Geyser Watch

Catle Geyser Rainbow 15 June 2010 - as seen from Geyser Hill by the Lion Group

In traditional field journaling, a naturalist – formal or informal – would keep a record of what they observed on a regular basis. They would take notes while actually out in the field, and each evening would use those to create a journal entry that included things such as:

• The weather for the day
• The route they took
• The animals and plants or other items of interest they encountered

Then for each particular item they were observing (such as birds and other wildlife or flowers that bloomed in a particular area), they would create pages just to compile the observations for easy reference. Accuracy was important, and they worked hard to describe things as clearly as possible so those finding their notes later on could make sense of what they saw. They also would include sketches and line drawings in their notes.

I used to record life through scrapbooking methods, but since learning more about how to keep a field journal, I’m blending the best of what worked for me with scrapbooking with the consistency of field journaling. Since this works so well for me, I found this to also solve how to set up this site – as a blend of a blog and a field journal.

Over on the right you’ll see a Tour Old Faithful Area and Geyser Hill. On that page are links to each individual feature. I’ll be adding in more areas soon, as well as adding in my observations. Feel free to add your observations in the comments – old or new. If you have photos up somewhere, feel free to link to them. Also on the right is a link to the calendar – another way to reference things.

To learn more about how I’m working with new technology to create modern field journals, take a look at one of my other blogs: Field Journaling.