Observations for 25 May
It's a lot easier going out into a cold, rainy day when you've got a good night's sleep. The early morning Grand eruption of course started just as the rain picked up, and the rain ended soon after Grand did.
The channel leading to the new drain for Old Tardy's runoff appears to be wider and deeper than it was last week. The hole itself doesn't seem much changed, but I have yet to see Old Tardy in eruption, either. The vents by the bridge aren't as murky as yesterday. I'm assuming that that means there's not been an eruption recently. (Alternative is that they are erupting frequently enough to start to clear out the system.)
The river seems higher and murkier than it had been yeserday, but I guess the cold, steady rain is having its effect.
Probably the best indication that Giant is not going to erupt soon is that all the people who in previous Mays (or previous days) would have made an effort to go down and wait for something to happen instead today went to see Great Fountain. (You know the basin is empty when no one reports a Plume eruption on the radios.) Not that that wasn't a good decision. I killed an hour down there. The amount of splashing from Giant is impressive. On several occasions it slopped out the front, leaving a steaming pool at the base of the cone that could almost have been mistaken for the result of hot period activity. But when it came time for the hot period, everything looked wrong. The southwestern platform vents preceded Feather by over a minute. Bijou didn't even try to slow down. If it had any reaction to the hot period, it didn't show it until the end. That's when it went into a nice steam phase which in previous years would have followed an eight to ten minute long hot period. Otherwise, Bijou reminds me of its appearance back in the 1980s.
Since it seems a waste to be here for only a couple of days and not be out and about, I decided that I should make an effort to visit various parts of the basin. Another sign of how dull things were is that I did something I probably haven't done in close to two decades. I waited for an eruption of Riverside. It was too steamy to see much, so maybe it shouldn't count.
Paid a visit to Geyser Hill: walk the loop, catch a Plume and get lucky with anything else. In this case, got to see a nice eruption of Lion that started while I was down by Depression. (There was an Aurum while I was at Plume, but that doesn't count.) But what I found interesting is that both Vault and Infant were down about 3 inches from their respective rims. It seems a bit long for them to have not recovered from the Giantess eruption. Or have my Geyser Hill visits been so rare that I no longer even know what is normal for them?
While waiting for the late evening Grand eruption, I got to witness a perfect example of how people get themselves lost.
The sun had already set but it still wasn't totally dark. There were three other people besides me waiting for the eruption, when up from the Sawmill Group up walked a man. From accent it was obvious that his native language came from somewhere in East Asia. But language didn't seem to be an issue. He asked the couple, "is this the way to Old Faithful?"
Now at this point all that could be seen down basin were the whitish splotches of various steam clouds. Behind him were all the lit up buildings of the Old Faithful area. He was told, no, you need to go back the way you came. But he insisted that he needed to keep heading downbasin, despite repeated attempts to make clear that he was wrong.
The second woman waiting even gave him simple instructions, "go back to the junction, go right across the river to the paved trail, then left towards the lights." The last we saw of him, he was headed towards Geyser Hill.
The man asked for information and directions multiple times, yet every time he got an answer that he didn't like, or didn't fit what he needed to hear, he'd asked again. It would seem obvious with it getting dark that the way to civilization was toward the lights, yet he wanted to go farther into the dark. Why did he bother to ask us when he wasn't prepared to listen? What would he have done, how far downbasin would he have gotten, if no one had been waiting at Grand?