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My original visit was back in 2012, the Storehouse was vastly overgrown back then ( www.flickr.com/photos/139375961@N08/shares/sRmFG0 )
Speaking to a local chap, who informed me the area where the Storehouse is positioned was amongst the cattle sheds, recently cleared out by the current owner, the area may be put over for housing.
From my position of shelter from the rain I was able to record the arrival Konstal tram units HZ 270 & 271 at plac Wszystkich Świętych in Kraków while they were working a Line 1 service.
All images on this site are exclusive property and may not be copied, downloaded, reproduced, transmitted, manipulated or used in any way without expressed written permission of the photographer. All rights reserved – Copyright Don Gatehouse
I position myself upstream of an Otter in the hope that it would go passed. I was slightly taken aback when two popped up way too close, but then anything can happen when the river is flooded. This is the only usage image that I managed to get.
Highest Explore Position #339 ~ On March 23rd 2009.
Grey Wolf - Wildwood, Kent, England - Sunday March 15th 2009.
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Well, I'm still in Colchester....so sorry for my lack of visits yesterday, if I didn't make it to your wonderful streams..:(
I'll try and catch up tomorrow..:)
Well, as I said on Friday....I spent the day at Southwold in Suffolk yesterday, where I went on a 3 1/2 hour speed boat jaunt up the coast to Lowerstoft and surrounding areas....we did indeed see a load of seals sunbathing on a sand bank out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, the only trouble was we didn't get in close enough for me to get a good shot...as I've said before, I soooooooooo need a 400 to 500 mm long lens..:(
We did get close to the wind farm though...ironic Yahhhh...lol
Anyhoo....I think out of the 500 or so images I took yesterday I may have one or two decent ones to show you...so stay tuned tomorrow..:)
I'm off to Explore the Essex coast line again today...as so far anyway, it's a lovely sunny and warm spring like day..:O))
So I hope everybody is having an awesome and relaxing Sunday, see you all on tyhe morrow...:)))
Picture above shows a Nikon D800E equipped with Phottix GPS and wireless RF trigger. The back of the camera is equipped with a Hoodman loupe to be able to critically focus using live view on LCD screen. The lens used is a Mamiya 645 Manual Focus A 150mm f/2.8. It is mounted on the camera via a PSA (Panorama Shift Adapter) from the company Zoerk (Zork) custom made to accommodate Mamiya 645 lenses on Nikon F body. The adapter has a tripod mount and can accommodate a L bracket shown here. The whole assembly is mounted via a Novoflex plate (QPL2 in blue color) on an Arca-Swiss compatible tripod head. I used here a clone of the Arca Swiss Cube for maximum flexibility and accuracy of positioning. In the picture above the lens is shifted horizontally to the left of the camera of approximately 10mm. This assembly is no longer a point & click camera but the digital equivalent of the old view camera, designed to meet or exceed the largest Digital medium format output.
The purpose of using a Mamiya lens on Nikon FF body is not just the latest fad to mount third party lenses on a Nikon body. Mamiya 645 lenses are excellent medium format lenses which have a diameter much superior to the 135 format lenses. It allows to take several photos shifted within the diameter of the lens optics. This is made possible because the 75mm diagonal of a 645 medium format lens gives 32mm of additional space (shift) compared to the 43mm diagonal of a 35mm format camera sensor. This is why we can take 3 photos shifted (one with no shit, one shifted left, and one shifted right) and still be within the diameter of the medium format lens. Using this technique the stitching is quasi perfect with no need to crop due to loss of coverage in the upper or lower section of the image, usually created by a a curvy horizon when panning/rotating with a non perfect leveling.
The resulting image that can be produced with this setup is the equivalent of a 80 Mpixel camera depending on the orientation of the D800E sensor vs the direction of shift! Superior resolution, higher ISO and less noise than all the current Digital medium format cameras sold $20000 and more! Yes, it is possible to do it with an investment inferior to $4000 if you count the purchase cost of the D800E. I will concede that the Mamiya 645 lenses, although excellent, will not quite match the performance of the Leica S lenses. Note however that a Leica S lens is usually > $6000 vs a used Mamiya 645 lens (55mm, 80mm) which can be found on ebay for $300 or less!
The German made Zoerk (Zork) adapter is unique as the Mamiya lens is fixed during the shifting: it is the body which moves behind the lens! Unlike most Panorama adapters allowing the rotation through a difficult to find nodal point , the Zork adaper eliminates any parallax issue since the lens is fixed vs the subject. This is particularly useful when you have a near and remote subject aligned with the camera: any rotation outside the nodal point will ruin the alignment and makes the stitching impossible. Therefore the Zork design results in a superior accuracy of the stitching of the photos where technically 2-3 pixels overlap is enough for a perfect stitch. Rotation based Panorama requires usually min 20% overlap to account for distortion/parallax issues, and the final image needs cropping due to curvature movement of the rotation if tripod head is not perfectly leveled.
Another huge benefit of the Zork adapter: it shifts horizontally 20mm with camera sensor in landscape mode. One limitation in vertical shift: the prism/flash housing of the D800 or D800E limits the vertical shift with sensor in landscape position (approx 14mm). It is better than the max shift of a Nikkor PC-E lens (approx 11 mm). With the camera in landscape mode and a vertical shift (up and down) or with the camera in portrait mode and a horizontal shift (left/right) you achieve the biggest file enlargement. With a Nikon PC-E lens a maximum 11mm shift will give you a 92% increase of the photo. With the Zork adapter a full 20mm shift (possible on Canon DLSR and Nikon pro bodies without built-in flash) will provide a 167% enlargement (yes 2.7 the original pixel size!). It means that a 36Mpixel camera like the D800 will provide a 96Mpixel file with the Zork adapter fully shifted. On Nikon bodies with built in flash like the D700 or D800 however the full shift of 20mm is not possible as the flash housing in on the path of the shift. It seems that the shift is limited to 14mm which provides an enlargement of 117% (x2.2 Mpixel increase).
For Panorama shots where the camera orientation must be the same as the direction of the shift (landscape/Horizontal shift or portrait/Vertical shift) the aspect ratio is spectacular but the Mpixel increase is less:
- On a traditional Nikon PC-E lens with 11mm shift, the Mpixel increase is 61% with aspect ratio of 2.4:1
- with the zork adapter using full 20mm shift (possible on all Canon and Nikon DSLR even with the D700/D800), the Mpixel increase is 111% with aspect ratio of 3:1! more information is available at the following link:
www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/tilt-shift-lenses1.htm
Tilt movement is not possible with this adapter and in general with Mamiya 645 lenses tilt can be achieved but you lose the ability to focus at infinity as the registration distance between the rear of the lens and the sensor would be too long with the additional tilt movement.
Although a sturdy design that reflects German engineering, the finish (look) of the adapter looks as a hand made prototype. The demand is not high enough in the market to mass produce this custom made adapter (the model I purchased use only Mamiya 645 MF lenses but the manufacturer can sell you one adapte for Pentax 6x7 or Hasselblad lenses to be mounted on Nikon or Canon bodies).
Cost $750 including the L bracket that allows the adapter to be mounted with flexibility in any position on a tripod head.
more information can be found on the manufacturer website:
I have put a lot of effort to research and understand the Tilt and Shift world which was new to me, and although there are a few books on view cameras, T&S lenses and the Scheimpflug principle, I could not find any practical information on using T&S adapters like Mirex and Zork on Digital cameras, using large diameter Medium Format lenses. Forums seem to provide some partial information with little experience with Nikon DSLR which are less friendly to shifting in the direction of the built-in flash. So I decided to gather all the information I have learned and summarize it in this single post, which you can bookmark or save as a favorite for future reference.
An example of a photo taken with this set-up with explanations how to use Photoshop for Panorama stitching and focus stacking is given in the comments area of this link:
www.flickr.com/photos/episa/8603934110/in/photostream
Final question you may ask and which I already asked myself since I own the Nikkor Micro PC-E 45/2.8: why not use a simple dedicated Tilt and shift lens from Nikon?
It turns out that using a dedicated Nikon PC-E lens is not any easier and still requires to manually focus and fix the exposure manually. A the same time it costs $2000 to get a single T&S lens. With the set-up described in this posting the investment is limited to the adapter ($750) and the Mamiya lens ($300 on ebay for each focal length like 55mm f/2.8N, 80mm f/2.8N, A 150mm f/2.8). Investing in a Nikon PC-E lens makes sense if you use the tilting function for creative effect or as a landscape photographer. But I would argue that using Focus stacking you can achieve an ever better effect than with a Tilt lens if your goal is to achieve maximum depth of field in a landscape or in a macro shot. The real advantage of the PC-E lens remains when you need to reduce the depth of field and create special effects (like miniature rendering, or tilted plane of focus). This becomes a very narrow application mostly for professional photographers who need to sell a unique look in their pictures.
I hope that you found this compilation of data instructive, even eye opening. Let me know if you appreciate the sharing.
I am doing the 2011 strobist class on Flickr, and here is the assignment result for Strobist L102 1.1 Position: Angle.
Handy Manny and Philipe kindly dropped in to model for me here on white seamless (A3). Lit with a 580EXII triggered by Cactus v4s. Light positions as indicated on the diagram. Exposures were kept the same for each shot using a Sekonic light meter.
If you are reading this, and have no idea what Strobist is... Check out Strobist 102 lessons. This exercise is specifically for 1.1 Position: angle lesson which is all about observing how things look different when you get your flash off the camera and hitting your subject from different angles.
Which one makes Manny look best do you think?
“A nuclear-propelled spacecraft, shown being assembled in an orbit around the earth, prepares for take-off to Mars. An orbital assembly team is depicted swinging a second stage assembly into position, using space tugs. This second stage will brake the craft into its orbit around Mars. A cluster of four cylinders (upper right), will house the astronauts during the long Martian voyage. At right angles to the astronauts’ quarters are temporary living quarters of the assembly team, which will spend nearly four months in earth orbit assembling the spacecraft for the Mars mission. This “typical” Mars mission was conceived by scientists at the Westinghouse Electric Corporation’s Astronuclear Laboratory and was described by Dr. William M. Jacobi of Westinghouse, at the American Institute of Astronautics and Aeronautics meeting. Heart of the system is a nuclear reactor (housed in the engine at lower left) which Westinghouse is developing in connection with the Rover Program, the nation’s effort to develop nuclear rocket propulsion systems for advanced space missions. The reactor will be incorporated into the NERVA (Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application) engine under development by Aerojet-General Corporation for the AEC-NASA Space Nuclear Propulsion Office, based on a concept originated by the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory.”
