Those three mesh grain bin lookin' things to the left of the highway? Corn cribs. No one uses them much anymore, and I've noticed over the years that the few that are left are disappearing. Very few of them are in the good shape these are. Corn used to be harvested on the cob and stored in that state, and the bins had to be ventilated to help dry and keep the ears dry. Modern combines remove the corn from the cob, and there isn't much market for dent corn on the cob these days, either. These are just north of Valentine, NE on US83.
This is a big drilling rig in action in the Bakken Formation near Ray, ND. The solid looking vertical mass on the left of the tower assembly is actually a vertical stack of drill stem - the pipe that the driller uses to extend the bit as it drills lower and lower. In the old days, roughnecks would sling chains around the pipe to loosen and tighten the joints as pipe was added or removed, which resulted in an identifying characteristic of roughnecks - missing fingers. Now it's all hydraulic clamps, but being a roughneck is still very dangerous work. Those tanks to the left of the rig? Three are steel and my company built and hauled them, and the one to the far left is fiberglass. Our customer buys those from a more local company (our versions are superior, but cost more without taking delivery into account). We set them for our customer as well. The raw crude has salt water in it, and a separator/heater (keep in mind how cold it gets here) directs the water to the fiberglass tank and the cleaned crude to the steel tanks. Some areas require more water to crude storage and some do not - a company we haul to in the Panhandle area uses a four steel to one water tank ratio for their wells. Some just take smaller water tanks.
This is a shot of part of the climb out of the Little Missouri River on US85 south of Watford City, ND. The area is in the North Unit of the Theodore Roosevelt National Park. I knew this picture would suck because of the low light conditions - the sky was very dark to the south, and I ended up running through a toad strangler before the day was done. The others I took were just too blurry.
But, after road construction stopped the forward wheels of progress, the more stable platform partially made up for the low light. If you look slightly to the left of the very center of the picture just a tad above the greenery, you can see what to me looks like two caves. I doubt I'll be exploring those any time soon, but it was cool to see them.
The view slightly north of the previous pic.
Farmers had a habit of parking their old machinery on top of these hills next to the road - and Robert has a term for that I have forgotten. When I was in this country custom harvesting wheat thirty years ago, it seemed every hilltop had something parked on it. Now, not so much. I suspect that collectors of old machinery have rounded up the majority of the elderly equipment.
I finally broke out the new camera, so these next pics might be better than the ol' Droid! At any rate, this was the predominant type of machine found on those hills. This would be a thresher. Back when Moby Dick was a minnow, wheat was harvested in a far different fashion than now. The ripe wheat was cut manually by people using scythes and bundled into shocks (Wichita State University's mascot is an anthropomorphic wheat shock - thus the "Shockers"). The shocks would be gathered (by hand) into large wagons and hauled to the thresher. The threshers used the steam powered tractors of that time to power their operations.
This thresher is all folded up. The far left end would have the feeder tray unfolded and the shocks would be fed into the machine there - thrown by hand by people with pitchforks. The far right spout would be rotated around to dump the straw and chaff into a wagon to be hauled away, and the middle spout was set above another wagon for the grain.
Harvest used to be a long drawn out labor intensive affair. The advent of the pull type combine ("combining" all those operations into one) and eventually the self propelled combine really opened up the ability of the American farmer to more efficiently grow more wheat far more economically.
Another old warrior.
South of Thedford, NE is a pretty neat little valley formed by the Dismal River. There is a scenic byway there with an overlook I'd always wanted to check out, so this trip home I took the extra fifteen minutes. However, the overlook required a bunch of climbing. This fat boy? Not gonna happen. So I took these pictures from the bottom. You can see the bridge carrying US83 in the picture above.
I'd always thought the view was rather idyllic. The reality is that the air isn't moving, and it's humid. Buggy, too. Sure looks purty at seventy mph over the bridge, though.
This is the view of the North Platte River from the US83 bridge at - appropriately enough, North Platte, NE. I'm not sure if this picture gives y'all the idea of how the river is so very near flood stage. This bridge makes me nervous because it is so close to the water, but lately it is very close to the water, and has flooded over and blocked traffic for a time.
So, hope you enjoy!
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9 comments:
Always great to see pictures of your trips!
And your explanations are damn good, too!
I did, thank you.
*Re: the missing fingers: I learned in my youth that it was a characteristic of die-press machinists. When I was going through my obligatory practice (2 summer months after 4rd year of the Polytechnic University), I worked in a hot stamping plant of the auto-truck concern (9 big factories altogether), operating a 300,000tonn press. Half of the crew had their digits or even fingers missing, despite the safety controls and devices on all the machinery (and the machinery itself was modern, imported from Japan, Germany and Italy). I was outraged at their cavalier attitude and their mocking my "good girl" follow-the rules - until I learned that their pay was tied to the number of stamped parts they've produced to the end of the shift. And that would be almost impossible to do with the safety on.
** I thought "Dismal" was your name for the river! Even felt offended on river's behalf...till I saw the official sign.
***and...humid? I thought at least in the middle of continent the air is dry, unlike this terrible NY summer. We had one and a half day break from over-80% humidity with a bit of a breeze, and now it feels suffocating again, even though the temps are below 90F (87 at the moment).
it was after 4th year, not 3rd, as I thought at first...failed to fix it correctly, sorry!
Heh. Humidity is relative, doncha know? It was nothing compared to Houston earlier this summer. For me, that was brutal.
Farmers used to lose more than just fingers - often it was the whole arm, and it was generally a rotating power take off shaft or a belt/pulley or chain on a farm equipment. Now, protective shielding helps prevent those injuries, but they're a pain. Unfortunately, it still happens. One of my friend's Dad died from a PTO injury (his shirt sleeve got caught) after he got gangrene from his injuries.
Even today, fat cow haulers are a scarred up bunch because the cattle are so big and strong the guys get beat up by gates and latches in pens and in their trailers.
I'd bet that auto workers might have a tale or two about fingers and stamping out body parts as well.
Body parts -probably not, but missing digits are common, fingers and hands -less so.
Although at the instruction session at the shop we were told scary tales about the danger of not keeping one's hair held in place by a scarf or hairpins...some story about an operator leaning under the top matrix (sorry, don't know proper English terms) to position the part properly, and getting her hair stuck under the moving parts. Not much left to put even in closed casket.
My data is 25 years old, but even then one couldn't operate the press with one hand. It was always two buttons that has to be pushed simultaneously, specifically to keep both hands outside of action theater. Even 1 tonn tiny cold-stamping nail press could make your hand go splat! with a 1000kg hit, and our presses were 3-storey high and hundreds of thousands of tonn strong.
There were also pedals on smaller presses (that had to be pushed with manual buttons at once) and transparent acrylic shields hanging from top matrix, so as to protect from flying pieces of red-hot metal. But somehow the guys worked around all these measures...
Hope your AC is working smoothly; I intend to go to catch some breeze to the Narrows' promenade.
Great travelogue. Thanks.
Great post. My Grandfather and his brother had the first threshing machine in this area. It was powered by teams walking in a circle. and they did have a machine that cut the wheat and tied it in bundles. Looked like a small swather. They were called a grain binder. People walked along and stood the bundles up to wait for the thresher. I have pitched lots of bucker loads of alfalfa for seed into an old threshing machine. For quite awhile they thought you had to do it that way to get the best seed, but eventually everyone went to combines.
Love these photo posts from the road. You are a latter day Charles Kurault!
OOOOOooooo I LOVE your travelin' pics.
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