Sheepherder's Party

This weekend we went to the Sheepherder's Party out on the Utah/Nevada stateline. This area, generally called the West Desert, has been a big winter sheepherding area for over a century. This party is put on to encourage sheepherders, sheep owners, and others involved in the sheep industry to celebrate their heritage and to take a break from the mundane routines of winter.

Denys Koyle, owner of the Border Inn, organized the event, which went from Friday evening to the wee hours of Saturday night. Friday night was a dinner and sheepherder's stories; Saturday was a pancake breakfast, presentation by Sour Dough Slim, a dinner, and the sheepherder's ball, with lots of good music to kick up your heels to. 

Nevada Governor Jim Gibbons opened the program Friday evening with remarks.

Some of the actual sheepherders came. There aren't so many of them anymore as transportation has improved. Nevertheless, they still do a lot of the sheepherding the old-fashioned way, living in small sheep camps, riding horses to move the sheep, and having only their border collies and sheep dogs for company most of the time. At one point most of the sheepherders were Basque, but today they are all from Peru. 

Sourdough Slim showed off his excellent musical abilities and sense of humor.

The program included those of all ages, including young Melanie singing a pretty song in her pink cowgirl hat.

This gentleman showed off a quilt his made. He explained that he wore the elbows out of his wool shirts, and they would mysteriously disappear from the closet. He wanted his wife just to cut the sleeves off to make short-sleeved summer shirts, but she used them to make this beautiful quilt--her 100th quilt!

The emcee was the hilarious Hank Vogler. His son got up to take his turn at filling the room with hot air.

No program is complete without a little cowboy poetry. Here is the Sheepherder's Lament by Jack Ingram, about the difficulties of getting a wife while herding sheep:

And then came something new for me: cowboy yodeling. I really enjoyed it. If you want to hear more, Sourdough Slim will be performing at the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada the end of January, or you can get CDs from his website.

John Deere 45W Forklift

Desert Boy is always happy to join me on forays to the equipment yard because it means he can practice his driving skills. On this day, he took quite a liking to this old John Deere tractor with the 45W forklift attachment. The tractor appears to still be in pretty good shape despite a light coating of rust.

I imagine the tractor was used to move hay to help feed the cows. 

On the back axle it says Deere on one side. I imagine it says John on the other, but it's covered in grease and I didn't have a rag with me. That metal sure looks solid, doesn't it?

One of the reasons Desert Boy likes to drive the old tractors is they just have so many fun parts. Gear shifters, levers, indicators, knobs, a big steering wheel, and even something to rest his short legs on. It just doesn't get much better.

I tried to look this tractor up on the internet to get more information about it, but didn't have much luck. So I'll have to keep digging to uncover the past of this tractor and what it did. For some reason I always leave the equipment yard with unanswered questions.

The Extraterrestrial Highway

I saw this lovely cow crossing the ranch road the other day. Now, for most people, this would not be a memorable moment. But there was something in the cow's stature, the far-off mountains, and the winter lighting that made me remember of a trip I took a few years ago, a trip not to be forgotten.

That trip was out to a desolate highway, with plenty of open range, except the open range wasn't quite the same as it is throughout the rest of the West. This open range had the special designation shown above the cow on the sign. (Photo from rachel-nevada.com website). I kept expecting to see cows being beamed up, and the music from Close Encounters of the Third Kind played in my head.

This trip was out on the Extraterrestrial Highway, Nevada 375. This 98-mile long highway only passes one town, Rachel, NV. Calling it a town is a bit of a stretch, with just a scattering of buildings. Normally it would be totally ignored, but it has the fortune of being close to the infamous Area 51. If you like UFOs and aliens, this is a mecca. 

The Little A'Le'Inn is a restaurant and hotel. When I went in, some folks from the military base were enjoying a little time off by entertaining themselves with looking at the numerous photos covering the walls of UFOs and clippings of strange sights seen in the area. Locals offer tours to special spots where outsiders can peek into the ultra-high security area and try to determine what's happening inside. (By the way--the magnet above is a bit old--the new area code is 775, but the rest of the phone and fax numbers are correct.)

At the time I took my trip, the Nevada tourism office was offering a promotion that if I turned in a couple receipts from the ET highway, I could get this cool bumper sticker. I still haven't ever seen anyone else with one. I wonder why not??

