Firefighting with a Bell 205A

Bell 205A works Cottonwood Valley Fire on BLM land June 14, 2021

Looks like wildfire season is getting an early start this year. The Cottonwood Valley Fire is in the Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area (map), which is just west of Las Vegas, Nevada.

The Bell 205A is the civilian version of the Vietnam War era Huey.

Rubicon Trail

I had all kinds of posts in mind, but I'm draggin', so here's this video:

Trying to keep all WHEELS on the ground at the Historic RUBICON Trail -- Part 1
Fab Rats
Marc and I drove the Rubicon Trail in his Isuzu Trooper umpteen zillion years ago. I've been watching Matt's Off Road Recovery videos for a while now. Paul from Fab Rats shows up there occasionally and I've seen a couple of his videos. I enjoyed watching Matt and his crew build the Morevair.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I have been abandoned. Daughter has moved to days shifts after working nights for 2 or 3 years. Same sort of erratic schedule though,  3 days on, 2 days off, 3 days on, 6 days off maybe? 12 hour days. So Osmany has adopted the same schedule. Wife is off to whoop it up with her girlfriends and I have the house to myself, except for Gus (the cat), and he can pretty much keep himself amused. By sleeping, the lying dog. (Look at him lying there like a dog. Sleeping.)

I got a supply of Coors in the fridge, I merged the engineer's PDF with the extract from the kitchen designer's plans and sent them to Mr. Wood at the Portland Building Department, which was my chore for the week. Aside from getting my second shot of Pfizer and being miserable for 3 days.

'

Where was I going with this? Ah! The video! I might be a redneck. I really enjoyed this video, long as it is (30 odd minutes). I figure that these guys, running their own businesses, need to be grossing between $300 and $500K a year. They also need a lot of energy and it's apparent that they have it. I suspect that the big difference between them and me is that I never learned, of liked, to deal with people. Is that innate or because of my experience with people? Great, another question that has no answer. Not good for someone who thinks of thoughts as data.

Back to the video. Sorry, I keep getting distracted. Around about the 17 minute mark, Paul drags the rear differential of his SUV (heh) on a big rock, not once but several times. It was most distressing. These guys, being as they built these rigs, are probably thinking about how much strain the axle can take and whether all the supporting components can handle the stress. Me, I just shuddered.

Fab Rats Journey to the Rubicon

Here's Google's driving route from Hurricane, Utah to the beginning of the trail in Tanoma, California.

Rubicon Trail

Scale is 40:1 larger compared to above map. I'm posting the maps because I went to the trouble to look them up, and just in case anyone else wants to see where this is. The Rubicon Trail link takes you to a page that shows the elevation of every stinking bit of the trail. It ranges from like 6,000 feet to a shade over 7,000 feet.

Airplanes

B-29 Superfortress “Umbriago III - Dat’s My Boy" 90 miles NW of Saipan

British Airways Concorde, Boeing 747, and Vickers Super VC-10 at JFK

Short Sunderland Mk.III

General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcon, General Dynamics F-111 Aardvark, McDonnell Douglas F-15C Eagle, and Republic A-10 Thunderbolt II (Warthog)
This must be an old picture because there is a bridge just this side of the dam now.

Big Tires

Dirt Every Day FULL EPISODE | Stock Trucks vs. the Rubicon Trail!—Episode 83
20 odd years ago Marc & I drove his Isuzu Trooper to Reno Nevada to watch the air races. The unlimited class, which was all WW2 fighters, was the big draw. With the craze for safety that was sweeping the country we figured anything this dangerous was going to be banned any day now, so we decided we wanted to see one of these races before they disappeared completely. This was before that warbird last a trim tab and dove into the ground.

Marc had gotten into offroading and had made some minor modifications to his Trooper, and since we are driving all the way to Reno, we decided to tackle the Rubicon trail.

On the way down something happened that has stuck with me all this time. We were driving down highway 58 southeast from Eugene to highway 97. It was late and just after we turned onto 97 a little old man in a little old Japanese truck came flying by us, between us and a big truck with inches to spare. He must have been going about 90 MPH. We were moving at what we thought was a pretty good clip, maybe 70 MPH or so, but that wasn't fast enough for Mr. Wizened old man. It woke us up.

Rubicon Trail, Lake Tahoe & Reno Nevada

Our experience on the Rubicon trail was very similar to that shown in the video. We didn't have any break downs, but it was a real struggle. We spent half of our time scouting the area on foot trying to figure out how we were going to get past the next obstacle.

On our second night we had just made camp when we heard rock and roll music coming from a hill a mile away. It slowly got closer and after a bit we started seeing headlights. Eventually a Jeep rolled up on enormous tires. What had taken us 2 days, these guys had covered in a matter of hours.

The thing that bothers me is I can't be sure just how big those tires were. John bought a set of big fat Dick Cepek tires for his aging F-150 and compared to the tires on my Hyundai, they look huge. But compared to my memory of the tires on that Jeep, they look small. Tires that are just a couple of inches larger in diameter look enormous until you measure them with a ruler and then they seem to shrink down to normal dimensions. It's just weird, man.