Additionally. It’s very long but incredibly informative, enlightening & pertinent, with LOTS of content I wasn’t aware of. Not to mention, who knows how long it’ll continue to be available online:
“Before his death, renowned science fiction writer, inventor, and futurist Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) confidently declared the space age had not yet begun, and would only commence when reliable nuclear-powered space vehicles become available to drastically reduce the cost of moving humans and heavy payloads from the surface of the earth to the farthest reaches of the solar system. It is a little appreciated fact that Pittsburgh’s Westinghouse Electric Company played a central role in bringing that vision much closer to reality through its participation in the Nuclear Energy for Rocket Vehicle Applications (NERVA) program between 1959 and 1973. With recently renewed interest in the human exploration of Mars and destinations in the outer solar system, attention is once again focusing on the remarkable accomplishments that Westinghouse made in the development of the largely untapped potential of the nuclear thermal rocket.
As early as 1949, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico, conducted research to develop a solid core nuclear thermal rocket engine to power intercontinental ballistic missiles. The idea of a nuclear-powered rocket had already captured the imagination of many serious science fiction writers, evidenced by Robert A. Heinlein’s 1948 novel Space Cadet that featured a sleek nuclear-powered rocket ship that inspired the 1950 CBS television series Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, starring Frankie Thomas (1921–2006). With encouragement from science advisor Willy Ley, in 1951 Joseph Lawrence Greene, writing under the pseudonym Carey Rockwell at the publishing house of Grosset and Dunlap, launched Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, a juvenile novel series that fired the imagination of an entire generation of America’s youth with images of a streamlined manned single-stage-to-deep space atomic-powered rocket called the Polaris.
Similar to the nuclear rocket engine eventually developed under the NERVA program, the Polaris employed turbo-pumps to supply propellant to a uranium-fueled reactor core. Virtually all of the single-stage rockets of the golden age of science fiction were described at the time as using some form of atomic energy for propulsion. In a classic example of scientific theory inspiring art and, in turn, inspiring practical engineering concepts, by 1957 Los Alamos Laboratory had acquired a test facility at Jackass Flats, Nevada, to test the first KIWI series of nuclear rocket engines as part of Project Rover. Because these were ground tests rather than actual flight tests, the early engines were named after the flightless Kiwi bird endemic to New Zealand. The trials were conducted with the engines mounted upside down on their test stands with the rocket plume firing upward into the atmosphere.
In 1959, the Westinghouse Electric Company of Pittsburgh and its Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory in nearby West Mifflin, also in Allegheny County, were busy building nuclear reactors for the U.S. Navy and had also designed the nation’s first commercial nuclear power plant at Shippingport, Beaver County, that went online in December 1957. In anticipation of landing more lucrative government contracts, John Wistar Simpson, Frank Cotter, and Sidney Krasik convinced Westinghouse CEO Mark W. Cresap Jr. in 1959 to approve the creation of the Westinghouse Astronuclear Laboratory (WANL) to investigate the feasibility of building nuclear rocket engines.
Authorized in May 1959, WANL officially became a Westinghouse division on July 26, 1959, and consisted of just six employees with Simpson at the helm. Krasik, a Cornell University physicist, served as technical director and Cotter worked as Simpson’s executive assistant and marketing director. Born in 1914, Simpson graduated from the United States Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland, joined Westinghouse in 1937, and earned an MS from the University of Pittsburgh in 1941. Working in the switchgear division of Westinghouse’s East Pittsburgh plant, Simpson helped develop electric switchboards that could survive the extreme impacts experienced by naval vessels under bombardment in the Pacific Theater during World War II. In 1946, he took a leave of absence from Westinghouse to work at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to familiarize himself with atomic power. Upon his return three years later, he became an assistant manager in the engineering department of Westinghouse’s Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory. He subsequently managed the construction of the Shippingport Atomic Power Station in 1954 and the following year was promoted to general manager of the Bettis Laboratory. He was elected a Westinghouse vice president in 1958. By 1959 Simpson and his team had become enthusiastic about taking on the new challenge of building nuclear-powered rockets to explore the solar system.
WANL was first headquartered in a shopping mall in the Pittsburgh suburb of Whitehall. By 1960 its staff and the leaders of Aerojet General had pooled resources to compete for the lucrative NERVA program contract from NASA’s Space Nuclear Propulsion Office (SNPO). Aerojet and Westinghouse won the contract to develop six nuclear reactors, twenty-eight rocket engines, and six Rocket In Flight Test (RIFT) flights the following year. With a substantial contract in hand, WANL increased its staff to 150 and relocated to the former site of the Old Overholt Distillery. By 1963, Westinghouse and its collaborators employed eleven hundred individuals on the project, based near the small town of Large, thirteen miles south of Pittsburgh in Allegheny County. Large was named for a former distillery founded during the early nineteenth century by Joseph Large. Together, Aerojet and Westinghouse developed the NRX-A series of rocket test engines based on an 1120 megawatt Westinghouse reactor. Assembled at Large, the reactors were loaded on rail cars for delivery to the nuclear test facility at Jackass Flats for field testing.
The initial objective of the NERVA program was to build a rocket engine that could deliver at least eight hundred seconds of specific impulse, fifty-five thousand pounds of thrust, at least ten minutes of continuous operation at full thrust, and the ability to start-up on its own with no external energy source. Seventy pounds per second of liquid hydrogen pumped from the propellant tank into the reactor nozzle would provide regenerative cooling for the rocket nozzle. The cylindrical graphite core of the nuclear reactor was surrounded by twelve beryllium plates mounted on control drums to reflect neutrons. The drums, also containing boral plates on opposite sides to absorb neutrons, were rotated to control the chain reaction in the core. The core consisted of clusters of hexagonal graphite fuel elements, the majority of which consisted of six fueled element sectors and one unfueled sector. The fuel, pyrographite-coated beads of uranium dicarbide, was coated with niobium carbide to prevent corrosion caused by exposure to hydrogen passing through the core. Each fuel rod cluster was supported by an Inconel tie rod that passed through the empty center section of each fuel rod cluster, and a lateral support and seal was used to prevent any of the hydrogen from bypassing the reactor core. Inconel is a high-temperature alloy, one version of which was being used at the time as the skin on the famous X-15 rocket plane.
The solid core nuclear thermal rocket used highly enriched uranium embedded in a graphite matrix. As the highly fissionable uranium 235 atoms absorb a neutron they split to form lighter elements, more neutrons, and a large amount of thermal energy. The nuclear rocket uses the thermal energy generated by a nuclear chain reaction to heat hydrogen, forced through narrow channels in the reactor core. The hydrogen propellant is delivered under pressure to the reactor core using turbo-pumps. The nuclear chain reaction in the reactor core causes the hydrogen to become superheated and expelled through the rocket nozzle at extremely high velocity as an explosively expanding reaction mass resulting in a high specific impulse of 825 seconds. In a chemical rocket, where a fuel (such as liquid hydrogen) and an oxidizer (such as liquid oxygen) are brought together and burned in a combustion chamber, the maximum specific impulse achievable is only about 450 seconds. Specific impulse is a measure of efficiency of a rocket and is defined by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky’s rocket equation as the pounds of thrust produced for the pounds of fuel consumed per second and is expressed in seconds.
With a high specific impulse, the ability to conduct multiple shutdowns and restarts, and a highly favorable energy to weight ratio, the nuclear rocket was the kind of vehicle that the early rocket pioneers Robert Goddard, Herman Oberth, Wernher von Braun, and Tsiolkovsky had long envisioned. As early as 1903, Tsiolkovsky, a Russian mathematics teacher, had hoped that it might be possible to somehow extract atomic energy from radium in order to power a rocket, but it was not until 1938 that Otto Hahn in Germany first succeeded in causing uranium to fission. Hahn’s former colleague Lise Meitner, living in exile in Sweden, realized the significance of what he had done—and the door to the atomic age flung open!
The power density of traditional chemical rockets is puny compared to the extraordinarily high power density of a nuclear rocket engine. Chemical rockets consist of numerous throwaway stages and require an enormous volume of their mass devoted to carrying both a propellant and an oxidizer. A nuclear rocket can be built as a single-stage vehicle, and requires no oxidizer because it heats a propellant that serves as the reaction mass, and is also able to undergo numerous shutdowns and restarts, making lengthy missions to the ends of the solar system both possible and economical. While the inefficiencies inherent in chemical rockets result in nominal costs of $3,500 to $5,000 per pound to deliver payload to low earth orbit, the more favorable propellant to payload mass ratio of the nuclear rocket promises costs in the range of just $350 to $500 per pound.
After radiation safety concerns were raised by SNPO at NASA over launching nuclear-powered rockets directly from the earth’s surface, von Braun at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, developed a proposal to boost a nuclear-propelled second-stage NERVA rocket to the edge of space using his Saturn V first-stage before firing the nuclear rocket engine after it was well above the densest part of the atmosphere. There is some debate as to whether this precaution is necessary for a well-designed nuclear rocket, but the prevailing cautiousness regarding anything nuclear renders it unlikely that direct ascent from the earth’s surface will be found acceptable anytime soon. The early NERVA rocket engine tests were, in fact, open atmospheric tests.
Westinghouse Astrofuel’s fabrication plant at Cheswick, Allegheny County, supplied nuclear fuel for the NERVA project. Fuel element corrosion was tested by heating the fuel elements by their own resistance, first at the Large site, and later at a new facility at Waltz Mill, Westmoreland County. In order to ensure fuel corrosion resistance and the stability of dimensional tolerances to several thousandths of an inch, the materials in the core elements were extruded into a bar possessing a hexagonal cross section having nineteen longitudinal holes. The extrusion was then polymerized, baked at a low temperature, and graphitized at a higher temperature of about 2200 degrees Centigrade. The resulting unfinished fuel element was subjected to a high-temperature chemical vapor process to coat the surfaces of the longitudinal channels with a gas mixture of niobium pentachloride, hydrogen, and methane. This mixture reacted with the graphite to form a niobium carbide coating intended to prevent corrosion of the core when it was exposed to the hydrogen propellant. The great challenge was to achieve a good match between the thermal expansion coefficients of the graphite and the niobium carbide to prevent cracking.
