Valley of Dreams, Part 1: Finding It

The American Southwest is an amazing, mysterious, and visually stunning place. I’ve had a fascination with it my whole life, and make excursions whenever an opportunity arises.  A few years ago, Poldi and I discovered an area in New Mexico with remarkable geologic features:  badlands, hoodoos, and petrified wood!  It was the Bisti Wilderness Area, held apart from private and reservation land by the Bureau of Land Management for the benefit of the public.  It is only very lightly “managed” by the BLM.  There are no visitor centers, no picnic areas or campgrounds, and no trails.  There is a small parking area at the end of a difficult dirt road, marked by a signpost and featuring an outhouse.  

Despite the lack of trails, we were able to follow the breadcrumb descriptions posted online by a photographer who explores Bisti for its photogenic subjects.  We located and visited the Alien Egg hatchery, a 30-foot-long petrified log, and a hoodoo village.  In the years since, we have wanted to return and explore more of this fascinating area.

We were able to do so this year.  The timing was right—late Spring, before the desert becomes intolerably hot.  We both researched and found several more sites with novel features bearing names like “King of Wings”, “Chocolate Penguin King”, and “Alien Throne”.  These are not roadside points of interest with explanatory markers; they are deep in wilderness area, accessible to intrepid hikers willing to explore the desert and locate them.  Those that are successful bring back stunning photographs.

Those photographs inspired us to consider visiting them.  A particularly novel feature, “The Alien Throne”, made me wonder if I could get a picture of it with a night sky backdrop.  I read the accounts of others who had made the trip.  Maybe it was possible!

After deciding on this photographic target, I needed to find it!  There are several levels involved in “finding it”.  Navigational dead reckoning by hiking the desert is one level.  Based on GPS coordinates, it could be located on a map, but how to even get close?  Ideally, you’d drive to the nearest point on the nearest road and hike from there.  That seems easy enough if the roads were like the ones you find on state highway maps, identified by number and by road type.

But the roads throughout this area of New Mexico are not like those roads.  They range from a regular width of gravel, to narrower washboarded and eroded dirt roads, to pairs of ruts, to a single path indicated only by a slight contrast in vegetation.   In fact, they are sometimes not even visible on the satellite views presented on Google Maps.  Were it not for the Google label overlay, some of the roads would not be identifiable.

The roads do have numbers, often multiple numbers: state, county, and reservation, each with a distinct designation.  Not that it matters.  When on one of these back roads, there are few identifying signs showing any number at all.

We had no fewer than four navigational tools to help us.  My trusty old standard is a state road atlas, printed as 90 pages of large 11×17 B-size paper sheets bound into a book.  This revealed land ownership status and showed details, including unpaved roads, but only down to the officially maintained gravel roads.  The lesser roads were not shown at all, yet we needed them to reach our desired access points. 

In addition to the paper atlas, we had electronic tools:  the mapping applications on our phones, a route display in our car (Volvo calls it “Sensus Navigation”), and a handheld Garmin GPS receiver marketed for outdoor enthusiasts.  Having been raised on paper maps and magnetic compasses, I have mixed attitudes towards the electronic tools.  I have owned GPS receivers since 2000, starting with a gift from my mother-in-law, who thought it was the height of silly electronic gadgets (but she knew I would love it).

And they are indeed amazing gadgets for locating one’s position on the planet, but less amazing in identifying orientation, and a bit scary in terms of being dependent on batteries and infrastructure (cell phone and satellite signals).  

The phone is our main navigational tool on the road because its display and user interface is the most supportive.  But it is highly dependent on being in cell phone range.  Outside it, one will see a blue dot representing our current location, but in an ocean of gray—the maps that provide context are loaded on an as-needed basis from the cell phone network.  No cell tower nearby, no map.

I am also skeptical about its GPS capabilities.  My phone does not have the characteristic stubby antenna for GPS wavelengths; how does it see enough sky to get the triangulation data from the satellites?

The car’s Sensus map worked well, but was harder to operate, and suffered some of the same limitations—the map data did not always show.  It was better than the phone; I think it has better local storage of map data, but as with all electronic mapping, there is a “level of detail (LOD)” display control that depends on how far you are zoomed in.  If it appears that your blue dot is lost in space, not on any route, zoom in some more, and the lesser roads will show up.  I often wish I could override the automatic LOD to show more or less of the map detail around me.  But even fully zoomed in, we noticed that some of the backroads were invisible—an apparent gap in the map data.