Area 51

United States Government Weapons Test Sites, Nevada.
Area 51 is the orange rectangle. Las Vegas is in the lower right corner.
Map is from OpenStreetMap. Google doesn't show these areas, probably because there aren't any fast food joints nearby.

I was amused to hear that there was a movement afoot to storm Area 51. I doubt whether a dozen people will go to the trouble to actually travel there. I mean it's way out in the middle of fricking nowhere. Meanwhile, the meme makers have been having some fun.

Tesla

Tesla plugin, 8 of them, Was taken behind a gas station in Beatty NV. Middle of nowhere. Via Iaman.

Eddie World Gasoline in Beatty. I think the pylons at the far side of the pavement are the charging stations.

Why anyone would want to put a charging station for electric vehicles in Beatty, Nevada, is beyond me. You are on the road from Las Vegas to Reno. Your only other choice is Death Valley. Some kind of bullshit, this is.

I've been trying to figure out why I don't like electric cars. Right now they have some shortcomings, but they are getting better every day and so it probably won't be too long before they perform as well and are as cheap as, or cheaper, than a gasoline powered car. So why don't I like them? There are a number of issues you could quibble over, but the gasoline empire has corresponding problems of its own, it's just been around longer so we have learned how to cope.

Part of the problem is that I have invested a great deal of time learning all I could about gasoline powered cars. And now someone is threatening to make all that knowledge obsolete? Stick it your ear, Tesla.

Another factor might be that the pieces used to control large amounts of electrical power are typically very expensive. They might be simple appearing, it's just a metal box, but it takes serious engineering to make these simple pieces. They are not something you can make in your garage. And the magnets in the motors are made from rare earths and the battery is made from Lithium. And where do we get those? China mostly. Three cheers for globalization. Bah, hum & bug.

And then there is the conceptual bit. All self propelled vehicles up till now have been powered by burning some kind of fuel to generate heat, which produces push, which makes the machine go. Electric cars count on someone else burning the fuel and making the power. If electrical power plants were any more efficient at producing power than a gasoline engine, there might be a point, but with the loses sustained from power line transmission, and the time it takes to charge a battery, I just don't see the advantage.

Now it might be that it would be cheaper to operate an electric car than one powered by gasoline, but I suspect that is only because the electric car isn't paying it's fair share of road taxes. Near as I can tell, this is just a plot by the electric utilities, the coal companies and China, to steal market share from the gasoline engine manufacturers and the oil industry. And for effete intellectual snobs to cut their tax bill.

One idea that I do like is a hybrid without a battery. It has a gasoline engine that provides power, but then instead of a mechanical drivetrain, it has a generator hooked to the engine and electric motors driving the wheels. Much of the undercarriage of a car is designed to accommodate the mechanical drivetrain. If you can replace that with some electrical cables, it could allow all kinds of new body arrangements. Still be needing those rare earth magnets from China, and we'd be putting the mechanical drivetrain manufacturers out of business, but at least we wouldn't have those giant, gawd awful expensive batteries.

Pic of the Day

An atomic mushroom cloud, Las Vegas, 1953.

Sparks

This is the 500 kV Eldorado Substation near Boulder City, Nevada. It shows a three-phase motorized air disconnect switcher attempting to open high voltage being supplied to a large three phase shunt line reactor. The line reactor is the huge gray transformer-like object behind the truck at the far right at the end of the clip. Line reactors are large iron core coils (inductors) which are used to counteract the effects of line capacitance on long Extra High Voltage (EHV) transmission lines. Internally, this line reactor has three coils, one for each phase in the three-phase system. Each coil within the reactor can provide 33.3 Million Volt Amperes of compensating inductive reactance (MVAR) at 290 kV between each phase to ground . The power company had previously encountered difficulty interrupting one of the three phases when trying to disconnect the line reactor. The substation maintenance crew set up a special test so that they could videotape the switching event, and they also made arrangements to "kill" the experiment, if necessary, by manually tripping upstream circuit breakers.

I don't understand everything in the above paragraph, but let me summarize the highlights:

• 500,000 Volts

I've heard that some places will keep a tank of compressed air on hand and use it to shoot a blast of air at the arc when they open the switch to "blow it out".

Update February 2018 replaced missing video.

Amateur rocket reaches 121,000 ft

On September 30, 2011 at 11:08am, Derek Deville's Qu8k (pronounced "Quake") launched from the Black Rock Desert in Nevada to an altitude of 121,000' before returning safely to earth. Above 99% of the atmosphere the sky turns black in the middle of the day and the curvature of the earth is clearly visible.

This happened back in the fall of 2011. Since then we had Felix jump from a balloon that reached  an altitude just a little higher than this rocket at 124,000 feet. The balloon took two hours to reach that altitude, the rocket took a minute and a half.
    This is a dumb rocket, it has no provisions for steering or course correction. All the electronics in the nose cone are simply recording instruments. You point it in the direction you want it to go, light the fuse, and get away.
    Since they were going for high altitude, and they were using a metal rocket, they must of had a special dispensation from the Pope, otherwise I suspect DoD would have been down on them like a ton of bricks.

Qu8k at Altitude

Original website with a bunch of photographs. From Scott.

Update December 2025 replaced dead link, replaced flash slide show with single image.