On September 24, 1964, the NRX-A2 established proof of concept by providing six minutes of power. By April 23, 1965, Aerojet and Westinghouse tested the NRX-A3 nuclear rocket engine at full power for sixteen minutes and demonstrated a three-minute restart. Pulse cooling was also introduced at this time in which bursts of LH₂ were used to cool the reactor core. This was followed by a test of the NRX/Engine System Test (EST) engine equipped with Aerojet’s new nozzle and turbo-pump mounted next to the engine in place of the earlier Rocketdyne pump that had been housed separately behind a concrete wall. This permitted full operational testing of all of the equipment in a high radiation environment typical of an actual spaceflight. In 1966, Aerojet and Westinghouse commenced an additional series of tests to demonstrate ten startups on the NRX-A4/EST and full power operation of the NRX-A5 engine for two periods totaling thirty minutes of operation. On December 13, 1967, the NRX-A6 reached sixty minutes of operation at full power. According to data compiled by Aerojet and Westinghouse, on June 11, 1969, the XE engine was started twenty times for a total of three hours and forty-eight minutes, eleven of which were at full power. By 1970, the proposed NERVA I concept vehicle that evolved out of this work was projected to be capable of delivering 1500 MW of power and 75,000 pounds of thrust. It also had a projected lifetime runtime of ten hours and could be started and stopped 60 times while delivering 825 seconds of specific impulse for each hour of continuous operation. Especially encouraging was the fact that it was projected to have a total weight of less than fifteen thousand pounds.
Capable of starting up on its own in space and reaching full power in less than one minute, the design operating temperature of the reactor was 2071 degrees Centigrade and its reliability was projected to be at least 0.997. The .003 projected failure rate covered all forms of operational deficiencies, not just a catastrophe such as a crash or explosion. In one test conducted at Jackass Flats on January 12, 1965, a KIWI-TNT nuclear rocket engine reactor was intentionally exploded to more accurately assess the consequences and cleanup implications of a truly catastrophic launch pad accident. Off-site radiation from the test was judged to be statistically insignificant, adding just 15 percent to an individual’s average annual exposure at a distance of 15 miles from ground zero, and technicians were able to thoroughly clean up the site at ground zero within a matter of weeks.
Aerojet and Westinghouse prepared to begin construction of five reactors and five NERVA I rocket test engines for actual flight testing from the Kennedy Space Center on Merritt Island in Florida beginning in 1973, the year the federal government terminated the NERVA program. Total government expenditure by that time on the combined Rover/ NERVA program from 1955 to 1973 had reached more than $1.45 billion (equivalent to roughly $4.5 billion today). As a result of the cancellation of this program, a NASA plan to use a NERVA-type vehicle to place humans on Mars by 1981 was quietly shelved.
Based on the rapid improvements made to the design of the NRX engines in little more than a dozen years, it has been argued that with subsequent improvements in materials science, coupled with a better understanding of physics, the solid core nuclear thermal rocket would have been improved to the point where it could have delivered at least 1000 seconds of specific impulse, 3000 MW of power, and been capable of perhaps 180 recycles. Such a rocket would have been capable of continuously cycling back and forth to Mars about fifteen times with each transit taking as little as 45 to 180 days depending upon the transfer orbit configuration chosen, instead of the six to nine months required for a chemical powered rocket to make the same trip. The faster transit would actually lower astronauts’ exposure to radiation from cosmic rays, the van Allen radiation belts, and solar flares; it would also make it possible to launch heavier vehicles with larger crews and better shielding against cosmic radiation.
After the NERVA program ended, the Westinghouse Astronuclear Laboratory in Pittsburgh continued to work on several other projects, including the development of a nuclear-powered artificial heart. Amidst a changing political climate concerned with finding “green” energy sources, the laboratory became the Westinghouse Advanced Energy Systems Division (AESD) in 1976. Engineers at AESD experimented with a heliostat and worked on the Solar Total Energy Project in Shenandoah, Georgia, that used five acres of solar collectors to power a knitting factory. AESD also worked on a prototype for a magnetohydrodynamic system which reuses exhaust gases to increase the electrical output of a coal-powered plant by 30 percent. Following Westinghouse’s shuttering of AESD, several former employees formed Pittsburgh Materials Technology Inc. in 1993 at the former Westinghouse Astronuclear Laboratory. Pittsburgh Materials Technology specializes in producing high temperature specialty metal alloys for government and industrial customers.
During the 1970s, Westinghouse Electric Corporation sold its home appliance division and oil refineries, and in 1988 closed its East Pittsburgh manufacturing plant. In 1995, the company purchased CBS and the following year acquired Infinity Broadcasting. Renaming itself CBS Corporation in 1997, it sold off the nuclear energy business to British Nuclear Fuels Ltd. which, in turn, sold it to Toshiba in 2006. Under the wing of Toshiba, the nuclear energy business continues to operate under the name Westinghouse Electric Company and, because of rapid expansion in overseas demand for nuclear power plants, moved its corporate headquarters in 2009 to a new larger campus in Cranberry Township, Butler County.
In 1963, when Cresap died, Simpson was responsible for eighteen major Westinghouse divisions. Six years later he became president of Westinghouse Power Systems. He earned the Westinghouse Order of Merit and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1966. In 1971, he won the prestigious Edison Medal. A member of the board of governors of the National Electric Manufacturers Association (NEMA) and chairman of NEMA’s Power Equipment Division, he was also a fellow of the American Nuclear Society where he served on the board of directors, on the executive committee, and as chairman of the finance committee. In 1995, the American Nuclear Society published his book Nuclear Power from Underseas to Outer Space, in which he recounted his experiences at Westinghouse. The book includes a detailed description of the company’s astronuclear program. Simpson died at the age of ninety-two on January 4, 2007, at Hilton Head, South Carolina.
The Westinghouse Astronuclear Laboratory was a product of an era of bold optimism in the promise of science and technology to solve problems and to bring to fruition a vision long shared by rocket pioneers Sergei Korolev, Stanislaw Ulam, Freeman Dyson, Tsiolkovsky, Goddard, Oberth, von Braun, and many others to eventually spread mankind across the vast solar system. Much of the science fiction of the era, such as the Tom Corbett television and juvenile novel series, was grounded in hard science as it was understood at the time. Overtaken by the social and political upheavals that accompanied the growing disillusionment with the Vietnam War and social dissension at home, the NERVA program nonetheless achieved remarkable successes that were ultimately cut short by shifting political events and a narrowing of national horizons. Despite a long hiatus, those successes are now inspiring a new generation of aerospace engineers to once again think boldly and embrace the difficult challenges articulated by President John F. Kennedy, a strong early supporter of the NERVA Program, at Rice University, Houston, Texas, in 1962: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade, and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
The collaboration of Westinghouse Electric and Aerojet General in tackling the difficult work of developing a viable solid core nuclear thermal rocket engine is a down payment on the eventual human exploration and settlement of the solar system. The full utilization of such nuclear technology will make possible the fulfillment of the dream first enunciated by Tsiolkovsky who more than a century ago proclaimed, “The earth is the cradle of mankind, but a man cannot live in the cradle forever.” Nurtured by the dreamers in the cradle of western Pennsylvania’s Three Rivers Valley for a brief but shining period of fourteen years, the dream of one day boldly setting off into the new frontier moved a little closer to reality.”
At:
paheritage.wpengine.com/article/aiming-stars-forgotten-le...
Credit: “PENNSYLVANIA HERITAGE” website
Although no signature is visible, to me, there’s a Ludwik Źiemba influence visible, although not as exquisitely detailed or precise. Maybe by one of his protégés? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Over the years we've brought hundreds of sea shell back from our many visits to Baja California in Mexico. I was looking for a subject to light this afternoon and this was sitting outside among the rocks near the front of the house so I grabbed it.
Strobist info: I light this very simply by placing it on a mirror and then positioning a YN560-II in a 24 inch softbox camera left and above at 8 o'clock. I then handheld a small mirror to the right of the mirror for fill light on that side. The flash, in manual mode was triggered by a Yongnuo RF-603N.
If you enjoy pictures of sea shell, you might not hate my Shell set. www.flickr.com/photos/9422878@N08/sets/72157626043932290/
The town of Charleville was surveyed in 1867 following the surveying of a number of pastoral runs in the district in 1863. Sited on the banks of the Warrego River along a natural stock route from New South Wales to Western Queensland, the town was to develop as the major service centre for the surrounding pastoral industry: bullock teams passed through the town, Cobb & Co established stables (as well as a factory for the construction of mail coaches and buggies and an associated sawmill) and in 1888 Charleville's position as a strategic transport node for the south west was confirmed when it became the terminus for the Western Main [railway] Line (extended south to Cunnamulla 1898 and west to Quilpie 1917).
The first half of the 1920s was a time of economic prosperity in Queensland unrivalled for three decades. The boom was sustained longer in the building sector than in others; and in Brisbane the transformation of the city's central business district was a tangible legacy of the boom. In Charleville the main streets gave an air of solid prosperity to this centre of one of the richest areas of western Queensland ... it has fine hotels, stores, offices of the leading pastoral firms, and a full complement of general business concerns. There is a most attractive School of Arts, Town Hall, [and] three churches ... There is a most excellent club, the "Warrego" ... The fledgling QANTAS commenced their first commercial services from the town in 1922 ("replacing" the last Cobb & Co coach which ran in 1920); in 1924 the town turned on electric lights; and in 1926 a new Town Hall was completed. However a severe drought in 1926 described by the Charleville Chamber of Commerce as the worst season known by black or white man with losses of sheep to the enormous extent of eleven millions was to bring the state's pastoral and agricultural sectors to collapse and many rural towns entered a slow decline into the world-wide depression of the 1930s.
