Day: August 10, 2012

As with yesterday morning, Rift was erupting as I tied the bike down at Castle. Only this time I didn't even get to see a full Turban interval. Arrived during a nice overflow, and it kept on building. It was still too dark to see well, but when Turban started, it was with the sound that only precedes a Grand start.

For some reason, despite it being dead calm, the entire Sawmill Group got rained on during the first parts of the eruption. Another one-burst eruption, but this with two distinctive false pauses at 9 and 11 minutes into the eruption. There were several seconds of silence (again, dark and foggy enough that had to go on sound), then the sudden, sharp jet that always accompanies the end of a die-down in Grand bursting. Grand finally quit after over 12 minutes.

It's far to easy to ignore Daisy and pass it by. With the greater than two hour interval, it's hard to get motivated to go up there at a random time, and much easier to just cycle by to or from Fan & Mortar. So I made one last deliberate attempt to see it today, and ended up with it erupting just as I arrived. Splendid is as dead as it's always been, too.

Except for my second or third day here, every day has been dry, or at least the showers so short and light that they didn't matter. Today the clouds rolled in and stayed, and it looked like only a matter of time before we got dumped on. At least Grand didn't hold off like it would have done in previous years. About an hour there were several nearby lightning strikes, and then the sky opened up for about five minutes. But once the clouds cleared, the sky did seem cleaner, not as brown, and the humidity of the morning was gone.

With nothing much to do, and knowing that earlier in the day it looked like the Sawmill Group was in a Tardy mode, decided to head out early. To either watch Sawmill or wait for a possible Penta.

When I got there, things didn't look promising. It appeared that Sawmill had been overflowing earlier, and was now sitting just below overflow with tiny bubbles reaching the surface. Spasmodic looked like it had been erupting and overflowing for quite some time, and Thumping Hole and friends didn't seem all that full either. Then we got one of those Oval high fills with pulsations and ripples. Not bad enough to abandon, but not encouraging, either.

After about an hour, I decided it was time to concentrate on Grand and Turban since it was over 5-1/2 hours since the previous eruption. Was a bit surprised, then, to see the Penta steam cloud form, and for an announcement of the start. So it was back to splitting my time and attention between Penta and Turban again down by Rift and Belgian Pool.

After Penta had been erupting for about 25 minutes it was time for another Turban. Once it started, I looked back toward Penta, and noticed Churn starting to boil up. It had been overflowing, but I didn't really expect it. So I moved in that direction, and managed to get some photos and video of the eruption, which seemed long at about 1m20s. As it was, I missed the Turban duration, which might have been useful info considering later events.

So after the Churn eruption, I was trying to split my time between waiting for a possible second Churn eruption, and watching for the next Turban. So I was a bit surprised that when I turned at around the 17 minute mark to see Turban starting. The previous intervals had given no indication that a short interval like that was in the works. In any case, almost immediately Grand began to boil up. The sky made a nice contrast to the water column, as the photo shows. The second burst lasted for almost 2-1/2 minutes, and despite this Vent & Turban continued to play strongly.

At that point, another storm was heading in, and I decided that not getting wet was more important than seeing the end of Penta's eruption. So I headed in and caught an eruption of Aurum from the bike trail, and just missed seeing the first Plume eruption of the month. Also got back just in time to miss the downpour.

When I got here, I was afraid that the short Grand intervals would mean a lack of sleep, but it didn't turn out that way. When Grand has had these short intervals in the past, the interval range was still large, with 6-1/2 hour intervals intermixed with 10 to 11 hour intervals. This meant that a lot of nights, the wait could be several hours. This year, however, the waits have consistently been about an hour or less. Sometimes I'm not even out there for a full Turban interval. It's just an hour or so break in the middle of the night. So, while I haven't gotten long periods of sleep, I don't feel like I'm missing out on it. It's the long waits that get to be grinding, and that's not been the case this year.

After yesterday's adventure, I was none too thrilled to see Rift in eruption as I was tying down my bike at Castle. Got closer, and found that West Triplet had ended a while ago, so at least Rift might quit soon. The moon was providing some light, but filtered through a thin hazy layer that didn't seem brown enough for the smoke. Because of that layer, and because it was warm earlier, I didn't need all the layers I'd brought out with me.

As it was, turned out Rift was in eruption the whole time i was out there. Just that Grand didn't have the expected delay, although it tried. It took nearly two minutes from the start of Turban before Grand kicked in for another one burst eruption.

On the ride back in, saw something new and different. As I was passing the Inn at 04:30, there were four people in white bathrobes walking along the railing next to the walkway. Were they really out to see Old Faithful erupt? Or to get a baptism by Holy Mother Gaia? I have no idea, and not sure I want to know.

Turns out that the Rift eruption that I saw ended over an hour later, so the duration was at least two and a quarter hours, and could have been as much as three. For the next eruption, we got a delay at around the 5h40m mark. Coupled with the long Rift duration I was expecting a several hour wait, but it turns out we only had to wait two Turbans. The one-burst eruption itself started with an explosive blue bubble, instead of the usual booping around for several seconds.

The next eruption was another unremarkable one burst, other than it constituted the seventh one-burst in a row. After five consecutive two-burst eruptions, I guess Grand feels a need to revert to the mean.

Coming in from the late afternoon/early evening one burst Grand eruption, I noticed something different. The little frying pan area that used to be drowned by Castle's runoff channel, that for the last two weeks had been noisy but otherwise ignorable, was now acting like a little mudpot. There was water in the runoff channel leading into the area, and a gray muddy cone had developed on one side.

The Beehive overlook doesn't get quite so packed when the Visitor Cathedral isn't trying to cram everyone who was in the building into that little area.

Grand erupted on the last Turban of the day, making sure it was another four-Grand day. This was the first clear, dark night of the trip, with the Milky Way easily visible and without the fire haziness of previous nights. It was also dead calm, so when the eruption started, the steam quickly obscured any chance of seeing anything. But that was okay, as the sounds more than made up for it. From the start of Turban with Grand quickly joining in, to the fall of the water away from the jets coming from Grand, to the roaring of Vent reaching maximum height. It was easy to fill in the sights based on the sounds.

It was also another one of those cases where the two bursts ended before the ten minute mark, but there wasn't a third burst. A bit disappointing, but at this point, just getting a second burst seems like a victory of sorts.