Summer Wanderings

A recent trip out to the Black Hills left me with a few perspectives that I thought I’d share in this issue. First was windmills. As we headed down I90 they were everywhere. Of course, they seem to be everywhere here in North Iowa and specifically in Worth County with the two batched already built, and the new set going up in the eastern part of the county, but I suppose I’m getting used to them whereas I haven’t traveled I90 for several years now so it was all new.

It was also interesting that South Dakota didn’t have any. When you hit the border, they stopped. I suppose with all the large dams in South Dakota generating power, maybe their isn’t as much interest in wind power.

On the way home as evening was falling, I tried to count windmills as we traveled east. I think I hit at least 300 in about 90 miles. They were a bit hard to count with trees, twists in the road and distractions, but that is certainly a lot of power.

This spring I took a group to the landfill by Lake Mills. They are making electricity from the garbage. Specifically, the landfill generates a lot of methane gas and it is collected and used to power a bunch of big caterpillar engines which in turn general electricity. I forget at the moment how much, but I think it was enough power to satisfy the residential needs of a town about Forest City sized.

That is truly something from nothing, or even better. All landfills create methane gas, many or probably most have a flare that simply burns the gas. You can’t let it just go into the atmosphere (that’s a law by the way) and so it just goes up in flames. The landfill in Mason City runs a flare with their methane (this is to keep the methane from going into the atmosphere and causing pollution such as global warming).

Lastly on the electricity end, I watched a very interesting interview with Ray Kurzweil. A simple google search will find lots of information about him. But the interesting thing about this futurist is that he is very optimistic about our future energy wise. He stated that wind and solar are doubling their output in the US ever year. 1% now will be 2% next year, 4% and so on. Within a relatively short span of time, the US should be in great shape energy wise. DOE projections available on the net seem to prove this prediction.

Pros VS Private

In touring two Black Hills caves, I was once again to experience the difference between caves that are operated by some sort of Government agency and the private sector. (The first time I noticed what I’m about to describe was after viewing a private cave in Eastern Iowa and comparing it to a cave in Minnesota run by the state).

So, we have Wind Cave which is a natural park service cave, and Rushmore Cave, not a public entity. In similarity, Mystery Cave in Minnesota run by their DNR and Wind cave run by the park service both had the obvious fact that the tour guides were college educated professionals, geologists and cave experts. They could entertain (a couple better than others) and answer complex cave geology questions that the average person might ask. The tours tended to entail how the caves were formed and focus on the unique features geology.

On the other hand, the common thread in the private caves were the fact that the tours I’ve had were run by young girls somewhere in their late teen years (it seems difficult to age girls these days). I would guess they are paid minimum wages. They could entertain but both my wife and I looked at each other and had the same thoughts “where do they get these people” when a large part of the tour seemed to focus on how this rock looked like snoopy or some other dribble.

In Wind cave they were talking about boxwork, a specific formation very common there but rare other places. It was told that the boxwork (which looks like little boxes) was formed then the cracks in limestone filled with a harder more durable rock and then the limestone itself dissolved away in the cave forming process.

The ceilings were lined with the stuff. I asked a question that popped into mind. “Do you suppose if you took any particular rock here and placed it in carbonic acid that it would reveal boxwork?” The guide looked very thoughtful for a minute and said “good question” but then figured that nobody would ever try it as the park wouldn’t want to take a rock out of the cave.

We had another discussion that sinking an elevator shaft into the cave for access had been done (by the national park service), but drilling a few random holes in the ground to try and locate more caves would not likely be done. (Sometimes you have to ask the hard questions if you want to know how people or entities think).

Gold Fever

Turns out to be real, or at least explained as real according to the guide at the gold mine.

Gold it turns out is quite easy to find in the black hills, only its hard to find it in anything approaching a large quantity. After touring a mine we are instructed on how to pan for gold, given a pan and some gravel and quickly found little flakes of real gold (about pin head sized). Veins of gold ran through the mountains and hard rock mining through shafts found lots of gold in the past. Anyway, in looking at old mining machinery, it was explained that the fine gold particles were accumulated by spreading mercury in with them where the mercury would cause them to clump together and make it easier to pick out. The constant contact with the heavy metal actually caused miners to go insane and thus formed one aspect of “gold fever” which would be a bit different than the gold fever which would lure men into searching