On the cusp of the boom/bust, Harry Corones was to commence building his grand vision of hospitality for the west to rival the capital's best hotels. Born on the Greek island of Kythera, Harry "Poppa" Corones arrived in Australia in the early 1900s coming to Charleville by 1909 when he was recorded in the Post Office Directories as a "fruiterer". Reputedly on the encouragement of a brewing company representative, Corones became in 1912 the licensee of the Hotel Charleville, which he operated until 1924.
In 1926 Corones became the registered owner of the Hotel Norman, a single storeyed hotel established c1895 located a block south of the Hotel Charleville on the corner of Wills and Galatea Street. In an advertisement in Pugh's Almanac for 1905, proprietor DC McDonald claimed the hotel as the leading hotel of the southern western line ... the home of the pastoralist, agriculturalist and tourist with lofty cool bedrooms, hot and cold baths, and good paddocking - claims which would be later repeated and amplified by Corones regarding his own hotel.
Construction of Corone's Hotel Norman (as it was then called) commenced in 1924. Rising phoenix-like on the site of the old Norman Hotel, the ambitious scheme was built in four stages from the south to the north to enable continuation of trade; the construction dates displayed at either end of the building testifying to the five year enterprise. Significantly, given the number of (timber) buildings in the town destroyed by fire including Corone's former hotel the Charleville (actually destroyed by fire twice), Harry Corone's new hotel was a masonry building. The first two stages were of reinforced concrete, the third including the ballroom and final stages of brick. Costing some £50,000 the hotel was built by day labour with preference given to men of the district. By the end of 1926 the new hotel was two thirds complete; only the bar area of the Norman Hotel remained. The mythology of Corones was also well advanced. According to the Australian Pastoralist, Grazing Farmers' and Selectors Gazette the hotel was the topic of conversation from Roma to Eulo, and out to the far west and north ... In every way the new Hotel Corones will be an example of hotel architecture and comfort scarce equalled in the Southern Hemisphere, and will undoubtedly be a great centre for all western men.
The final stage of building was completed in 1929. The hotel now stretched almost an entire block of Charleville's main street. According to the A & B Journal of Queensland it was a magnificent white building ... an outstanding feature in a progressive town ... the best equipped and most up-to-date hotel outside the metropolis ... generally acknowledged as the calling-place of all distinguished tourists and travellers... The Hotel itself produced a 12 page brochure about this time which included black and white photographs of the interior: on the ground floor the lounge had gleaming copper-topped tables, deep leather lounges and chairs and led to a writing room and telephone booth, the dining room enticing in its cleanliness was capable of seating 150; the private bar which gave exclusive service amidst convivial surroundings was screened from the public bar by an ingenious arrangement a French polished oak partition with mirrors; the public bar was very modern and luxurious and a cool cement court-yard formed an entrance to the ball-room. Upstairs all accommodation rooms opened onto the verandah - some were equipped with their own bathrooms designed to please the most fastidious and the upstairs lounge was just the place for a real restful smoke. Corones Hall located on Galatea Street had a floor unexcelled outside Brisbane and was largely in demand for exclusive balls, parties, and banquets. Capable of seating 320 at dinner, the hall was built for coolness with a number of high set windows and electric ceiling fans. The lights with Venetian shades of various hues [were] adjustable either to dimness or the reverse, and an orchestra platform added to its popularity and beauty.
Furnishings throughout including the bedroom furniture, dining room, lounge room, chairs, settees, sideboards, etc were designed and manufactured by that well known Queensland home furnisher F Tritton Ltd George Street Brisbane from that beautiful Queensland wood, the Queensland maple. Carpets, linoleums, floor coverings, curtains, etc (British throughout) were all laid and fitted by Trittons.
The architect of this magnificent modern hotel was William Hodgen jnr (1867-1943). The son of pioneer Toowoomba building contractor William Hodgen, in 1886 he became a cadet in the Colonial Architect's Office and in 1891 enrolled at the Architectural Association in London whilst working with a number of prominent London architects. In December 1896 he returned to Queensland commencing practice the following year in Toowoomba when he immediately received a substantial commission from retailer TC Beirne for works to his newly established Fortitude Valley premises as well as winning a competition for a new wing to the Toowoomba Hospital (the Victoria Wing). In practice until his death in 1943 (from 1935 in partnership with his sons as W Hodgen and Hodgen), Hodgen's practice, like that of contemporary Harry Marks (1871-1939) (who also was a member of one of Queensland's architectural family dynasties) was both extensive and broadranging from domestic (eg the Toowoomba residences "Tor" (1904) [DEH file ref 601325) and Tyson Manor (1905) [Entry in the Heritage Register 600864], institutional (eg Glennie Memorial School (1914), to industrial (eg flour mill and wheat and flour stores for Crisp O'Brien 1911) and a number of hotels in western towns including in Charleville, the Hotel Charleville (1913; rebuilt again after a second fire 1931). Hodgen's second Hotel Charleville was similar but of a smaller scale to the Hotel Corones - both had lost the classical and arts and crafts elements typical of his early hotels, and instead adapted simplified Art Deco decoration on the facade. Both hotels are a dominant presence in Charleville's main street; but it is the Hotel Corones which is regarded as Hodgen's major single work and the highlight of his career.
For over thirty years the Hotel Corones ("The Leading Hotel of the West") flourished as a tourist, pastoral and CTA (Commercial Travellers Association) House. Harry Corones' advertisements and stationery proclaimed vice-regal patronage; and in addition to wealthy local graziers, celebrities such as Amy Johnson, Gracie Fields, and the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester were guests at the Hotel. In 1936 there were on average 133 guests per week and during World War II when "American" servicemen occupied the local aerodrome and hospital, "Poppa" Corones did a roaring trade with dances held "every night" in Corones Hall. In 1959, the state's centenary year, Charleville's civic welcome to its Royal visitor, HRH Princess Alexandra took place in front of the hotel and Corone's advertisement in the town's centenary souvenir book could still proclaim that Charleville Means CORONES because Corones is the centre of Charleville's social activities and the rendezvous where business agreements can be made in surroundings which, by their comfort and restfulness, provide the perfect setting for quiet consideration. People who insist on the best in fine living invariably made Corones their home while in Charleville.
Just a few years later, however, a Licensing Commission Report described Corones as at one time (past tense) the leading hotel in Charleville now overtaken by the new type of hospitality accommodation, the motel in the shape of the newly rebuilt Victoria Hotel-Motel. Drought in the 1960s was also to severely impact on the local (including Corones') economy: the heyday of both the town and the Hotel was over.
In 1972 Harry Corones died; his elder son, Peter and wife Mary who had operated the hotel for some time prior to Harry Corone's death continued its stewardship. In 1982 the hotel was acquired by Doreen and Bob Bishop. It was acquired by the present owners in 1989. In 1990 a motel was erected to the rear of the hotel: in April of that year, the disastrous flood which covered much of the town, entered the ground floor of the hotel. As a result substantial works including the restoration of the main stair were carried out; about this time some bedrooms on the upper floor were also converted into bathrooms and what are believed to be the former Commercial Travellers' sample rooms on Galatea Street were converted into a shop and motel style accommodation. In 1993, the hotel was listed by the National Trust of Queensland. The Hotel Corones is now operated by Gordon and Frances Harding as both a local pub and (in recognition of the hotel's iconic status) a cultural tourist attraction in the state's south west: Corones Hall is regularly used for functions such as weddings and balls, daily tours of the hotel are conducted by Mrs Harding, and the mythology of both the man and his hotel continues.
Source: Queensland Heritage Register.
In Explore dal 19.03.2015 - Highest position: 188 on Thursday, March 19, 2015
Wiew my set "Flora" www.flickr.com/photos/7728475@N07/sets/72157600782636343/
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WALNEY LIGHTHOUSE WAS BUILT IN 1790, AND POSITIONED AT HAWS POINT ON THE ISLAND. ITS PURPOSE WAS TO IMPROVE THE NAVIGATION OF THE RIVER LUNE AND ACT AS A GUIDE FOR CARGO SHIPS FROM THE WEST INDIES BOUND FOR THE GLASSON DOCKS. THE LIGHTHOUSE WAS NOT BUILT TO BENEFIT BARROW, AS IT WAS ONLY A SMALL FISHING COMMUNITY AT THIS TIME.
THE LIGHTHOUSE WAS BUILT OF STONE QUARRIED FROM OVERTON IN LANCASHIRE AND TRANSPORTED TO THE SITE BY SHIP. THE OCTAGONAL TOWER IS 70 FEET HIGH AND RESTS ON A CIRCULAR FOUNDATION 20 FEET 6 INCHES IN DIAMETER. THERE ARE 91 STEPS UP TO THE TOP OF THE LIGHTHOUSE. THE ORIGINAL LIGHT WAS AN ARGENT BURNER, A TYPE OF PARAFFIN LAMP.
IN 1909 AN ACETYLENE GASLIGHT SYSTEM WAS INSTALLED WHICH FLASHED AT ONE MINUTE INTERVALS. IN 1953 THIS WAS REPLACED WITH AN ELECTRIC LIGHT WHICH FLASHES AT 15 SECOND INTERVALS. THE NEW LIGHT IS 30 TIMES MORE POWERFUL (450,000 CANDLE POWER) AND HAS A RANGE OF 18 MILES COMPARED TO 13 MILES OF ITS GAS PREDECESSOR. THE ELECTRIC LIGHT WAS FIRST POWERED BY ITS OWN GENERATOR, NOT BEING CONNECTED TO THE NATIONAL GRID UNTIL 1969. THIS GUIDING LIGHT CAN EVEN BE SEEN FROM BLACKPOOL.
ATTACHED TO THE LIGHTHOUSE ARE TWO HOUSES IN WHICH THE KEEPER AND STAFF LIVE. THESE HOUSES WERE ORIGINALLY ONE HOUSE, WHICH WAS BUILT FOR THE FIRST FULL-TIME KEEPER. THE HOUSE WAS DIVIDED INTO TWO IN THE LATE 19TH CENTURY. AT THIS TIME THE LIGHTHOUSE’S ONLY WATER SOURCE CAME FROM THE RAIN AND THE ONLY LIGHTING CAME FROM CANDLES.
DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR, THE HOUSE WAS USED AS AN OFFICERS' MESS WHEN 170 SOLDIERS WERE ENCAMPED AT THE LIGHTHOUSE AS PART OF THE COASTAL DEFENCE NETWORK. IN 1946 14 PRISONERS OF WAR WERE MOVED INTO THE CAMP. THEY DID ODD JOBS AROUND THE LIGHTHOUSE IN RETURN FOR CIGARETTES AND FOOD. THE REMAINS OF THE BARRACKS ARE STILL VISIBLE.
TODAY THE LIGHTHOUSE IS RUN BY THE PORT OF LANCASTER COMMISSIONERS AND CONTAINS A RADIO BEACON FOR TRINITY HOUSE, FORMING A MAJOR LINK IN THE BRITISH COASTGUARD SYSTEM. ALTHOUGH THE LIGHTHOUSE IS NO LONGER OPEN TO THE PUBLIC, IT CAN BE VIEWED FROM THE OUTSIDE.
Explored :: position 316 on Thursday, Jan 26, 2012
♥ o ♥ o ♥ Huge thanks to all of you wonderful friends for your comments and favs! ♥ o ♥ o ♥
♥ ~ ♥ ~ ♥ Thank you all so much for your kind visits and comments! Apologies if I cannot always reciprocate ♥ ~ ♥ ~ ♥
When I don’t have enough time to prepare a fancy dessert, this is one of my favourite choices! An Asian meal requires lots of prep (lots of ingredients which need chopping, roasting, portioning in small bowls, etc). Making meringue for dessert is ideal since you can get on with other things both while making and baking it. Then, before you start cooking the main meal, just trim some fresh fruit, steep with spirits, whip some cream with and flavour with the same spirits, then layer. Decorate with sprigs of fresh herbs such as mint for an impressive-looking but easy dessert! ( visit my gourmet webzine to find out how to make Perfect Meringues)
I had some exceptionally sweet strawberries for this time of year, so I used Cointreau, a French orange liqueur. Along with the liqueur, I also added a little brown sugar to the whipped cream. It was the perfect finale to my Asian meal of Pot Sticker Dumplings to start, followed by Vietnamese-style Lemongrass Chicken , Chinese Curried Prawn Noodles, and steamed Chinese vegetables.
EXPLORE: Highest position: 265 on Monday, February 25, 2008
Silver Gull (Larus novaehollandiae), Sydney, Australia
Highest position on explore #43
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This is taken up the road from my Mums house in Scarborough, QLD...
Scarborough is a residential suburb of the Moreton Bay Region at the northernmost of the Redcliffe Peninsula, approximately 30 kilometres (19 mi) north-northeast of Brisbane, the state capital of Queensland, Australia. Officially established on 27 March 1971, the suburb used to act as a gateway to Moreton Island via the Combie Trader barge, but this service was recently sold.
Highest position: 269 on Saturday, January 6, 2007
(since we started tracking this statistic on April 19, 2006)
Highest position: 459 on Friday, September 5, 2008
(since we started tracking this statistic on April 19, 2006)
EXPLORE - 28 APR 2009 best position: #151
Honduran Cashews
Anacardium occidentale
The cashew is a tree in the flowering plant family Anacardiaceae. The plant is native to northeastern Brazil. Its English name derives from the Portuguese name for the fruit of the cashew tree, caju, which in turn derives from the indigenous Tupi name, acajú. It is now widely grown in tropical climates for its cashew "nuts" and cashew apples.
What appears to be the fruit of the cashew tree is an oval or pear-shaped accessory fruit or false fruit that develops from the receptacle of the cashew flower. Called the cashew apple, better known in Central America as "jocote de marañón", it ripens into a yellow and/or red structure about 5–11 cm long. It is edible, and has a strong "sweet" smell and a sweet taste. The pulp of the cashew apple is very juicy, but the skin is fragile, making it unsuitable for transport. It is often used as a flavor in agua fresca.
The true fruit of the cashew tree is a kidney or boxing-glove shaped drupe that grows at the end of the pseudofruit. The drupe develops first on the tree, and then the peduncle expands into the pseudofruit. Within the true fruit is a single seed, the cashew nut. Although a nut in the culinary sense, in the botanical sense the fruit of the cashew is a seed. The seed is surrounded by a double shell containing a dermatogenic phenolic resin, urushiol, a potent skin irritant toxin also found in the related poison ivy
Volvo B9TL Wright Eclipse Gemini
Seen at Stevenson square, waiting Excess time out ready for out 163, back to Bury. The is the first B9 I have driven with the shorter arms, and I find it much easier having the mirror in them is position, so you look through the quarter light (like stagecoach with their E400's). I much prefer the original longer arms still though.
Arches National Park is a national park in eastern Utah, United States. The park is adjacent to the Colorado River, 4 miles (6 km) north of Moab, Utah. More than 2,000 natural sandstone arches are located in the park, including the well-known Delicate Arch, as well as a variety of unique geological resources and formations. The park contains the highest density of natural arches in the world.
The park consists of 310.31 square kilometres (76,680 acres; 119.81 sq mi; 31,031 ha) of high desert located on the Colorado Plateau. The highest elevation in the park is 5,653 feet (1,723 m) at Elephant Butte, and the lowest elevation is 4,085 feet (1,245 m) at the visitor center. The park receives an average of less than 10 inches (250 mm) of rain annually.
Administered by the National Park Service, the area was originally named a national monument on April 12, 1929, and was re designated as a national park on November 12, 1971. The park received more than 1.6 million visitors in 2018.
As stated in the foundation document in U.S. National Park Service website:
The purpose of Arches National Park is to protect extraordinary examples of geologic features including arches, natural bridges, windows, spires, and balanced rocks, as well as other features of geologic, historic, and scientific interest, and to provide opportunities to experience these resources and their associated values in their majestic natural settings.
The national park lies above an underground evaporite layer or salt bed, which is the main cause of the formation of the arches, spires, balanced rocks, sandstone fins, and eroded monoliths in the area. This salt bed is thousands of feet thick in places and was deposited in the Paradox Basin of the Colorado Plateau some 300 million years ago (Mya) when a sea flowed into the region and eventually evaporated. Over millions of years, the salt bed was covered with debris eroded from the Uncompahgre Uplift to the northeast. During the Early Jurassic (about 200 Mya), desert conditions prevailed in the region and the vast Navajo Sandstone was deposited. An additional sequence of stream laid and windblown sediments, the Entrada Sandstone (about 140 Mya), was deposited on top of the Navajo. Over 5,000 feet (1,500 m) of younger sediments were deposited and have been mostly eroded. Remnants of the cover exist in the area including exposures of the Cretaceous Mancos Shale. The arches of the area are developed mostly within the Entrada formation.
The weight of this cover caused the salt bed below it to liquefy and thrust up layers of rock into salt domes. The evaporites of the area formed more unusual "salt anticlines" or linear regions of uplift. Faulting occurred and whole sections of rock subsided into the areas between the domes. In some places, they turned almost on edge. The result of one such 2,500-foot (760 m) displacement, the Moab Fault, is seen from the visitor center.
As this subsurface movement of salt shaped the landscape, erosion removed the younger rock layers from the surface. Except for isolated remnants, the major formations visible in the park today are the salmon-colored Entrada Sandstone, in which most of the arches form, and the buff-colored Navajo Sandstone. These are visible in layer-cake fashion throughout most of the park. Over time, water seeped into the surface cracks, joints, and folds of these layers. Ice formed in the fissures, expanding and putting pressure on surrounding rock, breaking off bits and pieces. Winds later cleaned out the loose particles. A series of free-standing fins remained. Wind and water attacked these fins until, in some, the cementing material gave way and chunks of rock tumbled out. Many damaged fins collapsed. Others, with the right degree of hardness and balance, survived despite their missing sections. These became the famous arches.
Although the park's terrain may appear rugged and durable, it is extremely fragile. More than 1 million visitors each year threaten the fragile high-desert ecosystem. The problem lies within the soil's crust, which is composed of cyanobacteria, algae, fungi, and lichens that grow in the dusty parts of the park. Factors that make Arches National Park sensitive to visitor damage include being a semiarid region, the scarce, unpredictable rainfall, lack of deep freezing, and lack of plant litter, which results in soils that have both a low resistance to and slow recovery from, compressional forces such as foot traffic. Methods of indicating effects on the soil are cytophobic soil crust index, measuring of water infiltration, and t-tests that are used to compare the values from the undisturbed and disturbed areas.
Geological processes that occurred over 300 million years ago caused a salt bed to be deposited, which today lies beneath the landscape of Arches National Park.[ Over time, the salt bed was covered with sediments that eventually compressed into rock layers that have since been named Entrada Standstone. Rock layers surrounding the edge of the salt bed continued to erode and shift into vertical sandstone walls called fins. Sand collected between vertical walls of the fins, then slightly acidic rain combined with carbon dioxide in the air allowed for the chemical formation of carbonic acid within the trapped sand. Over time, the carbonic acid dissolved the calcium carbonate that held the sandstone together. Many of the rock formations have weaker layers of rock on bottom that are holding stronger layers on top. The weaker layers would dissolve first, creating openings in the rock. Gravity caused pieces of the stronger rock layer to fall piece by piece into an arch shape. Arches form within rock fins at points of intense fracturing localization, or weak points in the rock's formation, caused by horizontal and vertical discontinuities. Lastly, water, wind, and time continued this erosion process and ultimately created the arches of Arches National Park. All of the arches in the park are made of Entrada Sandstone, however, there are slight differences in how each arch was developed. This allows the Entrada Sandstone to be categories into 3 groups including Slick rock members, Dewey rock members, and Moab members. Vertical arches can be developed from Slick rock members, a combination of Slick rock members and Moab members, or Slick rock members resting above Dewey rock members. Horizontal arches (also called potholes) are formed when a vertical pothole formation meets a horizontal cave, causing a union into a long arch structure. The erosion process within Arches National Park will continue as time continues to pass. Continued erosion combined with vertical and horizontal stress will eventually cause arches to collapse, but still, new arches will continue to form for thousands of years.
