Fire Season

Rowena Fire - Leslie Lamb

Iowa man has moved to Bingen, Washington. It's across the river from Hood River.

Hood River, Bingen, Rowen Fire, The Dalles

He reports:

Sitting waiting for Angie’s orthopedic consult. Both of us have bum left knees. My xray was yesterday, my consult in September after pt.

Then later today up to the mountain to haul gear for Stephen, our 72 hippy ski bum friend who is going to self build his forever cabin on 15 wilderness acres.  He has a bum knee too. Angie’s bro-in-law, 68, is soon to have both knees replaced. The year of the knee!

Being laid up dampened my plans for exploring on mc, biking, hiking…but there is nice.

Two forest fires either side of us, fortunately no smoke at house. One 50 acres, the other 2500 stage 3 evacuations. I think they are out.  

Our 72 yo ski friend Steven bought 20 acres (cheap) of eastern Oregon sparsely treed dry land, zero population nearby.  Rough road along a dry creek to the no-utility lot, passing a couple of  long disused and deteriorated camper RVs.   

His plan is to build a cabin for off-ski season use,  stay with friends near the ski slopes in the winter (not us).

To this end he has so far had a shipping container placed into a hillside.  He plans on sharing a neighbor's wood mizer (mile away) in exchange for 50% of the cut lumber, sourced from his 20 acres.

He drives a 15 yo Ford Escape, hoping to upgrade to a Ford PU soon.

Fun to visit.  Stephen seems happy but I would want something on the grid and less dry,  it was crackling tinder dry.

On the way home we detoured around the Rowena fire, 3200 acres, 40+ homes destroyed.

Container in hillside

Digging Equipment

Greater Idaho

Greater Idaho

Crook county is the 13th Oregon county to vote to secede from Oregon and become part of Idaho. Well, they voted to talk to Idaho about it. I've been hearing some noise about this for awhile, but I wrote it off as just noise. But now it's beginning to look like a fair number of people are getting serious about it and I don't blame them. Portland politics is full of morons, and Washington County / Silicon Forest is living in a plastic fantastic bubble brought about by the financial success of Nike, Tektronix, Intel and Nvidia.

Umatilla county (the big gray blob on the northern border surrounded by red) is home to the military base where we had a zillion bombs filled with nerve gas. They eventually dismantled / crushed / destroyed all those bombs and the nerve gas they contained. I believe Ronald Reagan ordered those bombs to be filled with nerve gas.

ZeroHedge:

If the group's [Greater Idaho] goal comes to full fruition, Oregon would end up 62% smaller by size, but only 9% smaller by population. That math that underscores the contrast between the sparsely populated, rural eastern region and the more densely-populated coastal areas. It also highlights the eastern counties' lack of political strength in influencing statewide decisions.

 

Small Planes, Small Towns

Piper PA22 Pacer at Roy's Motel & Cafe

Roy's is in the 'town' or Amboy, California, population 4. It is roughly in the center of a triangle with Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Phoenix at the tips.

Rome Station, Oregon

Rome Station is the sole business in Rome, Oregon, population too low to count. It's equidistant between Portland and Reno, and just a little farther to Sacramento.

Alvord Desert

View From On High

Marc flew down to the Alvord Desert in southeast Oregon a couple of weeks ago and sent back some pictures.

The Airplane

Steen Mountains

John Day Oregon

Kam Wah Chung General Store
John Day Oregon

John drove out to John Day on Monday to get a client up to speed on a new computer system. John Day isn't much of a town, the population is less than 2,000, which isn't too surprising since it is smack dab in the middle of eastern Oregon, some of the most desolate terrain in the world. Okay, that's not exactly fair. The town is on the John Day river, in a valley surrounded by tree covered mountains. But Malheur county is right next door.

The Oregon Encyclopedia has a good article about the Kam Wah Chung General Store.

Wikipedia's article about the town notes that "federal policies . . . shut down all gold mining in the United States in 1942". Really? That sounds kind of weird. Google turns up a case on FindLaw that explains the situation:

Early in 1941, it became apparent to those in charge of the Nation's defense mobilization that we faced a critical shortage of nonferrous metals, notably copper, and a comparable shortage of machinery and supplies to produce them. Responsive to this situation, the Office of Production Management (OPM) and its successor, the War Production Board (WPB), issued a series of Preference Orders. These gave the producers of mining machinery and supplies relatively high priorities for the acquisition of needed materials. They also gave to those mines, which were deemed important from the standpoint of defense or essential civilian needs, a high priority in the acquisition of such machinery. Gold mines were classified as nonessential and eventually were relegated to the lowest priority rating.

Gold was non-essential? Who'd a thunk that gold, the most sought after metal in the world, would be deemed non-essential? Since gold has become the preferred material for plating electronic connectors I doubt that such an order would fly today.

Pic of the Day

1912 Umatilla County, Oregon. Science teacher preparing for class at the Milton Freewater
high school. Behind him on the chalkboard is the name of the next lesson:
Part IV, Radient phenomena and Radiation energies.

Milton-Freewater is in the northeast corner of the state, just down the road from Walla Walla Washington and about 20 miles east of where the Columbia River turns north into Washington. Umatilla County is where we stored our nerve gas when Reagan was getting hard nosed about the Russkies.

