[Geysers] Geyser Report 6/1

[Lynn Stephens]

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I came back to town early this evening, and may get this to the listserv before the other reports go out.  Forgive me if I duplicate eruption times.
 
Stephen Eide spent the day at the Fountain Group.  The overnight interval(s) for Fountain from 20:24 on 5/31 (thanks to Kent Morby for getting the start of that Fountain) to the first Fountain observed this morning by Stephen (08:02) was 11h38m. No idea whether it was two short intervals or one long interval.  Stephen got this afternoon's Fountain at 16:47, a closed interval of 8h45m.
 
I also spent the day in the Lower Geyser Basin, but I spent it at Great Fountain and in the Pink Cone Group.  When I first drove through Firehole Lake Drive, Great Fountain was in overflow, so I stopped there.  Great Fountain erupted at 06:15.  This afternoon's eruption started at 18:04, for a closed interval of 11h49m.  The eight intervals since Firehole Lake Drive open have an average (mean) of 13h27m.  If you exclude the first interval (17h14m), the mean drops to 12h54m.
 
Pink Cone had finished its eruption by the time I checked it, for an estimated interval of somewhere under 22 hours.
 
Narcissus--no real change in behavior from prior seasons.  Generally a long duration eruption is followed by a short interval (~2 hours); then a short duration eruptioon followed by a long interval (~4 hours).  I have had one cycle where Narcissus skipped an eruption so there was an interval > 6 hours between eruptions.  Today I had a long duration eruption followed by a short interval (~2h51m).  The short duration eruption was then followed by an interval of ~5h16m, for a total cycle time of 8h09m.  The next interval was ~2h34m.
 
Pink--durations are quite variable, and so are intervals. Yesterday I recorded two durations--one of ~4m05s, one of ~7m45s.  Since I left for about 1 1/2 hours to go watch Fountain, I don't know whether there was an eruption between these two eruptions.  Today I had an interval with a duration of 4m30s, followed by an interval of 2h52m.  The next eruption had a duration of 2m15s, and was folloed by an interval of 2h46m.  That eruption then had a duration of ~8m40s.  (Since all observations of geysers in the Pink Cone Group are made from the road, times recorded to the nearest second are only approximations of the seconds.)
 
I finally got a closed interval on Labial today--6 1/2 hours.  Yesterday I left Labial when the interval was > 8h11m, and I think the interval was actually > 10h10m.  I left to go to Great Fountain.  When I returned about 1 1/2 hours later, Labial did not look post-eruptive.
 
Other news:
 
Yesterday evening as I was driving across the north end of Fountain Flats, I noticed four or five bull bison running around in a frantic manner.  Then I realized one of the shapes loping along in a fairly straight line was actually a large grizzly bear.  Two cars and a tour bus had pulled into the pullout on the east side of the road.  Another vehicle and I pulled into the pullout on the west side of the road.  The grizzly kept chasing the bison.  A bicyclist, apparently headed to Madison Campground, stayed on the east side of the vehicles (the bear was on the west), carefully pulling up to peer around various vehicles so he could take a picture.  The bear kept running in a northwest direction until it splashed across Nez Perce Creek and then turned west.  I'm glad I was inside my pickup watching it instead of seeing it from the Fountain overlook.
 
The weather was in the upper 50's today with sun most of the day.  I kept on my long sleeved shirt and long pants, but managed to shed the layer of thermal underwear I had started with in the morning.  I sunburned part of my hands, despite trying to be careful about putting on plenty of sunscreen.  High temperature in West Yellowstone is supposed to drop back into the 40's tomorrow.
 
Lynn
  		 	   		  
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