The Garmin receiver (Montana 610t) was the most reliable in getting a signal—it embeds the stubby antenna and it carries all of its mapping data internally, so our location was always displayed and the map seemed to have ALL of the near-invisible back roads.  The Garmin, however, suffers from a klunky user interface.  I might call it user-hostile, but instead will generously label it as “industrial”.  It uses a touch screen that requires a heavy hand, an awkward data entry screen, and the functions are just not intuitive (to me).  As a result, even after five years, I barely know how to operate it.  

Its greatest weakness, however, is the power supply.  GPS receivers don’t need power to transmit, but they must detect very weak signals from satellites hundreds of miles away and make complex calculations on them.  The built-in rechargeable battery might last a day or so, but on this trip, it failed to recharge.  It could be replaced by lithium AAs, so I now carry spares.   Despite this shortcoming, the Garmin was definitely the unit to bring on our excursions into the desert.

The Garmin was superior in its location display, but it was an app on the iPhone that helped us locate the route to the Alien Throne.  Apple Maps and Google Maps are wonderful applications that have changed how we get from place to place.  But they are designed for driving, public transport, bicycling, and walking urban streetscapes.  There is another application focused on hiking in backcountry settings:   AllTrails (alltrails.com), from a company that caters to those of us who enjoy exploring the many hiking trails out there in the world.

They collect and publish maps for these trails, and they support a community of hikers who report back on their experiences and offer advice and photos.  The maps can be downloaded to your phone (while connected), and then are available to show your position while on the trail, regardless of cell phone coverage.  It turns out your phone is still in contact with the GPS signals (even in airplane mode—recommended to conserve battery life).

There was a trail in the AllTrails library for the Valley of Dreams.  This was the navigational help we needed, not only to find our way through the unmarked desert, but also to find the access point!  Although we were not at the trailhead yet, the AllTrails map showed us where we were with respect to it, and the roads (numbered or not) that could take us there!

This is how we located the trail to the Alien Throne.  The AllTrails application guided us to an informal parking area.  There was a clear trail that started here, but then dissipated onto the sandy washes and scrubland of the desert in front of us.

We had located the trailhead, a wide spot to the side of one of the “pair of ruts” roads in the New Mexico badlands.  We marked the location on the Garmin GPS, and returned to Farmington to prepare for a hike the next morning.

The weather was clear the next day, and we were excited about hiking to the Valley of Dreams, but it took 1-1/2 hours to return to the trailhead.  The day was heating up as we embarked.  We had come for the unusual and novel beauty of the desert and this trail really embodied it.  It was a little over a mile to reach the area of wind and water-eroded shapes contained in the Valley of Dreams.  On the way we encountered other badland features, previews of hoodoos, dry creekbed washes that hosted flash drainage during rain, and the hardy patches of vegetation: cacti and tumbleweed, that somehow make a life here.

Normally, I estimate a two-mile-per-hour rate while hiking over flat terrain, but for whatever reason (trail conditions? distractions? age?), we took twice as long.  There really isn’t a trail here.  It is a broad, flat area of desert scrub punctuated by interesting geologic features.  Distracted by them, we strayed from the AllTrails route, which, because there is no trail; is just a recording of some person’s path.  The application would alert us that we had gone off the trail (“Did you take a wrong turn?”).  This was both annoying and reassuring.

We reached the Valley of Dreams around noon and entered a region of highly eroded features, areas separated by chasms and gulleys, clearly carved by water, but completely dry today and most days.  We found ourselves off the prescribed route and trying to figure out how to not get trapped in some box canyon.  We climbed out of one and into another, but eventually found (or think we found) a feature we had read about:  the giant mushroom.  

And then finally, the Alien Throne!  It evoked a sense of both awe and less.  As large as it was, sitting amongst its peers in this setting of similar thrones, it did not match the scale that we had cultivated in our minds’ eye from the photos we had seen.  Yet it was unique, so eroded by the elements that its supporting column had been eaten through, and the penetrating holes provided viewports to the vista behind.  We marveled at it, took photos from all angles, some selfies, and then had lunch under it!

The heat had suppressed our hunger, but our thirst was unquenchable.  Electrolytes had fueled our passage to this point, and now apples and grapefruit were the preferred lunch nutrition.  We slowed down, caught our breath at this elevation (7000 ft), and enjoyed a moment in the sparse shade of this alien monument.

