Bill-on-the-Hill

Mainly more of the same today, with the main attraction (Giant Geyser) continuing to be coy. There was some fine wildlife watching to go along with the geyser gazing, however, and some excellent advice from the hard-core gazers led to a surprisingly good dinner in a place that I didn't know offered any edible food at all.

We were up considerably earlier than we like to rise while on vacation, the better to get into Upper Geyser Basin in a hurry and hope that Giant didn't go before we got there. (The early start also had the advantage of cutting down on the tourons blocking the road to stare at elk and bison, which was a nice change.) On arrival at the Basin we learned that Grotto Geyser, which has a complicated symbiotic relationship with Giant -- did you read that Web Site du Jour that I listed a couple of days ago? -- had had a so-called "Marathon" eruption overnight, which pretty well negated the chances of seeing Giant until some time in the afternoon (I'll return to this subject later), so we spent the morning looking at some of the other major geysers of the Upper Basin.

A word here about "predicting" geyser eruptions. Pretty well everybody knows about Old Faithful, arguably the world's most famous geyser. Old Faithful is nearly unique among Yellowstone geysers in that its underground "plumbing" isn't closely tied to any other major geyser, so when it erupts, there is a very strong relationship between the duration of the eruption (i.e., how much water it discharges before the eruption stops) and the time expected to elapse before the next eruption starts (i.e., the time to "recharge" the plumbing with super-hot water). This allows the observing ranger, and others who know the trick, to predict the time when that next eruption will start, if they've observed the duration of the just-concluded eruption and applied the formula. It works very well; the visitor center posts predicted times for the next eruption with a plus/minus error bar of 20 minutes total, and a very large proportion of ensuing eruptions fall well within the posted windows.

Most geysers, however, aren't nearly this cooperative, because their plumbing is much more complex and is tied to other things going on in the Basin. The majority are completely unpredictable and will erupt when they feel like it, period. In some cases there are at least some general trends and indicators that give hints when an eruption might occur, although with no guarantee that it will occur; as will be seen, Giant falls somewhere between this category and the "I'll erupt when I feel like it" type. And for a very few, eruptions can be predicted, Old Faithful style (although mostly with lower confidence and longer windows), if the time and duration of the previous eruption is known. The visitor center posts predictions for five other geysers in addition to Old Faithful: Great Fountain Geyser in the Lower Geyser Basin (about 10 miles away -- it's gorgeous and we'd seen it before, but we didn't spend time in Lower Basin on this trip), and in the Upper Basin, Riverside (shown in the previous blog entry), Daisy, Castle, and above all, the sublime Grand Geyser, the world's tallest predictable geyser and a sight that just defies description -- if you're visiting Yellowstone and can possibly adjust your schedule to be there during a Grand prediction window, do it. It turned out that all four of the Upper Basin "predicted" geysers were due to erupt while Giant was getting back into shape, so we had plenty of highly satisfying gazing to do during the morning and early afternoon. A couple of pictures:

Daisy GeyserCastle GeyserGrand Geyser

While we were digressing to watch these guys at various times during the day, a herd of elk wandered through the basin for a little extra scenery. This shot exaggerates how close they got to people on the trail, telephoto lenses being what they are, but it doesn't exaggerate it that much.Elk in the Upper Basin, with tourist

So back to Giant. Again, there'll be more on the nuances of waiting for Godot ^h^h^h Giant in the next entry, but the key point for right now is that some hours after a Grotto "marathon" eruption ends, Giant will have a so-called "recovery hot period," and that's a good time for it to erupt. During a "hot period," all sorts of little stuff around Giant's immense cone starts to play, and if you're lucky, Giant follows. We got back to the "cage" in front of Giant where the gazers collect, in plenty of time for the recovery hot period, and after not too long a wait, the fun started. For fully 15 minutes (a more typical hot period lasts maybe 5 minutes) various things spouted and belched, and the water even rose in torrents in Giant's cone, which is one of those things the gazer really likes to see, because that's the way a Giant eruption starts. But ... no luck. The water in the cone receded, the smaller vents nearby shut off, and a bunch of disappointed gazers realized that the hot period was over. Consensus was that it was going to be a while before there'd be another one energetic enough to trigger an eruption, so the gazers dispersed (the elk shot above actually came after the hot period), and we headed back to West Yellowstone to eat and try to do laundry.

I would be remiss if I didn't thank several of the gazers for a tip regarding that return to "West." Our previous experience, not just on this trip but on some others I'd made to the area for professional reasons, had suggested that all the available food there was more or less inedible. The gazers, however, gave us a pointer to a very good Chinese restaurant right on the main drag that gave us by far the best dinner I've ever had in West. Service was marginal (not least because the place was jammed full of customers who, judging from their speech, were from China -- it's always a good sign when eating national/ethnic food if the restaurant is full of happy customers of that nationality/ethnic group) and the decor anything but elegant, but the food was surprisingly good. I'll try to find details on this place and edit them into this narrative. Anyway, we retired for the night full and happy, hoping that Giant would hold off yet a little longer so that we could get back in time to see it.

Tomorrow: more gazing, lousy weather, and fascinating company, including the amazing "Sonia."