 minute intervals that would normally accompany 6 or 7 minute durations. The trail to Solitary is...well...passable in the morning when the snow is frozen hard, but we did it in the afternoon and sunk in pretty deep. We were rewarded with a few goodsized eruptions on a beautiful sunny day for our trouble though. It will be pretty much unwalkable for the next few weeks until the deep soft snow turns into shallow soft snow and then mud.

I did not see a peep out of Sawmill the whole time I was there. Many very long Tardy eruptions. Penta did not cooperate for me, erupting only when I wasn't in the basin, but active every day. I saw one 2-eruption Churn series, starting several minutes after a very long Tardy ended; at least two other 3-eruption series were in the logbook. Two nice 2-burst Grands; two merely adequate Oblongs (water visible from Grand, but no monster eruptions like I got used to seeing the last couple years).

Nobody has yet posted to the list about Fan and Mortar. I understand secondhand that the first eruption since opening day happened around midday Friday, while everyone was elsewhere. I may or may not have seen a steam cloud from it from Biscuit Basin between 1300 and 1330. I didn't personally make it farther downbasin than Grand either day, so no details from me on what it did before or after.

At Biscuit Basin, Jewel is having nice strong eruptions - sometimes up to 20 seconds of continuous surging at the start instead of pausing between what would normally be first, second, and third bursts - and producing a modest amount of runoff despite the low water level. Intervals were 10 to 12 minutes instead of the usual 7 to 9 (and no corresponding increase in duration.) Rusty is also having some very impressive eruptions, sometimes hitting 3 to 4 meters instead of the usual eyeball-height-or-lower play, and also waiting 2 or 3 minutes between them instead of the 1½ or so I remember in the past. Avoca Spring is surging noisily, splattering a bit of water over the rim and even managing to moisten its runoff channel. I saw nothing out of any of the Silver Globes. One closed  Outpost interval of 11 minutes.

No news on Till or Flood. Water levels in the Fountain Group are very low (pool out of sight in Fountain's crater unless it's erupting) and the one eruption of Super Frying Pan I saw was only 5 minutes long. Steve Eide, among others, may be posting more details on Fountain; at least one eruption a day was making its way into the logbook.

At Norris, Steamboat was having frequent strong minors, and putting a healthy amount of water down the channel - all south vent and all angled, however. Dare we hope that it still "normally" progresses to South function after it has been dead? The view from the upper platform is impressive; in many places at Norris, there is enough snow that your feet are higher than the tops of the boardwalk handrails, and at Steamboat you are tall enough to see over the tops of the pine trees that obscure the view from the upper platform the rest of the year. In the cold morning air, the billows of steam looked almost like "an Echinus eruption in the wrong place," from a distance.

Echinus was still in steady overflow. Green Dragon was below overflow; Yellow Funnel was very low, and iron-oxide-red rather than yellow at all. Porkchop is still drained, the pool on Porkchop's shoulder just below overflow. Many intensely active perpetual spouters in the area between Pearl and Yellow Funnel. The one nearest where the trail descends from Yellow Funnel was big enough to be a contender for second-largest geyser at Norris (behind Steamboat minors.) Pearl was splashing weakly. A sickly green-brown color at the outer rim of its crater and in the runoff.

Vixen remains active every few minutes. We watched several eruptions; the two weakest just filled the pool, splashed once, and drained; more typically it lasted up to 20 seconds and got a few spikes to 4 or 5 meters. The little bit of water that was making it over the outer rim and oozing through the gravel was moving toward Pearl and under the trail, not toward Tantalus Creek as it did 20 years ago. There was considerable wash in the gravel leading under the trail here. Just a tiny wisp of steam from the hot ground on the other side of the boardwalk. I have to wonder how much of the increase in "ground temperature" on the Volcano Observatory webpage was really the ground heating up, and how much was the area being saturated in boiling runoff from a Vixen major.

Veteran looks promising too; the front pool has fresh spiny orange geyserite, implying the pool fills about high enough to cover the vent fairly frequently. The back vent was splashing noisily. The "auxiliary pool" toward Cistern Spring was puffing lots of steam with audible splashing just below the surface. Rubble has cleared its vent - in place of the slumped soil, a diamond-shaped 50x50cm vent, geyserite at the rim, steaming water just below the top. There didnt appear to be any recent rearranging of the runoff channel, however. A perpetual spouter between Minute and Monarch is doing very well this spring, getting up to at least a meter and starting to cement the gravel berm around its vent into a respectable little cone.

I spent very little time in the Porcelain Basin partly because of the snow on the trails, and partly because from the overlook, all the excitement appears to be in the far corner of the basin where the trails do not go. :(