Humans have occupied the region since the last ice age 10,000 years ago. Fremont people and Ancestral Puebloans lived in the area until about 700 years ago. Spanish missionaries encountered Ute and Paiute tribes in the area when they first came through in 1775, but the first European-Americans to attempt settlement in the area were the Mormon Elk Mountain Mission in 1855, who soon abandoned the area. Ranchers, farmers, and prospectors later settled Moab in the neighboring Riverine Valley in the late 1870s. Word of the beauty of the surrounding rock formations spread beyond the settlement as a possible tourist destination.
The Arches area was first brought to the attention of the National Park Service by Frank A. Wadleigh, passenger traffic manager of the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad. Wadleigh, accompanied by railroad photographer George L. Beam, visited the area in September 1923 at the invitation of Alexander Ringhoffer, a Hungarian-born prospector living in Salt Valley. Ringhoffer had written to the railroad to interest them in the tourist potential of a scenic area he had discovered the previous year with his two sons and a son-in-law, which he called the Devils Garden (known today as the Klondike Bluffs). Wadleigh was impressed by what Ringhoffer showed him, and suggested to Park Service director Stephen T. Mather that the area be made a national monument.
The following year, additional support for the monument idea came from Laurence Gould, a University of Michigan graduate student (and future polar explorer) studying the geology of the nearby La Sal Mountains, who was shown the scenic area by local physician Dr. J. W. "Doc" Williams.
A succession of government investigators examined the area, in part due to confusion as to the precise location. In the process, the name Devils Garden was transposed to an area on the opposite side of Salt Valley that includes Landscape Arch, the longest arch in the park. Ringhoffer's original discovery was omitted, while another area nearby, known locally as the Windows, was included. Designation of the area as a national monument was supported by the Park Service in 1926 but was resisted by President Calvin Coolidge's Interior Secretary, Hubert Work. Finally, in April 1929, shortly after his inauguration, President Herbert Hoover signed a presidential proclamation creating the Arches National Monument, consisting of two comparatively small, disconnected sections. The purpose of the reservation under the 1906 Antiquities Act was to protect the arches, spires, balanced rocks, and other sandstone formations for their scientific and educational value. The name Arches was suggested by Frank Pinkely, superintendent of the Park Service's southwestern national monuments, following a visit to the Windows section in 1925.
In late 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a proclamation that enlarged the Arches to protect additional scenic features and permit the development of facilities to promote tourism. A small adjustment was made by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1960 to accommodate a new road alignment.
In early 1969, just before leaving office, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed a proclamation substantially enlarging the Arches. Two years later, President Richard Nixon signed legislation enacted by Congress, which significantly reduced the total area enclosed, but changed its status. Arches National Park was formally dedicated in May 1972.
In 1980, vandals attempted to use an abrasive kitchen cleanser to deface ancient petroglyphs in the park, prompting park officials to recruit physicist John F. Asmus, who specialized in using lasers to restore works of art, to use his technology to repair the damage. Asmus "zapped the panel with intense light pulses and succeeded in removing most of the cleanser".
Climbing Balanced Rock or any named or unnamed arch in Arches National Park with an opening larger than 3 ft (0.9 m) is banned by park regulations. Climbing on other features in the park is allowed but regulated; in addition, slacklining and BASE jumping are banned parkwide.
Climbing on named arches within the park had long been banned by park regulations, but following Dean Potter's successful free climb on Delicate Arch in May 2006, the wording of the regulations was deemed unenforceable by the park attorney. In response, the park revised its regulations later that month, eventually imposing the current ban on arch climbing in 2014.
Approved recreational activities include auto touring, hiking, bicycling, camping at the Devils Garden campground, backpacking, canyoneering, and rock climbing, with permits required for the last three activities. Guided commercial tours and ranger programs are also available.
Astronomy is also popular in the park due to its dark skies, despite the increasing light pollution from towns such as Moab.
Delicate Arch is the subject of the third 2014 quarter of the U.S. Mint's America the Beautiful Quarters program commemorating national parks and historic sites. The Arches quarter had the highest production of the five 2014 national park quarters, with more than 465 million minted.
American writer Edward Abbey was a park ranger at Arches National Monument in 1956 and 1957, where he kept journals that became his book Desert Solitaire. The success of Abbey's book, as well as interest in adventure travel, has drawn many hikers, mountain bikers, and off-pavement driving enthusiasts to the area. Permitted activities within the park include camping, hiking along designated trails, backpacking, canyoneering, rock climbing, bicycling, and driving along existing roads, both paved and unpaved. The Hayduke Trail, an 812 mi (1,307 km) backpacking route named after one of Edward Abbey's characters, begins in the park.
An abundance of wildlife occurs in Arches National Park, including spadefoot toads, antelope squirrels, scrub jays, peregrine falcons, many kinds of sparrows, red foxes, desert bighorn sheep, kangaroo rats, mule deers, cougars, midget faded rattlesnakes, yucca moths, western rattlesnakes, and collared lizards.
A number of plant species are common in the park, including prickly pear cactus, Indian ricegrass, bunch grasses, cheatgrass, moss, liverworts, Utah juniper, Mormon tea, blackbrush, cliffrose, four-winged saltbrush, pinyon pine, evening primrose, sand verbena, yucca, and sacred datura.
Biological soil crust consisting of cyanobacteria, lichen, mosses, green algae, and microfungi is found throughout southeastern Utah. The fibrous growths help keep soil particles together, creating a layer that is more resistant to erosion. The living soil layer readily absorbs and stores water, allowing more complex forms of plant life to grow in places with low precipitation levels.
Among the notable features of the park are the following:
Balanced Rock – a large balancing rock, the size of three school buses
Courthouse Towers – a collection of tall stone columns
Dark Angel – a free-standing 150 ft-tall (46 m) sandstone pillar at the end of the Devils Garden Trail
Delicate Arch – a lone-standing arch that has become a symbol of Utah and the most recognized arch in the park
Devils Garden – many arches and columns scattered along a ridge
Double Arch – two arches that share a common end
Fiery Furnace – an area of maze-like narrow passages and tall rock columns (see biblical reference, Book of Daniel, chapter 3)
Landscape Arch – a very thin and long arch in the Devils Garden with a span of 290 ft (88 m) (the longest arch in the park)
Petrified Dunes – petrified remnants of dunes blown from the ancient lakes that covered the area
The Phallus – a rock spire that resembles a phallus
Wall Arch – located along the popular Devils Garden Trail; collapsed sometime on August 4/5, 2008
The Three Gossips –a mid-sized sandstone tower located in the Courthouse Towers area.
Utah is a landlocked state in the Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. It borders Colorado to its east, Wyoming to its northeast, Idaho to its north, Arizona to its south, and Nevada to its west. Utah also touches a corner of New Mexico in the southeast. Of the fifty U.S. states, Utah is the 13th-largest by area; with a population over three million, it is the 30th-most-populous and 11th-least-densely populated. Urban development is mostly concentrated in two areas: the Wasatch Front in the north-central part of the state, which is home to roughly two-thirds of the population and includes the capital city, Salt Lake City; and Washington County in the southwest, with more than 180,000 residents. Most of the western half of Utah lies in the Great Basin.
Utah has been inhabited for thousands of years by various indigenous groups such as the ancient Puebloans, Navajo, and Ute. The Spanish were the first Europeans to arrive in the mid-16th century, though the region's difficult geography and harsh climate made it a peripheral part of New Spain and later Mexico. Even while it was Mexican territory, many of Utah's earliest settlers were American, particularly Mormons fleeing marginalization and persecution from the United States via the Mormon Trail. Following the Mexican–American War in 1848, the region was annexed by the U.S., becoming part of the Utah Territory, which included what is now Colorado and Nevada. Disputes between the dominant Mormon community and the federal government delayed Utah's admission as a state; only after the outlawing of polygamy was it admitted in 1896 as the 45th.
People from Utah are known as Utahns. Slightly over half of all Utahns are Mormons, the vast majority of whom are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church), which has its world headquarters in Salt Lake City; Utah is the only state where a majority of the population belongs to a single church. A 2023 paper challenged this perception (claiming only 42% of Utahns are Mormons) however most statistics still show a majority of Utah residents belong to the LDS church; estimates from the LDS church suggests 60.68% of Utah's population belongs to the church whilst some sources put the number as high as 68%. The paper replied that membership count done by the LDS Church is too high for several reasons. The LDS Church greatly influences Utahn culture, politics, and daily life, though since the 1990s the state has become more religiously diverse as well as secular.
Utah has a highly diversified economy, with major sectors including transportation, education, information technology and research, government services, mining, multi-level marketing, and tourism. Utah has been one of the fastest growing states since 2000, with the 2020 U.S. census confirming the fastest population growth in the nation since 2010. St. George was the fastest-growing metropolitan area in the United States from 2000 to 2005. Utah ranks among the overall best states in metrics such as healthcare, governance, education, and infrastructure. It has the 12th-highest median average income and the least income inequality of any U.S. state. Over time and influenced by climate change, droughts in Utah have been increasing in frequency and severity, putting a further strain on Utah's water security and impacting the state's economy.
The History of Utah is an examination of the human history and social activity within the state of Utah located in the western United States.
Archaeological evidence dates the earliest habitation of humans in Utah to about 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. Paleolithic people lived near the Great Basin's swamps and marshes, which had an abundance of fish, birds, and small game animals. Big game, including bison, mammoths and ground sloths, also were attracted to these water sources. Over the centuries, the mega-fauna died, this population was replaced by the Desert Archaic people, who sheltered in caves near the Great Salt Lake. Relying more on gathering than the previous Utah residents, their diet was mainly composed of cattails and other salt tolerant plants such as pickleweed, burro weed and sedge. Red meat appears to have been more of a luxury, although these people used nets and the atlatl to hunt water fowl, ducks, small animals and antelope. Artifacts include nets woven with plant fibers and rabbit skin, woven sandals, gaming sticks, and animal figures made from split-twigs. About 3,500 years ago, lake levels rose and the population of Desert Archaic people appears to have dramatically decreased. The Great Basin may have been almost unoccupied for 1,000 years.
