Observations for 18 July
I decided I'd rather try for a good night's sleep than try to get up for Grand. But I still woke up around 04:00, which would've been fairly early in the window. I still decided I'd rather try to snooze some more, so I was able to confirm what I'd half-expected: I should've gone out because I'd have seen the 05:16 eruption.
With Beehive erupting shortly thereafter, there wasn't much going on. So I spent the morning down basin just seeing things. Caught a couple of Daisy eruptions, and even a Riverside.
It's been awhile since I paid attention to Link minors, but the one I saw today struck me as having larger boils than I remember. It built up to one at least a meter tall and then the boiling (but not the overflow) seemed to completely stop. The overflow continued, but for the next ten minutes I didn't seen anything like that big boil.
Giant may have shown slight signs of progress back in May, but today it looked about as bad as I remember it back in the 1980s. All that was missing is the grass growing on the platform.
I also noticed that Daisy's runoff channels seems to have shifted. No longer does it appear water flows from an eruption into the pools around Splendid. The runoff to the southwest is much wider, and has invaded an area of trees next to the trail. One advantage to not having Daisy runoff at Splendid is that should Splendid ever start showing signs of life, that will be reflected in large pools around it and even the rejuvenation of its runoff channels.
Made the mistake of going out to Grand too soon. Hearing a report of West Triplet at about the 5.5 hour mark in Grand's interval, I thought that it might have a chance to go on the next West Triplet eruption and have a short interval. As it turned out, it did go on the next West Triplet opportunity, except that was a three hour West Triplet interval, and Rift had already started.
The eruption itself was a nice change from the usual one burst. After the end of the second burst, several times Turban looked like it had quit, only to become active again. Then the activity really picked up, and that meant that an afterburst needed to be considered. As it was, there hadn't been any play by 10 minutes. Didn't want to stay any longer because of incoming black clouds.
Beehive's Indicator started during Grand, and today we had a Beehive interval shorter than the coincident Grand interval. Which gives some idea of the frequency (or lack thereof) of the two geysers.
The middle of the night Grand was a bit hard to see, since the moon had just disappeared behind the ridge since the previous Turban start. But it was a relatively short interval (8h30m) and I did get to see the Castle minor eruption and an Oblong while waiting.