I was scouting for potential nighttime compositions when I noticed that I could no longer read my position on the AllTrails map on my phone. It had gone dark.  Yes, it was high noon in broad daylight in the desert, so I expected the display might be hard to see, but this was significantly dimmer than I had experienced during the hike to this point.  The brightness setting was maxed out, but only a faint image, too dim to read, showed itself.  The AllTrails app, which up to now had surpassed my expectations, had suddenly failed.  I tried various help-line-advice type tricks, like stopping and restarting the application.  I shut down every other application that might be running in the background, but the problem persisted.  Finally, I shut down the entire phone and restarted it.

A few minutes later, the phone came back to life, the display once again readable.  I was relieved.  We were never in any danger; it was just a reminder of being out on a technology limb.  And in fact, a few minutes later, the display dimmed again, rendering the AllTrails guidance once again useless.

Later, I would learn that this was not an AllTrails problem, but rather a “feature” of the iPhone platform it lived on.  When the operating temperature exceeds a certain threshold, the phone cuts back on its power, the display being a big part of it.  Even though my body temperature is regulated, and the phone is not even trying to transmit while in airplane mode, evidently sitting in my pocket, or in my hand during a hike at noon in the New Mexico sun was too much for it, and it went into a lockdown safe-mode.

Fortunately, we had our printed maps.  They didn’t need batteries, and we could read them even in bright daylight.  Although we were never in danger of becoming lost or unable to return to our car, we really wanted to find the remaining cool features in the Valley of Dreams, so we set out from the Alien Throne to find items with names like The Turtle, Petrified Log, and the Chocolate Penguin King.  We somehow managed to locate them using our stone-age technology.

We eventually found ourselves back at the entry point to the Valley of Dreams and headed back to the trailhead.  Poldi, making the calculation that a straight line was the shortest, led us across the desert in a beeline, never mind the snakes and cactus.  She knew that there was a beer packed in an ice chest waiting for us in the car.

It was an exhilarating day, one that we will be adding to our life highlight list.


Cloud Chamber Update

I still don’t have a reliable setup, but some recent changes I made to my cloud chamber have resulted in this very satisfying display of subatomic contrails.  Here are a couple of recordings.  The first documents when I was stunned to see multiple concurrent trails and I called for Poldi to witness it.

“Hey Poldi!” (expand to see what we were excited about).

The second video is a sustained view for several minutes, placed to background music, to mesmerize those of us who are susceptible. Think about it. This is a visual representation of the radiation that is all around us! Expand to full screen for best effect.

If you’d like to read about how I got here, the previous post describes the project of building the cloud chamber.


Instruments Evolve

I had the fortune of starting my career at a signature moment in the computer revolution—the microprocessor had just been invented and it was rapidly being incorporated into the many various tools that leverage our human intelligence.   Among those tools are the instruments we use to measure the world around us.

Up until then, instruments that required some amount of interaction used very direct physical interfaces:  knobs, buttons, and dials for input; meters, gauges and chart recorders for output.  They were wired in complex arrangements but had limitations in how complex their measurement could be.

The microprocessor changed this by providing an inexpensive logic element that could monitor and manage much more complex channels of interaction:  switches, keypads, digital displays, sensors, data terminals, printers, transducers and actuators were now on the list.  The opportunities to make better measurements than ever before, or measurements that simply could not be performed previously because of their complexity, now became possible.  As a result, there was a renaissance in instrumentation.  

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Chips and Challenges

I was recently presented with a gift from a young family member.  He thought I would get a kick out of a “NASA Mission Control Computer Chip.”  And I did, even more than he could have imagined.

I suspect that an entrepreneur had acquired some decommissioned NASA equipment and found a way to monetize it by stripping the chips out of their sockets, packaging them, providing a backstory, and selling them to nostalgia seekers, space history nerds, and millennials looking for novel gifts for their boomer relatives.  This is not a criticism.  This is a fine way to keep these components from ending up in a scrap heap headed to a landfill and instead make a final tribute to a remarkable human project.

To someone born after the Apollo moon landing program, the artifacts of those times must seem just that: obsolete artifacts.  There are still computer chips, of course, but they are smaller, more complex, and come in highly sophisticated packages that look nothing like those of that era.  Just look inside a cell phone.

