[Geysers] Daily posts (help with Kaleidoscope area?)

[Karen Webb]

Didn't you know everyone's off at the FB page making memes?

Anyway, despite the fact that we were traveling sans Zayne, we got in 
insanely late last night (Sunday), slept insanely late, got our act 
together insanely late, etc. Checked the VC and thought we might still 
be in the Fountain-or-Morning window and headed down. Turned out had 
missed Fountain by not too much but parked our carcasses just to see 
what we could see. Took notes but realized it was likely we would need 
help identifying what we saw. We know the basic landmarks but wonder if 
we needed an earlier edition of the book---I thought earlier ones had a 
little more extensive sections on both K'scope and Sprinkler.

We got lucky in that the landmarks I do know were being cooperative. 
Deep Blue was full with one small vent on the north edge playing as a 
pretty perpetual spouter, and what I believe is "Firehose" was active 
intermittently. Our good luck happened when, with binocs, I was trying 
to decide if what I was seeing was a sinter edge of some sort or an 
empty pool set at a good angle for the overlook. Mother Nature solved my 
problem, and ping! ping! ping! we got steam, we got water, and boy did 
we get Kaleidoscope! Huge and gorgeous, also a little longer than I'm 
used to (ie, if I blinked, I didn't miss it). It drained, emptied, and 
then about 20 minutes apart, we got the steam, the fill, and the 
eruption. The only odd one was the last, where the pool filled and 
stayed up but only had a small perpetual spouter.

1st weirdness question: as Kaleidoscope sat there with its pool doing no 
more than sloshing a bit, a perfectly round hole behind and to its left 
from our perspective, began to fill and overflow (I assumed this was the 
Drain. Immediately to the left of this feature and rear left of 
Kaleidoscope there was another fairly quiet pool that I normally would 
have though was 3-Vent. The round pool I thought might be Drain drained 
into Kaleidoscope and "other" as well as toward my next odd feature. No 
eruptive action by the time I left.

2nd weirdness question: If the thing I thought might have been 3-Vent 
with no activity, my other candidate was the next pool to the left, 
because it had a respectably sized slender jet of water (guess a meter 
or so in height) that was just intermittent enough that you couldn't 
quite call it a perpetual spouter, and it arose from just about dead 
center of the pool.

Last weirdness in this group. I thought we were going to see the touted 
"twins" we've seen in photos. If we saw what was part of these two 
geysers, those shots were taken at a very different angle than I could 
manage. Broad guess is the activity we saw was intermittent because we 
had been enjoying everything else before we even saw there was something 
to see. At first, we thought we might be seeing a new or reactivated 
vent round the left edge of Deep Blue. My first impression, in fact, was 
that DB had overflowed every which way, and this initiated this rather 
nice cone-type eruption as a side vent of DB. But, no, the longer we 
watched the more clear it became that this new geyser was erupting from 
the right-hand side of its own pool, and that it very clearly *had* its 
own pool. It appeared to be a cone-type geyser, played for about a 
minute every 3-7.

So (this is one thing late afternoon sun makes easy) instead of the 
triad of DB, Kaleidoscope (or Drain) and 3-Vent as the pools I always 
use to navigate, we had something like this (discounting the smaller 
players off to the left:
Drain? Perfectly round,
                                                                        
     empty till K. was down to a
                                                                        
               sloshing pool Pool playing in series
0000 at far right of full crater
0000000 0000000 0000000000 00000000000000000000
Pool that Mainly still 00000 Deep Blue & Co
behaved like pool where I look Kaleidoscope
3-Vent (?) for 3-Vent
as noted above quiet while observed


Area under abservation from 1730 till sunset and mosquitoes drove us 
off. Above, I was trying to separate the pools and their descriptors for 
clarify, but the pools really all but touched by the time "Drain" was 
overflowing in all directions.

In Sprinkler, have three we need help with. We think we may have ID'd 
East and West Sprinkler as described by Bryan. What we were seeing was 
another two round pools touching as if they were a figure 8. The 
right/back one, angled slightly away from us, was the one that was 
active: a fountain, nice (10-12') height, active every 8-12 minutes. At 
one point, we though we had an early eruption and, using the binocs,saw 
that this was actually a cone geyser arising from the same sinter 
formation that formed the pools. We split on a third geyser arising from 
the sinter at the front edge of the eruptive pool---Paul mentioned it 
looked like Grotto Foutain but thought this was more of a fountain play; 
I felt it looked like a cone, although, yes, one like GF.

For the sake of interest, when the mosquitoes finally did us in, Morning 
was quite full with convection over the vents and a general wave 
harmonic pattern to its surfacd. Fountain was steaming vigorously in all 
the right places (over the vent and where you knew the water had to 
travel to get out of the channel, but it was dark enough and steamy 
enough that we could not identify water. Going to be anxious to hear 
what happens overnight. And, please, any observations on what exactly we 
saw would be welcome. I've never seen that many pools lined up in a row 
at DB and would really like to nail what we saw in Sprinkler.

I'm sure by now Scott is sorry he asked!
Karen



On 6/30/2013 9:16 PM, TSBryan at aol.com wrote:
> ummmm.... am I the only one wondering what happened to daily posts. 
> Times on a list are one thing, while a bit of commentary tieing things 
> together is much more.
> Scott Bryan
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Geysers mailing list
> Geysers at lists.wallawalla.edu
> 
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