Observations for 2020 June 01
Riding out in the morning I had to follow a coyote up the hill to Castle. I was headed out in the morning to enjoy what I expected would be the last quiet morning of the spring. The roads in from Montana were opening at 10:00, and figured there'd a fair amount of pent up demand to visit the park, especially today.
So first went to see an eruption of Daisy. Over by Pyramid were 8 bison bedded down. It was a nice, normal Daisy. I didn't stick around to watch Splendid as usual, because I wanted to get over to Castle to catch the next eruption after the one we saw the previous night. I saw Castle start just as I got onto the main bike trail. There was one long pause about four minutes later, and then continuous activity leading into the steam phase.
From there I saw that Rift and West Triplet were erupting. When I arrived in the area, West Triplet had quit, and Belgian looked full and normal. Bulger was having a series of minors. While waiting on Grand, did see a huge eruption of Rocket, well above the trees. Also saw Percolator for a while.
The One Burst Grand came after a Turban delay. Rift continued to erupt during the eruption. Percolator had quit, but Sput D was active. Then Bulger finally had a major eruption. It only lasted a bit over six minutes, but the Hole showed water twice-- at about three and five minutes. The first time there was even a splash or two but the water level never rose higher than about 40cm below the surface.
Went down basin to confirm that there was no reason to pay close interest to either Fan & Mortar, or to Giant. It was near time for Riverside, so we were there when we heard the call for Beehive's Indicator via the webcam. It was a nice view from across the river.
Later it was back out to Grand. Not long to wait for another One Burst Eruption. The crowd wasn't much bigger than what we'd been seeing for the past week. The mass of people I'd expected to rush in from Montana appears to not have materialized.
The webcam people are starting to annoy me as an observer actually in the basin. They seem to be unable to have one report of activity, but must have at least three for every geyser. So many that I've had my "in the basin" reports superceded. They really need to figure out how to arbitrate their little competitions for "Level 5 Geyser Guru" and make one posting.
The other problem is that some people insist on posting useless observations like Pump Geyser. The excuse cited is that "it's to show that the geyser is active." So I decided that it's not just pump, but other features like Tortoise Shell, Comet, Spasmodic and Witches Cauldron that deserve the same treatment. Better yet, those camera watchers should actually spend some time on Geyser Hill and actually watch Pump for a while to learn what it normally does and what sort of activity is worthy of being reported. (They could at the same time see about getting 100 consecutive Sponge eruptions.)