My pleasure at receiving this gift was not just the experience of once again seeing a 16-pin DIP (“dual inline package”).  It was also the recalled memories of designing circuit boards with them in the 1970s.  At that time, I worked for a small company that made geophysical instruments.  We had employees, mostly women with fine motor skills, who hand-assembled these DIP packages, along with other electronic components onto circuit boards, soldering them into place and wiring the boards into the instrument chassis.  I contributed to the design of those boards by figuring out how the digital chips needed to connect to each other.

I was curious what exact chip from mission control I had received.  When I looked closely, I could see the part number stamped on its top:  MCM 4116 BC20, along with the manufacturer’s logo and date code (8122- the 22nd week of 1981).  This part number seemed familiar to me.  I looked it up and found it to be a memory chip with 16,384 bits.  Now even more memories flooded in!  This was a milestone memory chip in its day!

And it was the very chip I had used in one of my first memory board designs.  I was quite intimidated because it was in a class of memory called “dynamic,” which was a euphemism for memory that forgets rapidly.  In order for it to not forget, it needed to be refreshed.  And I had no idea how to do that.

There are now many different technologies used to store data, but in the 1970s, there were only a few, categorized by type.  Read-only-memory, ROM, had data permanently etched in place.  It was good for storing data that would never change, like program code and conversion tables.  The other major memory type was, and is, random access memory, RAM.  This is memory that can be written with any data pattern, and accessed later, in any order (randomly) to recover it.  There were two types of RAM:  static and dynamic.  Static memory, SRAM (pronounced “ess-ram”), would retain its data state for as long as it was powered on.  Dynamic memory, DRAM (“dee-ram”), as mentioned above, would fade away with time, measured in milliseconds.

Why would anyone bother with memory that didn’t remember much?  

Capacity.  It was possible to fit much more memory in a DRAM chip than an SRAM chip.  This was due to the additional complexity (transistors) needed for the static memory cell to stay, well, static, and hold its value.  In contrast, the DRAM cell comprised a single capacitor, a place to store electrons.  As a result, DRAM chips had 4X the capacity of SRAM for the same size or cost.

Unfortunately, the electrons on the DRAM capacitors had the tendency to leak away.  This can be compensated for by sensing the memory value before it fades, and then re-charging the capacitor to its original state.  It is a lot of overhead to visit every memory cell, read it, and re-write it before time runs out, but memory was valuable, and the effort was deemed worth it.

I knew little of these underlying details of memory chips in 1977, but I did know that it was easy to design circuits using SRAM chips.  Connect them up, and they seemed to “just work”.  On the other hand, on hearing about the onerous demands and complexities of using DRAM, I was scared.  It just seemed too complicated, and I didn’t think I knew enough to take it on.  It might be really hard.  So I resisted this project.

Eventually, I had to face the task.  I obtained the data sheets and application notes for the DRAM chip I would be using:  the 4116, just like the one recovered from mission control.  In the days before the internet, this involved procuring the published data books from the parts vendor.  I then dove into learning about dynamic memory and how to manage it.

I learned the basics that I described above, and I also learned that I didn’t have to read and re-write every cell.  The chip could help out with that task.  Memory was arranged in rows and columns of cells.  If I could access each row, the chip would take care of refreshing all the columns in it!  Other chips were available to invisibly help with accessing each row.

As I learned how to make the control circuits keep the memory refreshed, I realized that my fear had been unwarranted.  This wasn’t so awful.  It was not over my head.  I knew how to do this!

I would eventually become skilled enough to use DRAM chips in high-end color displays, sometimes devoting many bytes of memory for every pixel, an unheard-of extravagance made possible with the increasing capacity and dropping costs of DRAM.

I took away a lesson from all this.  Something may seem incredibly complex, like the ubiquitous example of “rocket science,” but a complex field is not necessarily a difficult field, especially to those who are in its midst and have learned along the way.  As one learns a little, the next questions to ask become apparent and guide you to learn more.  

As a result of this experience, I became less hesitant about taking on new and unfamiliar challenges.  Confront the challenge and the results are better, and you are better.

TAT Productions:  The Filmstrip

One of the works that came out of TAT Productions in the 1960s was an educational filmstrip.  “Filmstrips” were a popular and common educational resource in the days of ditto machines and library paste.  They presented a sequence of images that were explained by the teacher to convey an important topic in the class.