Via Posthip Scott

Steam Locomotives

Restoration of Sumpter Valley Steam Engine (Cushman)
I've been having trouble sleeping lately, which has led to watching long videos about steam locomotives. I can't listen to people bloviating for more than a few seconds, but I can watch people working with steel forever. This video is about restoring an old steam engine from eastern Oregon. The work was done in Oregon City, a suburb on the south side of Portland. Sadly, the Daylight Locomotive and Machine Works doesn't seem to be in business anymore.


Building Steam Locomotives - 1930's Trains & Railways Educational Film - S88TV1
This video is about the production of new locomotives in England 80 years ago. A while back I posted a video about building an all new steam locomotive, a replica of one from the 1950's. All of the originals had been scrapped. Looking around on YouTube, there doesn't seem to any limit to the number of  old steam locomotives that are being, or have been restored. Of course, even if there are a hundred, it doesn't hold a candle to the thousands that were built. Isn't it odd that people would be investing so much in these things that are essential toys? I guess that's what you do when you have excess funds.

They refer to the locomotive in the first video as a 'Mikado'. I had heard this term before, and wondering where it came from, so I asked Wikipedia and I got an answer:

The wheel arrangement name "Mikado" originated from a group of Japanese type 9700 2-8-2 locomotives that were built by Baldwin Locomotive Works for the 3 ft 6 in gauge Nippon Railway of Japan in 1897. In the 19th century, the Emperor of Japan was often referred to as "the Mikado" in English. Also, the Gilbert and Sullivanopera The Mikado had premiered in 1885 and achieved great popularity in both Britain and America.

The Wikipedia article also explains that the Mikado wheel arrangement produced a better, faster, stronger high speed locomotive.

Harney County Wildlife Refuge

Steen Mountains seen from Malheur Lake

It's on the front page everywhere, lots of people have got something to say about it. The problem I have is that I haven't been able to find out just how this blew up. What I did find was that a couple of ranchers were convicted of setting fires on federal land, for which they served moderate prison terms. The news reports I have seen call it arson, but what did they actually burn? A thousand acres of primeval forest? Or a couple of acres of sagebrush? Given the location, I tend toward the later. Fires burn out in the wilds all the time.
    How is it that these two cases ended up in Federal court? I smell something fishy. Perhaps we have a rancher who is chafing under rules of the Federal Bureaucracy and sets about to tweak their collective noses. Or maybe we have a prosecutor who is trying to make a name for himself. And if the new prison terms are so egregious, where is the ACLU?

Miracle on I-84 Eastbound

Pickup truck got caught between two semi-trailers in a massive pileup on Interstate 84 Eastbound near Baker City in eastern Oregon. Driver walked away with a blackeye and a couple of scratches. He was the only occupant of this vehicle. 12 other people were injured in the 26 vehicle pileup. Most of the other vehicles appeared to be semi-trucks. Kevin, the driver here, was only going 30 MPH. Black Ice has been named as the culprit.

This picture was on the front page of the Sunday newspaper, the paper version. I thought it was such a good picture I wanted to steal it for me blog, so I went looking through the on-line version. It wasn't there. With the subscription, you also get a digital facsimile of the paper edition, so I was able to swipe this picture there.

I still get the paper edition of the newspaper, though I keep threatening to cancel it. It only comes 4 days a week, it's tabloid sized, and all the sections are nested one inside the other and for some reason they are the very devil to separate.

Land Prices

When I was in Iowa a year ago I heard that farm land was going for as much as $10,000 an acre. This price is very dependent on the price of corn, or rather on what people expect the price of corn will be in the near future. I suspect the government's ethanol program has something to do with this.
    Yesterday I put up a post about a classic car auction taking place in Brothers, which is a small town in Eastern Oregon. I remarked that there wasn't much there, and Posthip Scott sends me this little notice from 1914.

Click to embiggenate.

Eastbound, Part II

You might think long drives across the American West would be boring, but there is always something to see. For instance:

• The Umatilla nerve gas arsenal. Miles of bunkers full of artillery shells loaded with nerve gas. Each bunker looks like a mound of dirt. The whole place looks like a gopher village made by giant, militarily precise gophers. The great and powerful Reagan decided we needed to arm all these artillery shells. They never went anywhere. They just sat there threatening to leak really nasty stuff for 10 years. The Army finally started decommissioning them a few years ago. They finished up last year. One of the best ideas ever.

• John Day Dam. Those wires go clear across the river. Yes, those are windmills on top of the hills across the way.

• Weyerhaeuser Poplar plantations. 

• The aircraft radio beacon building. It's just the weirdest thing, this little white square building with the funny round tower on top, parked way out in the middle of a field. It's like a landmark. I saw another one somewhere else along the road.

• Woodpecker Truck. The place has always been there. In years past it looked like it looked like a ne'r do well garage. Now it looks like a thriving enterprise stocked with hundreds of late model semi tractors.

• The factory that looks like an alien installation out of a science fiction adventure, plopped down in the middle of nowhere. Actually a cement plant.
• Snow fences. Miles upon miles of huge (8 to 10 feet tall) snow fences.
• Road closed gates. Much like railroad crossing gates, but they go down right across the interstate, usually near an exit along with a warning sign to the effect that the Interstate is closed when the lights are flashing. Must have been one every 50 miles all the way across Wyoming and down into Colorado. 
• Signs warning about high winds and light trailers. Might be why I didn't see many RV's. 
• Speed limit signs in Wyoming have the number displayed in lights so they can change it as needed. They were all set to 75 when I went by.

  These roads must be a real adventure in the winter time.