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Not Splendid

Well, it appears that whatever that was, it wasn't Splendid, as T.Scott Bryan reports that the slime around Splendid is thick and alive, and the marker from previous years still in place. And I was so looking forward to having a nice, quiet place to wait for Giant eruptions this summer.

This demonstrates one of the problems with observing geysers from unfamiliar locations and under unfamiliar conditions. It can just be hard to tell sometimes what's going on, especially when the geysers themselves are acting a little different. Combine all three, and sometimes all one can say is, "I saw something weird, and I have no idea what it was." Spend enough time in the geyser basins, and you will never stop seeing steam clouds you can't quite place.

The problem is worse with the camera, as it affords only a limited field of view, and if the operator doesn't pan around or widen the view, one can have no idea where exactly it is pointing. And it's from a vantage point from which almost no one has spent any time in person.

Back in the mid-1980s during one of Splendid's active periods, I put in quite a bit of effort keeping an eye on Daisy's intervals. (This was pre-radio days, mind you. It wasn't until 1986 when I was able to say in a CB borrowed from Railey that I "saw something erupting in the Giant Group.") Since I was staying in the Box behind the Lodge, an ideal vantage point for these frequent checks was the fencing to the west of the Lodge, not to far from where the camera is now. For every predicted eruption I'd head over to that same spot, wait a few minutes for the Daisy eruption, then go back to what I was doing. If I didn't see Daisy after 5 or 10 minutes, it was time to head down basin, or at least the the Visitor Center to learn if it had had a short interval. I know that on several occasions, gray stormy days with the wind pushing steam in different directions, I couldn't be sure what I was seeing. Sometimes I relied on the fact that the length of the eruption matched Daisy's 3m43s average in order to not have to make that wet trip down basin. Conversely, a two minute duration was good news, and it meant that it was time to head down. (And if it hadn't been for these frequent Daisy checks, I'd never seen that eruption of Big Cub.)