[Geysers] Geyser Report 6/20/16 (Stephens)

[Lynn Stephens]

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I had hoped to have a statistical analysis of one of the major geysers for this evening's report, but I got hung up trying to collect data at Atomizer and didn't get home in time to do the statistical analysis.
 
In the meantime, Pink Cone has not had a daylight eruption since the aborted eruption.  But this evening at 2015 when I stopped to look at it the road bubblers were ooziing water, not flowing, but at least they were oozing so maybe in a few days it will back up into the evening instead of middle of the night/early morning.
 
One of my goals this week was to try to get a closed interval on an Atomizer major.  I suspect it's doing long intervals--like 20-22 hours, so it may also take awhile to back up into the late evening before it gets dark.  (When I've gone up in the early morning recently I've carried my bear spray in my hand due to grizzly bear sightings, including one at Artemisia about 9 yesterday when I went up, missed the Atomizer major, but got an eruption of Artemisia at 0559.)  I caught a 45 second minor late this afternoon.  When I left three hours later there had not yet been another minor.
 
I finally parked at the Steel Bridge this morning to time a cycle of Till afterbursts.  (Law enforcement stopped to make certain I wasn't getting ready to go into the closed area.  I offered to show them my logbook to document my statement I was just parked there for a few hours to watch Till, but they said they didn't need to look at it.)  As I suspected, there were only 11 afterbursts in the cycle compared with the 18-19 afterbursts in a cycle before the first minor started lasting 8 minutes.  By the way, one of the significant points about the 8 minute minor is that I used to tell people if they caught an "eruption" ie, and it lasted more than 2 minutes, it was a major eruption.  Not true anymore.
 
Non-geyser comments:  While I was timing the afterbursts, I noticed a white car had backed up onto Till's runoff area and was parked about 25 feet off the road.  The woman started to get out of the passenger's side.  I quickly scooted over to explain to them that was NOT a parking area.  When they pulled out they drove north in the southbound lane.  They were still in the southbound lane when they disappeared from my sight as they rounded the corner by the Flood turnout.  I didn't hear any loud sounds of banging metal, so they didn't have a head-on collision.  Thankfully it was still early in the morning and traffic was light.
 
There are plenty of flowers in bloom.  The colony of yellow columbines at the south end of Fountain Flats on the west side of the road is in full bloom.  Wild strawberries, sulphur colored paintbrush, and pink elephant heads decorate Firehole Lake Drive.  On the way from Biscuit Basin to Artemisia/Atomizer there is a field of gentians in bloom near Cauliflower, the hillside of lupines north of Mirror is just starting to get some color, and there is a swath of yellow monkey-flowers cascading down the east side of the hill further south, also on the east side of the trail, marking a warm water run-off channel from a thermal feature up on the hill.
 
Lynn Stephens
 		 	   		  
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