A weekend visits to the park is always different than a long stay. They always seem to feel too hectic,at least for me, and I've always prefered the long stays. It's okay to miss the an eruption that takes place as you arrive, whereas with a weekend, that's a significant portion of what you came for. But when a weekend is all you can get, you take it. Earlier in the week it became farily obvious that this was going to be a really nice couple of days, perhaps the best of the spring, and a good time to figure out how to prepare for future weekend trips this summer. What t I didn't count on were the bears getting in the way.
The entire basin was closed yesterday because there were a couple of bears seen roaming about, including one which earlier in the week had take down a baby bison in full view of visitors up on Geyser Hill. So when I arrived, tthat closure was still in effect, and the choices for what to do were severly limited. I decided the Beehive overlook was the best place to spend my exile. The advantages are that it is near something erupting (Geyser Hill), you can see most features down basin (at least their steam clouds), and Beehive was probably going to erupt this morning. Fortunately, the three hours I spent there resulted in my missing nothing interesting down basin, as Castle had a minor as I arrived and Grand waited until well after the opening. (The less said of Giant and Fan & Mortar, the better.)
The indicator preceded the 10:39 Beehive eruption by only 19 seconds, and was maybe a couple of feet high at most. Beehive was already sloshing heavily when it started, and it quit moments after it became obvious that Beehive was in eruption. It did awaken for a bit later in the eruption, but due to the wind, I was not in a position to see much of it. So while Beehive has been fairly reliable erupting every day, the amount of actual warning you get may be none.
The Sawmill Group was interesting, too. During my exile, I noticed that Tardy was always on every time I looked down basin. So the wet runoff channels but dropping pools was no surprise. Looked like Penta might have a chance during the next cycle. Instead, as I was leaving the area, I saw Churn erupt for the first of three eruptions in the series. The first eruption even had that dead fish smell even though I was told that Churn had been active earlier in the week. During that same series, I saw a Bulger major, the first one I've probably seen since the 1990s.
Penta was not to be, however, as the pool levels didn't look right and Sawmill had a steady stream of small bubbles reaching the slowly rising surface. Sure enough, Sawmill began eruting while well below overflow.
Even worse, Rift started an eruption while I was there. I didn't see when West Triplet started, but it was active when Rift started, but quite within a few minutes of Rift's start. It seems typical of the Grand Group for West Triplet and Rift to reactivate in mid-to-late May, but why can't it ever wait until after I get to see West Triplet as an intermittent spring?
But the most intriguing thing is a new hole in the Old Tardy runoff channel, just before it joins the Crystal Spring/Slurp runoff. THis hole is about 8--12 inches across, and has that same layered appearance that the holes near Scalloped Spring exhibit. When I first saw it, I thought that it might have been a feature that appeared over the winter, but Scott Bryan said that it wasn't there when he was in the basin on Thursday. From where the ground is wet or dry, it appears that it might be a drain for all of the Old Tardy runoff that used to flow in that direction. Years ago there were some patches of steaming ground around Old Tardy. I'll have to go through my old notebooks to find the maps to see if any of those places correspond with this hole. (And I'll try to post pictures of it tomorrow.)
There's a lot of snow still on the ground. Coming in through Island Park, it seemed that if there wasn't snow, then there was standing water But the Madison and Firehole Rivers don't seem all that high, at least compared to some of the seasons I remember. The shelf in the Firehole at the Sawmill Bridge is just barely under water. So perhaps the worst is yet to come. (And if there's standing water around here like there is in Island Park, gonna be a long, nasty mosquito season.
Other Geyser Times
17 May 2008
- Churn
- 12:01, d>1m
- 12:21, d=1m22s
- 12:40, d=1m18s
- Rift, 12:57
- Oblong
- 08:12ns
- 14:00
- Castle
- 08:01, minor, d≈3m
- 11:39