And after recalling that wonderful trip and all the potentially strange things happening over the Great Basin desert, I look closer at the image of the cow crossing the road. Maybe some of those white clouds really aren't clouds after all...

Bald Eagles

In the winter, we are often fortunate to have a couple bald eagles (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) take up residence in our valley. Their bright white heads and tail feathers sure contrast with their dark brown bodies. Although bald eagles' favorite food is fish, they are opportunistic. That's a good thing, because there aren't too many fish out here in the desert! 

We were driving along when we spotted them, and when we stopped to take a photo, they flew off. Every winter we see two or three bald eagles, and they stay several months. We get excited seeing these huge birds, and I always am thankful they've decided to visit--and curious where they came from and why they choose this valley.

Cosmic Ray Center, Millard County, Utah

Out in the isolated West Desert of Utah a strange sight may cause drivers along US Highway 6 & 50 to take a second look. Is that a tanning bed out in the sagebrush?  And another? And another, each spaced out in lines that cross the highway?

These strange apparatuses are part of a study being conducted west of Delta, Utah, to measure cosmic rays. Educational institutions from Japan, Korea, Russia, China, Taiwan, and the United States are involved. The headquarters is in Delta, and that's where the data is also processed.

The study is "to observe cosmic-ray-induced air showers at extremely high energies using a combination of ground array and air-fluorescence techniques." Okay, what does that mean? It probably makes perfect sense to my brother, the physicist, but for those of us who are not immersed in physics, it may be a little nebulous.

First off, what are cosmic rays? Here's the simplistic answer: tiny stuff you can't see with the naked eye that comes from outer space. Now here's the official answer: The term "Cosmic Rays" refers to elementary particles, nuclei, and electro-magnetic radiation of extra-terrestrial origin. These may include exotic, short-lived particles such as muons, pi-mesons or lambda baryons. (okay--did any of you have fun saying "muons"? I started imagining cows flying through space. Sorry for this tangent, but I couldn't help myself. Moo.)

Cosmic rays weren't discovered until the 1930s, when Austrian physicist Victor F. Hess went up in a hot air balloon over 17,000 feet high, measuring radiation along the way. He was surprised to find that the radiation increased with altitude, and surmised that radiation was entering the earth's atmosphere from outer space. He called this phenomenon "cosmic radiation," and later it was coined "cosmic rays." For his trouble, he earned a Nobel prize in 1936.

Next, what is a ground array technique? The ground array uses 576 scintillation detectors. Here's what one looks like:

And from its better side:
These scintillation detectors are laid out in a grid, each 1.2 km away from the next. The research area covers 760 square kilometers. Helicopters were used to install them, with each one weighing about 250 kg. 

The map below shows the ground array of scintillation detectors.

On the sides of the grid are fluorescence detectors. Sorry, I haven't made it to any of them to photograph yet, but researching this study has piqued my interest and I may have to wrangle an invitation. The fluorescence detectors are able to detect cosmic rays with much less energy (between 3x10^16 eV and 10^19 eV to be exact) than those detected by the scintillation detectors (which only detect cosmic rays greater than 10^19 eV).

Let's get back to the tanning beds--oh, I mean scintillator detectors. They are double layer scintillators which sample the charge particle density of the air shower footprint when it reaches the earth's surface. Okay, I took that last sentence directly from the project website. I think that means when the cosmic rays get close to earth, these detectors see how close together they are. (Please correct me if I'm wrong!)

The solar panel on the scintillator detector collects enough energy to power it for an entire week in complete darkness. Unless Yellowstone explodes and we're shrouded in really thick ash blocking out the sun, we probably don't have to worry about that. 

The magazine Science took note of this huge project, called the Telescope Array. It came about when two rival groups merged, using their two different techniques in this one project. Despite its name, no telescopes are part of the project; they had been included in an earlier proposal. Japan put up $13 million of the $16 needed to install and operate the project, but it was never planned to be installed in Japan because of the increased humidity there. 

One of the reasons to study cosmic rays is that physicists had been noting more higher energy cosmic rays than expected. Some can hit the ground with the force equivalent of a golf ball hitting the fairway. It makes me want to duck under one of those thick scintillation detectors so I can avoid getting hit.

This post just scratches the surface of this interesting project, which includes lots more acronyms (like TALE) and terms (such as "energy spectrum"). To learn more about this project, visit the Telescope Array website. And if you happen to be driving near the project area, you might  think about particles falling from outer space all around you. Someday we might understand what's out there.