Here's a series of photos showing some of the activity of Link Geyser and the Chain Lakes Group during the activity in October 1983. Over a period of five days, Mary Ann Moss, Marie Wolf and I got to see several dozen major eruptions. We missed much of the activity of the first day.
Mary Ann took these photos, and as you can see, it was cold, damp and gray that week, which made seeing the eruptions difficult at times, but it didn't snow or rain. For more details on the activity, see my article in one of the early GOSA Transactions. Think of this as a supplement to that article.
Here's what we saw of one of the first eruptions we witnessed. A lot of steam coming from opaque water. The ruts produced by the runoff channel didn't get much deeper or wider over the next few days, which supports our conclusion that the first few eruptions that no one saw were even more voluminous and powerful than what we saw.
Here's one of the better photos, showing some of the details of the jets. I would estimate the height here at around 15 meters. We think we saw higher, more angled jets at times.
A couple more views of the discharge from an eruption.
Next are a series of close-up views of the drained vents of the Chained Lakes.
Note the debris washed onto the bike trail. We never saw an eruption put out enough water to reach that far, which again supports our assumption that the first eruptions were even larger.
And that's J.Randolph Railey watching the eruption.