The Fremont culture, named from sites near the Fremont River in Utah, lived in what is now north and western Utah and parts of Nevada, Idaho and Colorado from approximately 600 to 1300 AD. These people lived in areas close to water sources that had been previously occupied by the Desert Archaic people, and may have had some relationship with them. However, their use of new technologies define them as a distinct people. Fremont technologies include:
use of the bow and arrow while hunting,
building pithouse shelters,
growing maize and probably beans and squash,
building above ground granaries of adobe or stone,
creating and decorating low-fired pottery ware,
producing art, including jewelry and rock art such as petroglyphs and pictographs.
The ancient Puebloan culture, also known as the Anasazi, occupied territory adjacent to the Fremont. The ancestral Puebloan culture centered on the present-day Four Corners area of the Southwest United States, including the San Juan River region of Utah. Archaeologists debate when this distinct culture emerged, but cultural development seems to date from about the common era, about 500 years before the Fremont appeared. It is generally accepted that the cultural peak of these people was around the 1200 CE. Ancient Puebloan culture is known for well constructed pithouses and more elaborate adobe and masonry dwellings. They were excellent craftsmen, producing turquoise jewelry and fine pottery. The Puebloan culture was based on agriculture, and the people created and cultivated fields of maize, beans, and squash and domesticated turkeys. They designed and produced elaborate field terracing and irrigation systems. They also built structures, some known as kivas, apparently designed solely for cultural and religious rituals.
These two later cultures were roughly contemporaneous, and appear to have established trading relationships. They also shared enough cultural traits that archaeologists believe the cultures may have common roots in the early American Southwest. However, each remained culturally distinct throughout most of their existence. These two well established cultures appear to have been severely impacted by climatic change and perhaps by the incursion of new people in about 1200 CE. Over the next two centuries, the Fremont and ancient Pueblo people may have moved into the American southwest, finding new homes and farmlands in the river drainages of Arizona, New Mexico and northern Mexico.
In about 1200, Shoshonean speaking peoples entered Utah territory from the west. They may have originated in southern California and moved into the desert environment due to population pressure along the coast. They were an upland people with a hunting and gathering lifestyle utilizing roots and seeds, including the pinyon nut. They were also skillful fishermen, created pottery and raised some crops. When they first arrived in Utah, they lived as small family groups with little tribal organization. Four main Shoshonean peoples inhabited Utah country. The Shoshone in the north and northeast, the Gosiutes in the northwest, the Utes in the central and eastern parts of the region and the Southern Paiutes in the southwest. Initially, there seems to have been very little conflict between these groups.
In the early 16th century, the San Juan River basin in Utah's southeast also saw a new people, the Díne or Navajo, part of a greater group of plains Athabaskan speakers moved into the Southwest from the Great Plains. In addition to the Navajo, this language group contained people that were later known as Apaches, including the Lipan, Jicarilla, and Mescalero Apaches.
Athabaskans were a hunting people who initially followed the bison, and were identified in 16th-century Spanish accounts as "dog nomads". The Athabaskans expanded their range throughout the 17th century, occupying areas the Pueblo peoples had abandoned during prior centuries. The Spanish first specifically mention the "Apachu de Nabajo" (Navaho) in the 1620s, referring to the people in the Chama valley region east of the San Juan River, and north west of Santa Fe. By the 1640s, the term Navaho was applied to these same people. Although the Navajo newcomers established a generally peaceful trading and cultural exchange with the some modern Pueblo peoples to the south, they experienced intermittent warfare with the Shoshonean peoples, particularly the Utes in eastern Utah and western Colorado.
At the time of European expansion, beginning with Spanish explorers traveling from Mexico, five distinct native peoples occupied territory within the Utah area: the Northern Shoshone, the Goshute, the Ute, the Paiute and the Navajo.
The Spanish explorer Francisco Vázquez de Coronado may have crossed into what is now southern Utah in 1540, when he was seeking the legendary Cíbola.
A group led by two Spanish Catholic priests—sometimes called the Domínguez–Escalante expedition—left Santa Fe in 1776, hoping to find a route to the California coast. The expedition traveled as far north as Utah Lake and encountered the native residents. All of what is now Utah was claimed by the Spanish Empire from the 1500s to 1821 as part of New Spain (later as the province Alta California); and subsequently claimed by Mexico from 1821 to 1848. However, Spain and Mexico had little permanent presence in, or control of, the region.
Fur trappers (also known as mountain men) including Jim Bridger, explored some regions of Utah in the early 19th century. The city of Provo was named for one such man, Étienne Provost, who visited the area in 1825. The city of Ogden, Utah is named for a brigade leader of the Hudson's Bay Company, Peter Skene Ogden who trapped in the Weber Valley. In 1846, a year before the arrival of members from the Church of Jesus Christ of latter-day Saints, the ill-fated Donner Party crossed through the Salt Lake valley late in the season, deciding not to stay the winter there but to continue forward to California, and beyond.
Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly known as Mormon pioneers, first came to the Salt Lake Valley on July 24, 1847. At the time, the U.S. had already captured the Mexican territories of Alta California and New Mexico in the Mexican–American War and planned to keep them, but those territories, including the future state of Utah, officially became United States territory upon the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, February 2, 1848. The treaty was ratified by the United States Senate on March 10, 1848.
Upon arrival in the Salt Lake Valley, the Mormon pioneers found no permanent settlement of Indians. Other areas along the Wasatch Range were occupied at the time of settlement by the Northwestern Shoshone and adjacent areas by other bands of Shoshone such as the Gosiute. The Northwestern Shoshone lived in the valleys on the eastern shore of Great Salt Lake and in adjacent mountain valleys. Some years after arriving in the Salt Lake Valley Mormons, who went on to colonize many other areas of what is now Utah, were petitioned by Indians for recompense for land taken. The response of Heber C. Kimball, first counselor to Brigham Young, was that the land belonged to "our Father in Heaven and we expect to plow and plant it." A 1945 Supreme Court decision found that the land had been treated by the United States as public domain; no aboriginal title by the Northwestern Shoshone had been recognized by the United States or extinguished by treaty with the United States.
Upon arriving in the Salt Lake Valley, the Mormons had to make a place to live. They created irrigation systems, laid out farms, built houses, churches, and schools. Access to water was crucially important. Almost immediately, Brigham Young set out to identify and claim additional community sites. While it was difficult to find large areas in the Great Basin where water sources were dependable and growing seasons long enough to raise vitally important subsistence crops, satellite communities began to be formed.
Shortly after the first company arrived in the Salt Lake Valley in 1847, the community of Bountiful was settled to the north. In 1848, settlers moved into lands purchased from trapper Miles Goodyear in present-day Ogden. In 1849, Tooele and Provo were founded. Also that year, at the invitation of Ute chief Wakara, settlers moved into the Sanpete Valley in central Utah to establish the community of Manti. Fillmore, Utah, intended to be the capital of the new territory, was established in 1851. In 1855, missionary efforts aimed at western native cultures led to outposts in Fort Lemhi, Idaho, Las Vegas, Nevada and Elk Mountain in east-central Utah.
The experiences of returning members of the Mormon Battalion were also important in establishing new communities. On their journey west, the Mormon soldiers had identified dependable rivers and fertile river valleys in Colorado, Arizona and southern California. In addition, as the men traveled to rejoin their families in the Salt Lake Valley, they moved through southern Nevada and the eastern segments of southern Utah. Jefferson Hunt, a senior Mormon officer of the Battalion, actively searched for settlement sites, minerals, and other resources. His report encouraged 1851 settlement efforts in Iron County, near present-day Cedar City. These southern explorations eventually led to Mormon settlements in St. George, Utah, Las Vegas and San Bernardino, California, as well as communities in southern Arizona.
Prior to establishment of the Oregon and California trails and Mormon settlement, Indians native to the Salt Lake Valley and adjacent areas lived by hunting buffalo and other game, but also gathered grass seed from the bountiful grass of the area as well as roots such as those of the Indian Camas. By the time of settlement, indeed before 1840, the buffalo were gone from the valley, but hunting by settlers and grazing of cattle severely impacted the Indians in the area, and as settlement expanded into nearby river valleys and oases, indigenous tribes experienced increasing difficulty in gathering sufficient food. Brigham Young's counsel was to feed the hungry tribes, and that was done, but it was often not enough. These tensions formed the background to the Bear River massacre committed by California Militia stationed in Salt Lake City during the Civil War. The site of the massacre is just inside Preston, Idaho, but was generally thought to be within Utah at the time.
Statehood was petitioned for in 1849-50 using the name Deseret. The proposed State of Deseret would have been quite large, encompassing all of what is now Utah, and portions of Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, Wyoming, Arizona, Oregon, New Mexico and California. The name of Deseret was favored by the LDS leader Brigham Young as a symbol of industry and was derived from a reference in the Book of Mormon. The petition was rejected by Congress and Utah did not become a state until 1896, following the Utah Constitutional Convention of 1895.
In 1850, the Utah Territory was created with the Compromise of 1850, and Fillmore (named after President Fillmore) was designated the capital. In 1856, Salt Lake City replaced Fillmore as the territorial capital.
The first group of pioneers brought African slaves with them, making Utah the only place in the western United States to have African slavery. Three slaves, Green Flake, Hark Lay, and Oscar Crosby, came west with this first group in 1847. The settlers also began to purchase Indian slaves in the well-established Indian slave trade, as well as enslaving Indian prisoners of war. In 1850, 26 slaves were counted in Salt Lake County. Slavery didn't become officially recognized until 1852, when the Act in Relation to Service and the Act for the relief of Indian Slaves and Prisoners were passed. Slavery was repealed on June 19, 1862, when Congress prohibited slavery in all US territories.
Disputes between the Mormon inhabitants and the federal government intensified after the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' practice of polygamy became known. The polygamous practices of the Mormons, which were made public in 1854, would be one of the major reasons Utah was denied statehood until almost 50 years after the Mormons had entered the area.
After news of their polygamous practices spread, the members of the LDS Church were quickly viewed by some as un-American and rebellious. In 1857, after news of a possible rebellion spread, President James Buchanan sent troops on the Utah expedition to quell the growing unrest and to replace Brigham Young as territorial governor with Alfred Cumming. The expedition was also known as the Utah War.