The project was for a history assignment.  I don’t remember the exact topic, but I remember being pleased that I had access to a special-purpose camera.  The camera club, sponsored by our chemistry teacher, Mr Van Wyk, had equipment available to its members, including a “half-frame” camera.  This enabled and inspired us (Terry and Thor, the principals of TAT Productions), to make our own filmstrip.  Terry did the heavy lifting, gathering the visual sources that we would include in our filmstrip, and I provided the technical effort of operating the photographic copy stand and the lighting.  We had a broad range of materials and worked to present them in a coherent explanatory sequence.  I arranged the camera position, lighting, and exposure, to capture each item in its best representation.  We both worked on the script to accompany the filmstrip presentation.

When we developed the film and spooled it up to load into the filmstrip projector, we discovered a “production error”.  Most of the images had been taken in “portrait” aspect, taller than wide, but the filmstrip projector was designed for frames in “landscape” mode.  This resulted in the class having to turn their heads to make sense of it.  We soon figured out that someone could turn and hold the projector on its side while advancing the film.  And some poor student had to do this whenever our history teacher inflicted our production on his subsequent classes.

TAT productions went on to undertake more projects, forgettable to most, but unforgettable to us, including “The Commercial”, “The Tell-Tale Heart”, and “Images”, all featuring fellow students and our teachers, conveying truly important messages to our classmates of those times.  

Today of course, the classroom projector would automatically rotate the pictures to match their aspect.  I suspect that somewhere, in the same spirit that created TAT Productions, there is a modern-day collaboration between students making TikTok videos for their history class assignment.  They will probably also encounter “production problems”, but it won’t be something as simple as getting the aspect ratio wrong!

The Mission Ends, and Afternotes

The Mission Ends

I would not stay around to see the mission end.  Once the instrument was airborne, there was no further purpose for our lab in the airplane hangar, and my job title became moving man and trucker.  The packing went ok, but on the way home I ran into another weather condition: severe thunderstorms.  Driving the broad-sided truck east on Highway 12, it was a challenge to keep it in my lane.  The rain slowed me down but fortunately, the wind was not enough to blow me over.  I thought about how fickle the spring weather in the Midwest could be.  After weeks of steady wind, the short window of calm that permitted a balloon launch was followed by a gale force blast, perhaps to compensate and bring the average wind speed back up to the South Dakota standard.

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Launch at Last!

Our next opportunity finally arrived two weeks later. Having been through two “dress rehearsals,” we knew what to expect. 

The procedure was to lay out the balloon on a protective tarp on the runway.  The topmost section of the balloon, a small portion that would become the “bubble”, was fed through a retaining “spool” and folded back on itself.  The top section had two tubes, made of balloon material, through which helium would be fed, inflating the bubble, which would gradually ease up from the tarp, eventually becoming large enough to lift itself off the ground entirely, with only the spool and the tension from the uninflated remainder keeping it in place.

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Off Duty, Styrofoam Insulation, False Starts

Off Duty

While the wind blew, the various research groups and the launch crew prepared and tested their experiments and rigs, like fishermen mending nets to get ready for the next big catch.  At the end of each day we would check the wind conditions and then give up for the day, leaving the airport to seek dinner and retire to our rooms at the Super-8 for a few hours of personal time and sleep before repeating the routine the next day. 

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Instrument Troubleshooting, Feeding the Magnet

Instrument Troubleshooting

Cosmic ray instruments are complex and it seems there is always something that needs adjusting or fixing or calibrating, and then testing and confirming and re-calibrating.  This is what consumed our time while waiting for the wind to die down.  And it is a good thing to have had that time to do those last ground tests, because we encountered a troubling condition—an intermittent false trigger.  

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Setting up Shop, Monitoring the Weather

Setting up Shop

Scientific balloon launches have been part of NASA’s mission for over 30 years, but in 1977, they were conducted by NCAR– the National Center for Atmospheric Research.  NCAR maintained a balloon launching facility in Texas that had all of the equipment and resources to support experiments like ours.  Unfortunately, Texas was too far south for our experiment.  Instead, we would be operating from makeshift facilities in Aberdeen, a town of 25,000 in an area of South Dakota that offered low population, but enough infrastructure to meet our technical and launch requirements.

There was a regional airport outside of town, and an airplane hangar was provided to house our laboratory field station.  We were not the only researchers, however.  Groups from other universities were also trying to measure the properties of cosmic rays.  We each had a section of the hangar to set up and prepare our experiments for launch.  After packing up our instrument and all the essential support equipment from our 4th-floor lab in the Physics building into a rental truck and driving a day west on Highway 12, we arrived in Aberdeen.  It took us several more days to recreate an operational cosmic ray field lab in the airplane hangar.  

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