So I waited for the post-marathon hot period. Much longer than I'd hoped or really intended, but it was a fairly pleasant wait. Because of the cloud cover, it never really got frigid like the wait last Thursday, but by the end, there were several short sprinkles that seemed to come from nowhere. The wind was not as cooperative either, coming from the usual southerly direction, obscuring the platform.
The hot period itself was ridiculously long. By about 10 minutes, Mastiff had dropped below overflow, and so the steam on the platform decreased making seeing possible again. That's when Giant started major surging, and Feather never shut off the whole time. The surging in Giant never reached the " filling the cone" stage, but for a while it seemed like one more little push would be all it would take to get the eruption started. Instead, I packed up and headed back in. Didn't even need to check on Grand, as I could see it's steam cloud quite clearly.
After an event of that size, I figured that I could sleep until the next Grand time and not worry (too much) about missing anything. And once it got light, the geyser groupies should be able to handle keeping an eye on things. As I expected, we got a series of almost hourly events, most of them weak, some only observed from a distance (Grand, where else?). The intervals then lengthened out as the afternoon progressed.
Also got, as the first post-marathon activity, a solo Grotto Fountain (if you don't count a couple of splashes from Grotto). The next Grotto eruption lasted for three hours. Then things got weird, at least for those of us who don't know Giant well. The whole platform began to look like it does during a marathon, with Bijou dead most of all. But the hot periods, weak though they were, continued. I got this funny feeling that tomorrow morning the signs will have been moved.
After today's long Grand interval, I've come to the conclusion that there is a pattern here. Either West Triplet or Grand is going to erupt between 6 and 7 hours after the previous eruption. If it's West Triplet, the next window is 8.5 to 10. If neither erupts, then the second window applies. You can tell that West Triplet is not going to erupt in the early window if Percolator is quiet. A West Triplet eruption before that window opens is the same as if it doesn't erupt, in that Grand will wait for the second window.
This bit of guru geyser gazing will be obsolete by the end of the week.
In all the going back and forth for Giant on the bike trail, I noticed that Round Spring was down, and it was exposing some sort of animal bones.I'll leave it up to someone else to figure what kind of animal, and what part that is. Today the spring was back up and full. But, for me, a bigger question is how long, had the water stayed low and the bones exposed, would they stay there? I expect that they would find a magical ability to move out of the spring and into a waiting RV.
Other Geyser Times
12 June 2007
- Grotto Ftn. 07:00, 09:13, 19:55
- Grotto 09:24, 20:02
- Rift 17:39 d=10m39s
- Giant hot periods
- 01:48 d=15m43s
- 07:00 d≈5m
- 08:03 d≈4m
- 09:13 d≈6m
- 10:06 weak, Bijou off 3m
- 11:29 bathtub
- 12:57 d=5m18s
- 14:35 bathtub
- 16:26 d=2m50s
- 17:51 d≈4m30s
- 21:09 d≈2m