Port of Lewiston Idaho

Why There’s a Pacific Ocean Port in Idaho
Half as Interesting

Marine traffic, trains and pipelines are relatively invisible and mostly ignored, yet our civilization is totally dependent on them. Lewiston is like in the center of the proposed expanded state of Idaho.

So we have a serious method for getting the grain down the river to the ocean from Lewiston, but how do we get all that grain to Lewiston? So I started thinking about combines and how many you would need and I figured we need some videos. There are bunch of modern ones. Many of them are very long. Here's a short modern one and a couple about the old days. I thought the 20 mule team was a big operation. That's nothing compared to these guys.

Wheat Harvest on the Palouse
BJ Swanson

24 million bushels are exported out of Lewiston each year. An acre of ground can produce about 50 bushels of wheat, so you would need 480 thousand acres, which translates into 750 square miles of land. If you are driving a combine with a cutter head width of 15 feet and you are traveling at 4 miles per hour, if will take 66,000 hours to harvest all that wheat. Figure you got a month to get it all cut, and you're working 24 hour days, you're going to need 100 combines to get it all cut. And you probably are not going to have a month, you might have two weeks, and 24 hours a day is wishful thinking, so more likely you are going to need 500 combines. Make allowances for problems as the necessity to get the wheat harvested come hell of high water, you are probably going to want double that number.

To Till a Field: Man and Machine in the Palouse
Washington State University Libraries' Films

Harvesting Wheat with a 33-Mule Team
Fort Walla Walla Museum

Palouse Prairie in the Pacific Northwest

The Palouse:

The Palouse is a distinct geographic region of the northwestern United States, encompassing parts of north central Idaho, southeastern Washington, and, by some definitions, parts of northeast Oregon. It is a major agricultural area, primarily producing wheat and legumes. Situated about 160 miles (260 km) north of the Oregon Trail, the region experienced rapid growth in the late 19th century.

The Palouse is home to two land-grant universities: the University of Idaho in Moscow and Washington State University in Pullman. Just eight miles (13 km) apart, both schools opened in the early 1890s.

 

Crossing the Bitterroot Mountains

Getting around the Bitterroot Mountains
Jack & Randy have gone on an expedition to explore some old roads that cross the Continental Divide which happens to form part of the border between Idaho and Montana. The northern road (on the map) is the Lolo Motorway:

In the northern part of the state a famous travel corridor winds through the forests of the Bitterroot Mountains. It’s most well known as part of the route followed by the Lewis and Clark Expedition. But the Corps of Discovery was actually following the well established northern trail of the Nez Perce Indians. It was used by them for centuries to travel east into buffalo country in what is now Montana. In the early twentieth century a rough dirt road built by the Civilian Conservation Corps traced a good portion of the original Nez Perce Trail. That road is now known as the Lolo Motorway.

The southern one is the Magruder Road (pdf).

The 101-mile primitive Magruder Corridor Road winds through a vast undeveloped area, offering solitude and pristine beauty as well as  expansive mountain views. The landscape is much the same as when the  Nez Perce Indians and other early travelers crossed the area. The  road has changed little since its construction by the Civilian  Conservation Corps (CCC) in the 1930s. It has also been known as the  Southern Nez Perce Trail, Elk City to Darby Road, Montana Road and the Parker Trail.

I have taken I-90 across northern Idaho a few times. It follows the St. Regis River, mostly.

The yellow icon marks the Moose Creek Airstrip. Marc flew over there a couple of weeks ago in his new-to-him Piper Comanche. The Comanche is turbocharged, which means he can get up to 15,000 feet. On the way there, at that altitude, he picked up a tailwind which meant it only took him a couple of hours to get there. His co-conspirators in smaller, 100 MPH airplanes took almost 7 hours to get there.

Moose Creek Idaho

Moose Creek 2015
Marc likes to fly to obscure, out of the way places, and you can't get much more obscure or out of the way than Moose Creek, being as it is smack in the middle of the Bitterroot Mountains.

Idaho Aviation Association has a map. Starting with their coordinates I made my own.

Moose Creek Airstrip
What looks like a wrecked aircraft is not, it is just sitting in the shadow of the trees.

The coordinates I started with had five digits after the decimal point, and put us in the river at the Southwest end of the airstrip, so I decided to see how many decimal places you actually need. The markers on the above map are one one-thousandth of degree (.001) apart. Vertically (North-South) they are 363 feet apart, horizontally (East-West), they are 253 feet apart. So four decimal places would get you within 30 feet of a point, five decimal places would get you within 3 feet, and six decimal places would get you within a few inches. For purposes of navigation, three decimal places are plenty.

Computers don't care, one floating point number is as good as any other, but due to people wanting to use the decimal system and computers using binary, translating a perfectly good decimal number to binary and then asking the computer to display it can result in values that have a dozen digit after the decimal point, and most of them are just noise.