New West Book Excerpt
Chasing the Colorado River
Growing up on a cattle ranch in the Elk Mountains of Colorado, I spent many hours operating a haybine. Essentially an oversized lawnmower on steroids, a haybine perches the driver high above tines furiously whisking up stalks of grasses like timothy and brome, leaves of clover, and vast plumes of grass pollen. The sound of machinery belts whirl and groan, and typically a hot August sun beams across your trail of dust. It is the ideal place to focus on water.
From this elevated, noisy seat, your senses become immersed in hay. The smell of cut grasses chokes you. The subtle changes in the whine of the machine relate directly to the thickness and type of grass you are cutting. And the view, roughly 10 feet above the meadow, is a perfect vantage to see where water seeped into the high-mountain roots and where it didn’t. Dry spots stand out like brown beacons in a maze of green life.
Our somewhat antiquated hay-cutting machine boasts a sixteen-foot cutting bar, twirling wire fingers, and large rollers that break the grass stalks to “condition” or dry the hay faster. It is a dangerous machine that you respect. When I lost the tip of my thumb to it as a teenager when the engine wasn’t even running, it earned mine.
But more importantly, despite its clatter and clunkiness, the haybine provides a wondrous tool to witness the laborious hours of a summer’s irrigation. I can see exactly where I (or maybe my brother) missed an irrigation set, or where our gravity-fed sprinkler over-soaked a spot, nurturing less desirable wiregrass to shoot stalks skyward.
News Briefs
Flooding Roundup: Rain, Runoff Pummel Rockies
Heavy rains pelting western Montana this week sent area officials scrambling and Cottonwood Creek over its banks in the rural town of Deer Lodge on Tuesday, where sections of newly constructed retaining walls intended to prevent flooding failed their first test and collapsed into the creek.
It was the town’s first flood since its historic 500-year-level flood in 1981, residents said. Despite dozens of volunteers and local contractors contributing trucks and equipment to help the city crew, at one point the community ran out of sandbags and had to send for more from neighboring Anaconda. More rain is expected through the week.
Spring floods have been an ongoing problem throughout the state and the Rockies, thanks to a drenching combination of rapid snowmelt and excessive rainfall. In Montana, the counties of Clearwater, Deer Lodge, Flathead, Granite, Lake, Lincoln, Mineral, Missoula, Powell, Ravalli and Sanders are all under flood warning. Silver-Bow and Idaho’s Lemhi County are also on flood watch, the National Weather Service reports. In particular, the Blackfoot and Clark Fork rivers in Missoula and surrounding counties will be problematic, with the Clark Fork at Missoula already flooding and predicted to be two feet higher by Thursday, according to the Missoulian.
New West Technology
Could a New Transmission System Make the Wind Power Industry More Profitable?
About 25 years ago Utah inventor Gary Lee was growing frustrated with his snowmobile’s gearbox. Far too often when he was out riding the transmission would get really hot and burn out the rubber belt inside the gearbox. This got Lee thinking about how to design a more durable transmission. After years of work he’s designed a prototype of a recently patented transmission that he claims could make wind power profitable and help the industry move away from subsidies.
The poor reliability of gearboxes is a challenge for the wind power industry and the high cost of replacing busted gearboxes is a chief expense, according to the American Wind Energy Association. While wind turbines are designed to operate for 20 years, estimates for the life of an average gearbox are in the six-to-10-year range, although this can vary, Jeroen van Dam, an engineer with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s Gearbox Reliability Collaborative, said in an email. The collaborative, which includes wind turbine manufacturers, owners, operators and research institutes, has found that gearbox problems are an industry-wide issue and not tied to a particular wind turbine or gearbox manufacturer, he added.
The fixed gearboxes currently used in wind turbines are vulnerable to spikes in wind speeds, Lee said in a telephone interview. High-speed gusts apply a lot of torque (the force that spins the turbine’s shaft) to the transmission, placing it under stress. Sometimes, the wind doesn’t hit the turbine straight on and might catch just one of the blades, which can bend the gears, Lee said.
“If you look at windmills, you’ll see quite often that several of them are not turning and that’s because they’re broken,” he said.
New West Film
In ‘Boys of Bonneville,’ the Story of an Unknown Racing Legend
In the ‘30s and ‘40s, a Salt Lake City construction worker turned racecar driver transformed the notion of what a car was capable of, and he transformed the Bonneville Salt Flats from a plain of death into a landscape of possibility.
For most Americans, Ab Jenkins isn’t exactly a household name, but many of the speed records he set in his handcrafted car, the Mormon Meteor, still hold 70 years after he set them racing across the Utah wasteland.
Salt Lake City director Curt Wallin presents Ab Jenkins’ story in The Boys of Bonneville: Racing on a Ribbon of Salt. Trained as a biologist, Wallin devoted many of his early films to the natural world. A film about fast cars, he says, it’s a bit of a departure. But when the car’s current owner approached him about making the film, he says, “I couldn’t resist doing this.”
The Boys of Bonneville has it Colorado premier Saturday, June 11 at 10 a.m. at the Breckenridge Festival of Film. The Festival runs June 9-12.
New West Feature
Will New Legislation Make Way For An Oil Shale Boom?
U.S. Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming introduced the American Energy and Western Jobs Act in May in an attempt to streamline the leasing process for the oil shale industry in the Rocky Mountains.
The bill would repeal onshore leasing reforms proposed by Department of the Interior Secretary Ken Salazar last year, and would also force Salazar to open 10 more research and development parcels for lease in Wyoming, Utah and Colorado. (The bill also called for repealing the 2011 Wild Lands Order, though Salazar backed away from that policy earlier this week.)
The language of the bill is leaving some energy industry watchdogs uneasy.
The proposed legislation—cosponsored by fellow Wyoming Republican Mike Enzi and Utah Republicans Mike Lee and Orrin Hatch —would also streamline the permitting process by speeding up lease issuance after purchase, while requiring the DOI to set onshore oil and gas production goals that maintain or ramp up production levels. Simply put, it would be a return to the oil shale regulations of the Bush Administration.
News Briefs
Flooding Roundup: High Water in the Rockies
Heavy rain and snowfall, combined with rapidly melting snowpack, are sending rivers and streams over their banks in western states.
Weber County, Utah, is being hit especially hard this week with flood warnings on two area rivers. According to the National Weather Service, a flood warning remains in effect till noon Friday for Weber County on the south forth of the Ogden River near Huntsville, where melting snow is causing the water to rise. The river is presently about 0.2 feet below its flood stage of 4.6 feet. Threatening campgrounds, homes and farms, the river was expected to flood Thursday and continue for the next few days.
The nearby Weber River and its Lost Creek tributary are also flooding for the same reason. High or actual flood-stage waters have been reported all along the two waterways. The bridge on Lost Creek road at the confluence of the two streams is expected to flood. Flooding between Echo Reservoir and Weber Canyon is expected to hit low fields, roads, and the towns of Morgan and Uintah. Perhaps most significantly, the snowmelt buildup is threatening a levee system above Plain City, and the levee is believed to be in real danger of failing.
