Selenium GeckoDriver with Protractor: "Failed: Timed out" - selenium

Question

My automation test suite uses Selenium WebDriver with Protractor and Jasmine to run against a variety of browsers. When using GeckoDriver to run the tests on Firefox, I am intermittently getting an error message that just says "Failed: Timed out":
. ✓ WHEN I visit the favorites page
. ✓ THEN it should say I havent added anything
F ✗ WHEN I open the inspirations page
- Failed: Timed out
Build info: version: '3.8.1', revision: '6e95a6684b', time: '2017-12-01T19:05:32.194Z'
System info: host: 'admins-MacBook-Pro-3.local', ip: 'fe80:0:0:0:10a7:9b8d:6ff5:f46%en0', os.name: 'Mac OS X', os.arch: 'x86_64', os.version: '10.12.6', java.version: '1.8.0_144'
Driver info: driver.version: unknown
F ✗ AND I click on an inspiration preview pane to open an inspiration
I have tried padding it with hard-coded sleep on either side, and I've searched for other errors, but everything else I can find in regards to Protractor timeouts is for other errors that have some kind of a description about what is actually timing out.
Has anyone seen JUST the message "Failed: Timed out" here who can help determine what might be timing out?
As requested, here is the gulp task that kicks off my protractor:
gulp.task('test-frontend-firefox', 'Run feature tests locally', function() {
gulp.src(['test/feature/**/*.spec.js'])
.pipe(protractor({
configFile: __dirname + '/../test/protractor_local_ff.conf.js',
args: ['--baseUrl', 'http://localhost:9099'],
}));
});
And here is protractor_local_ff.conf.js as referenced by the gulp task:
var private_config = require('./private.conf.js');
var golden_config = require('./golden.conf.js');
exports.config = {
params: {
private: private_config,
golden: golden_config,
localhost: true
},
onPrepare: function(){
var SpecReporter = require('jasmine-spec-reporter').SpecReporter;
jasmine.getEnv().addReporter(new SpecReporter({displayStacktrace: 'all'}));
},
framework: 'jasmine2',
// seleniumAddress: 'http://hub-cloud.browserstack.com/wd/hub',
seleniumAddress: 'http://localhost:4444/wd/hub',
capabilities: {
'browserName': 'firefox'
}
};
As you can see, it's set up to be able to run against the hosted app in either browserstack or on my localhost, but the error gets thrown intermittently in either environment.