Geography Challenge (or: how Janitor spent his summer vacation)

enigma

1) Grand Canyon?
2) JPL?

Janitor

1) Right river (the Colorado River), but the wrong location (not Arizona)

2) Nope-- notice how dry the land is beyond the manicured green land

Evo

The meteor crater in Arizona. (had to google for the name) Barringer Meteor Crater

Cool pictures Janitor!

edit - no, I take it back, that looks too deep and not large enough & do I see water?

hmmmm

Janitor

Thanks! Definitely a crater, but not of meteoric origin, and not in Arizona. (I have been to Meteor Crater on other trips though.)

Evo

Yeah, I realized after a second it was a volcanic crater, lakes seem to form in those. But I don't remember where it is.

Janitor

What looks like water on the crater floor is actually a lighter-colored soil that wind has blown into the crater. I don't doubt that after a rainy season there could be a shallow lake there for a time, though this is located in a place where it does not rain much.

Evo

Hmmm, it gets more and more mysterious.

Janitor, are you positive you never left the planet?

Janitor

The location is Earth.

The municipal water supply where I grew up turns out to have been contaminated by trichloroethylene. That explains a lot.

Gokul43201

Going for the obvious guess : Is this the Thiokol plant, somewhere in Colorado (I think) ?

Janitor

Correct! I guess you could read the printing on the rocket.

The big rocket is one of the two boosters that strap onto the Space Shuttle's fuel tank. It comes back down to the Atlantic Ocean by parachute and is towed back to shore for refurbishing and re-use.

The Thiokol facility is in northern Utah. About a ten-minute drive to the left of the picture is the 'Golden Spike' site where the two railroad-building companies met up to form the first transcontinental railroad in the U.S. You can't quite see the north end of the Great Salt Lake itself from the area, but you can see white salty ground out in that direction.

Gokul43201

Yes, you can clearly read "THIOKOL" on the rocket. I knew their plant was either in Utah or Colorado. For some reason, I thought it was Colorado...I recall reading about Alcoa selling Thiokol to another company a couple of years ago.

Janitor

I didn't know about the Alcoa connection. I can remember when it was called Morton-Thiokol, and supposedly the 'Morton' part was the salt-making company, which I guess scooped up salt from the edges of the Salt Lake.

BobG

They make Atlas and Delta rockets in Colorado.

I would have guessed somewhere in Western Colorado (around Grand Junction) or Eastern Utah for the first photograph. The Morton-Thiokol picture makes me think it's probably Utah, but I'd be at a loss to identify the place closer than that.

Gokul43201

That explains it ! You're a saver, BobG !

Janitor

I will give BobG credit for picture #1, since it is in southeastern Utah, about midway between Grand Junction, Colorado and the Grand Canyon in Arizona. I took the picture from an overlook in Canyonlands National Park. They call this area "Island in the Sky." The river itself cannot be seen from where I was standing, just the gorge. The river flows left-to-right in the picture. Six miles downstream from here it is joined by the Green River, which starts in Wyoming.

I will provide answers on #3, 4, 5 in 24 hours.

Janitor

3) Not too far from the so-called Extraterrestrial Highway in central Nevada is a volcanic field. I drove past some cinder cones on the dirt road going to the rim of Lunar Crater, which is where I was standing when I took this picture. I think Lunar Crater itself is called a maar crater by geologists, since it formed when magma rose to the level of a groundwater layer, flashed it into steam, and blew the ground cover away in a very brief amount of time. I was the only person around when I was there. Places near there are called Hot Creek and Warm Springs, so I suspect there is still some hot magma not too far down in this part of Nevada.

4) For California-bound emigrants in the mid 1800s to cross northern Nevada meant winding their way between mountain ranges through hundreds of miles of sagebrush desert. Nature was kind enough to provide a perennial stream for most of those miles--the Humboldt River. But like all good things, the Humboldt ended. In particular, its water sank into ground on a mud flat, the ‘Humboldt Sink,’ on which I was standing when I took picture #4, looking southwest over the Fortymile Desert. Many oxen gave their lives pulling wagons across this stretch of desert without water. [I was giving a tiny hint by saying “I would be surprised if anyone comes within 40 miles."]

5) A group of California emigrants known to history as ‘the Donner Party’ took an ill-advised “shortcut” through Utah, and paid dearly for it. They arrived near the crest of the Sierra Nevada too late in the traveling season, such that the snow was too deep to get over the top of what is now known as Donner Summit, beyond which it was downhill to the destination in northern California. They had to spend a very snowy winter on the east slope of the Sierra, and they split into three camps. One camp was at Alder Creek. I took this picture sitting on the boardwalk spanning the creek. The dark portion of the foreground of the picture is the water of the creek itself, a couple of feet wide, heading down the meadow grass toward the Truckee River. A sign merely said that archaeologists believe the precise campsite was “nearby.” I suppose they don’t want people poking around in the ground for artifacts. In the running for most loyal spouse ever has to be Tamsen Donner. She had a chance to leave with rescuers who came from the west late that winter. She sent her children to safety with them, but she herself stayed with her dying husband. When the next rescue team arrived, Tamsen and George were both dead. Some believed that Lewis Keseberg cannibalized them to fill his belly, but he always denied the charge.

If anyone is interested in a brief item about the site, see this:

http://www.missoulian.com/articles/2...erritory01.prt


A lengthier telling of the story is at:

http://members.aol.com/DanMRosen/donner/

Gokul43201

Very interesting, Janitor !!