A Unique Experience

— Posted inOther — 3 min read

September 2, 2023

While visiting friends in Canada during harvest time we had the opportunity to experience something new to both of us.

One of their fields was being harvested by the farmer who rented it. We had seen combines in fields over and over during our travels this summer, but now we were going to get see one up close.

Make that, Very Up Close! Linda, being a farm girl when little was so exited to be able to ride along. Her dad owned a farm implement store at one time in the 1950’s and she said how much he would be amazed at the changes from then until now.

My turn in the jump seat. The amount of technology in these big machines is unreal. Gary, the farmer operating the combine would turn it around at the end of a pass, push a button and the autopilot would take over and he remarked how much better all this technology made his life.

Transferring the crop from the combine to the transport trailer was as simple as pushing another button. The GPS in the tractor pulling the trailer made sure it was lined up precisely with the combine to make the transfer.

This is the seed head of what they were harvesting, “canola”, a special cultivar of rapeseed developed in Winnipeg, Canada, not all that far from the our friend’s farm where we are staying. It is used as a vegetable oil and a source of protein meal. In the US we tend to think of it as something grown only in Canada, but actually rapeseed is the third largest source of vegetable oil and the second largest source of protein meal in the world, being grown in many other countries..

The seeds are tiny, about the size of poppy seeds. With each seed being approximately 40 % oil, it is hard to imagine the number of seeds it takes to make a quart canola oil, but by my admittedly very rough approximation it would be somewhere around 450,000 seeds on average. At least I hope my order of magnitude is correct.

So often we never think about what it takes to put the foods we consume onto the store shelves. Agriculture has been modernized in so many ways, and while people may differ on whether some some foods are better or not, the end result has a been a far better life in general of all of humanity.

Pompeys Pillar

— Posted inOther — 2 min read

August 18, 2023

Two things have had a major bearing on the direction of our travels this summer. One was seeing our first great grandchild, the second to follow Lewis and Clark’s return trip from the Pacific coast to St. Louis in 1806. Today we visited another significant Lewis and Clark site.

It wasn’t just just men that were involved in the multi-year trek up the Missouri River and down the Columbia River to the Pacific coast and back again. Pompeys Pillar is named after the youngest person that traversed a portion of the trip by what is known as the Corps of Discovery.

Circled is what is known as the Louisiana Purchase. Land that was purchased from France by President Thomas Jefferson in 1803 and which greatly increased the land area of the young Untied States.

Mannequins in the visitor center of Capt. Clark (right) and his slave York who Clark took along on the trip.

The “pillar” is a rock outcropping above the Yellowstone River east of Billings, Montana.

The reason for the stairs. Capt. Clark craved his name and the date when climbed up on the rock. He named it Pompeys Tower, but a later historian changed it to Pompeys Pillar as it sounded better.

View from the top. I wonder what Capt. Clark saw that day from up here. History isn’t just words in a book, it is far, far more.

A Prairie Dog Town

— Posted inOther — 2 min read

August 17, 2023

About 10 miles east of Big Timber, Montana at the Greycliff exit off I-94 is a KOA RV park where we spent the night and just a couple of minutes east of the RV park is Greycliff Prairie Dog Town State Park.

No fancy visitor center, just a road with a loop at the end when to can see those little critters.

They are out there.

Being burrowing animals look for their low earth mounds.

Watch Dog on duty.

A lounge around Dog.

The are called Black Tailed Prairie Dogs. This was only one we saw that had its tail showing and the end of its tail is indeed black.

This one was busy eating.

And here the camera decided to focus on the plants in the foreground and not the Prairie Dog in the background. It’s probably worth a quick off and back on the Interstate if you’ve never seen Prairie Dogs. PS – this KOA is right next to the Interstate highway with a BNSF train track just beyond the highway. Coal trains run 24 hours a day and blow their horns as they pass by the RV Park. The RV Park map states they have ear plugs available in the office if you need them! Usually RV parks are either right next to a busy highway or near train tracks, here you get both of them.

World Museum of Mining Tour – Butte, Montana

— Posted inOther — 2 min read

August 17, 2023

While we were in Butte we took the underground tour at The World Museum of Mining. They explain the name comes from the fact that the miners who worked in the hundreds and hundreds of underground mines during during Butte’s heyday came from all over the world.

Hard hats are required underground.

The head frame of the Orphan Mine.

Instead of going down deep into the mine riding the hoist, here you enter from ground level and walk down a slope to the first level if the mine. (We have ridden the hoist down many hundreds of feet during a mine tour in Michigan a number of years ago.)

Deterioration is evident in the mine.

Our guide demonstrating just how little light the miners had to work under in the early days when light was furnished by only by candles.

We had LED lights on our hard hats. As you can see, my wife was really into everything the guide said.

The mine is filled with water to within 50 feet of this level. So while standing in this cage there is more than 1,000 feet of water below us.

The map gives an idea of the relative size of the Berkley Pit. All in all there is more than 10,000 MILES of tunnels under Butte. Just as fascinating as seeing the remains of the mines are the stories of the “Copper Kings” Marcus Daly, William A. Clark, and F. Augustus Heinze and their battles fought over control of the copper mining industry in and around Butte, which are worth reading about if you are into history.

Back to Blogging – Butte, Montana

— Posted inOther — 2 min read

August 16, 2023

For nearly a year and a half I blogged every day, then suddenly stopped. I was simply burned out. We were not traveling and it was almost the same thing day after day. In early June we started traveling again but for some reason I had no desire to write about all the interesting places we were seeing, but today I got bit by the blogging bug once again. Unfortunately because of my hiatus you missed our travels in west Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho and some of Montana.

This is our third time spending time in the historic mining town of Butte and each time has been different. Its history is one of mining cumulating in one of the richest copper deposits found, though now it is just a mammoth hole in the ground, 1 mile long, a half mile wide and over a quarter mile deep. From the viewing stand it is too huge to show it all.

The color of the water looks so inviting, just like a Venus Fly Trap looks to an insect.

Photos don’t due justice to its size. Can you see the building at the edge of the water just in from the left side of the image?

It’s going to take a while to get back into the blogging groove. That’s all for today.