As fear of invasion grew, Mormon settlers had convinced some Paiute Indians to aid in a Mormon-led attack on 120 immigrants from Arkansas under the guise of Indian aggression. The murder of these settlers became known as the Mountain Meadows massacre. The Mormon leadership had adopted a defensive posture that led to a ban on the selling of grain to outsiders in preparation for an impending war. This chafed pioneers traveling through the region, who were unable to purchase badly needed supplies. A disagreement between some of the Arkansas pioneers and the Mormons in Cedar City led to the secret planning of the massacre by a few Mormon leaders in the area. Some scholars debate the involvement of Brigham Young. Only one man, John D. Lee, was ever convicted of the murders, and he was executed at the massacre site.
Express riders had brought the news 1,000 miles from the Missouri River settlements to Salt Lake City within about two weeks of the army's beginning to march west. Fearing the worst as 2,500 troops (roughly 1/3rd of the army then) led by General Albert Sidney Johnston started west, Brigham Young ordered all residents of Salt Lake City and neighboring communities to prepare their homes for burning and evacuate southward to Utah Valley and southern Utah. Young also sent out a few units of the Nauvoo Legion (numbering roughly 8,000–10,000), to delay the army's advance. The majority he sent into the mountains to prepare defenses or south to prepare for a scorched earth retreat. Although some army wagon supply trains were captured and burned and herds of army horses and cattle run off no serious fighting occurred. Starting late and short on supplies, the United States Army camped during the bitter winter of 1857–58 near a burned out Fort Bridger in Wyoming. Through the negotiations between emissary Thomas L. Kane, Young, Cumming and Johnston, control of Utah territory was peacefully transferred to Cumming, who entered an eerily vacant Salt Lake City in the spring of 1858. By agreement with Young, Johnston established the army at Fort Floyd 40 miles away from Salt Lake City, to the southwest.
Salt Lake City was the last link of the First Transcontinental Telegraph, between Carson City, Nevada and Omaha, Nebraska completed in October 1861. Brigham Young, who had helped expedite construction, was among the first to send a message, along with Abraham Lincoln and other officials. Soon after the telegraph line was completed, the Deseret Telegraph Company built the Deseret line connecting the settlements in the territory with Salt Lake City and, by extension, the rest of the United States.
Because of the American Civil War, federal troops were pulled out of Utah Territory (and their fort auctioned off), leaving the territorial government in federal hands without army backing until General Patrick E. Connor arrived with the 3rd Regiment of California Volunteers in 1862. While in Utah, Connor and his troops soon became discontent with this assignment wanting to head to Virginia where the "real" fighting and glory was occurring. Connor established Fort Douglas just three miles (5 km) east of Salt Lake City and encouraged his bored and often idle soldiers to go out and explore for mineral deposits to bring more non-Mormons into the state. Minerals were discovered in Tooele County, and some miners began to come to the territory. Conner also solved the Shoshone Indian problem in Cache Valley Utah by luring the Shoshone into a midwinter confrontation on January 29, 1863. The armed conflict quickly turned into a rout, discipline among the soldiers broke down, and the Battle of Bear River is today usually referred to by historians as the Bear River Massacre. Between 200 and 400 Shoshone men, women and children were killed, as were 27 soldiers, with over 50 more soldiers wounded or suffering from frostbite.
Beginning in 1865, Utah's Black Hawk War developed into the deadliest conflict in the territory's history. Chief Antonga Black Hawk died in 1870, but fights continued to break out until additional federal troops were sent in to suppress the Ghost Dance of 1872. The war is unique among Indian Wars because it was a three-way conflict, with mounted Timpanogos Utes led by Antonga Black Hawk fighting federal and Utah local militia.
On May 10, 1869, the First transcontinental railroad was completed at Promontory Summit, north of the Great Salt Lake. The railroad brought increasing numbers of people into the state, and several influential businessmen made fortunes in the territory.
Main article: Latter Day Saint polygamy in the late-19th century
During the 1870s and 1880s, federal laws were passed and federal marshals assigned to enforce the laws against polygamy. In the 1890 Manifesto, the LDS Church leadership dropped its approval of polygamy citing divine revelation. When Utah applied for statehood again in 1895, it was accepted. Statehood was officially granted on January 4, 1896.
The Mormon issue made the situation for women the topic of nationwide controversy. In 1870 the Utah Territory, controlled by Mormons, gave women the right to vote. However, in 1887, Congress disenfranchised Utah women with the Edmunds–Tucker Act. In 1867–96, eastern activists promoted women's suffrage in Utah as an experiment, and as a way to eliminate polygamy. They were Presbyterians and other Protestants convinced that Mormonism was a non-Christian cult that grossly mistreated women. The Mormons promoted woman suffrage to counter the negative image of downtrodden Mormon women. With the 1890 Manifesto clearing the way for statehood, in 1895 Utah adopted a constitution restoring the right of women's suffrage. Congress admitted Utah as a state with that constitution in 1896.
Though less numerous than other intermountain states at the time, several lynching murders for alleged misdeeds occurred in Utah territory at the hand of vigilantes. Those documented include the following, with their ethnicity or national origin noted in parentheses if it was provided in the source:
William Torrington in Carson City (then a part of Utah territory), 1859
Thomas Coleman (Black man) in Salt Lake City, 1866
3 unidentified men at Wahsatch, winter of 1868
A Black man in Uintah, 1869
Charles A. Benson in Logan, 1873
Ah Sing (Chinese man) in Corinne, 1874
Thomas Forrest in St. George, 1880
William Harvey (Black man) in Salt Lake City, 1883
John Murphy in Park City, 1883
George Segal (Japanese man) in Ogden, 1884
Joseph Fisher in Eureka, 1886
Robert Marshall (Black man) in Castle Gate, 1925
Other lynchings in Utah territory include multiple instances of mass murder of Native American children, women, and men by White settlers including the Battle Creek massacre (1849), Provo River Massacre (1850), Nephi massacre (1853), and Circleville Massacre (1866).
Beginning in the early 20th century, with the establishment of such national parks as Bryce Canyon National Park and Zion National Park, Utah began to become known for its natural beauty. Southern Utah became a popular filming spot for arid, rugged scenes, and such natural landmarks as Delicate Arch and "the Mittens" of Monument Valley are instantly recognizable to most national residents. During the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, with the construction of the Interstate highway system, accessibility to the southern scenic areas was made easier.
Beginning in 1939, with the establishment of Alta Ski Area, Utah has become world-renowned for its skiing. The dry, powdery snow of the Wasatch Range is considered some of the best skiing in the world. Salt Lake City won the bid for the 2002 Winter Olympics in 1995, and this has served as a great boost to the economy. The ski resorts have increased in popularity, and many of the Olympic venues scattered across the Wasatch Front continue to be used for sporting events. This also spurred the development of the light-rail system in the Salt Lake Valley, known as TRAX, and the re-construction of the freeway system around the city.
During the late 20th century, the state grew quickly. In the 1970s, growth was phenomenal in the suburbs. Sandy was one of the fastest-growing cities in the country at that time, and West Valley City is the state's 2nd most populous city. Today, many areas of Utah are seeing phenomenal growth. Northern Davis, southern and western Salt Lake, Summit, eastern Tooele, Utah, Wasatch, and Washington counties are all growing very quickly. Transportation and urbanization are major issues in politics as development consumes agricultural land and wilderness areas.
In 2012, the State of Utah passed the Utah Transfer of Public Lands Act in an attempt to gain control over a substantial portion of federal land in the state from the federal government, based on language in the Utah Enabling Act of 1894. The State does not intend to use force or assert control by limiting access in an attempt to control the disputed lands, but does intend to use a multi-step process of education, negotiation, legislation, and if necessary, litigation as part of its multi-year effort to gain state or private control over the lands after 2014.
Utah families, like most Americans everywhere, did their utmost to assist in the war effort. Tires, meat, butter, sugar, fats, oils, coffee, shoes, boots, gasoline, canned fruits, vegetables, and soups were rationed on a national basis. The school day was shortened and bus routes were reduced to limit the number of resources used stateside and increase what could be sent to soldiers.
Geneva Steel was built to increase the steel production for America during World War II. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had proposed opening a steel mill in Utah in 1936, but the idea was shelved after a couple of months. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States entered the war and the steel plant was put into progress. In April 1944, Geneva shipped its first order, which consisted of over 600 tons of steel plate. Geneva Steel also brought thousands of job opportunities to Utah. The positions were hard to fill as many of Utah's men were overseas fighting. Women began working, filling 25 percent of the jobs.
As a result of Utah's and Geneva Steels contribution during the war, several Liberty Ships were named in honor of Utah including the USS Joseph Smith, USS Brigham Young, USS Provo, and the USS Peter Skene Ogden.
One of the sectors of the beachhead of Normandy Landings was codenamed Utah Beach, and the amphibious landings at the beach were undertaken by United States Army troops.
It is estimated that 1,450 soldiers from Utah were killed in the war.
Lesson 39, part 1. Drawn from a reference. The bottom left one took about 1hr 12min. I didn't record how long the other ones took. These are old drawings I finally finished.
Rochester Castle stands tall on a cold end of February day.
English Heritage gives the following description of the castle - "Strategically placed astride the London Road, guarding an important crossing of the River Medway, this imposing fortress has a complex history of destruction and rebuilding. Today it stands as a proud reminder of the history of Rochester, along with the cathedral and cobbled streets.
Its Norman tower-keep of Kentish ragstone was built about 1127 by William of Corbeil, Archbishop of Canterbury, with the encouragement of Henry I. Consisting of three floors above a basement, it still stands 113 feet high. Attached is a tall protruding forebuilding, with its own set of defences to pass through before the keep itself could be entered at first floor level.
In 1215, garrisoned by rebel barons, the castle endured an epic siege by King John.
Rebuilt under Henry III and Edward I, the castle remained as a viable fortress until the sixteenth century".
No colour adjustment at all! Just a horizon straighten and a contrast boost :)
Great sunset tonight :)
For Our Daily Challenge, "pink"
1st Lieutenant Kharisma Bandhan.
Squad position: Art 4.
Callsign: Legs.
Hailing from the Luzon system, 1Lt Bandhan was a semi-pro rooftop racer before being recruited by Dramstellar as part of their spin up in response to Krewstara's hostile actions kickstarting the Colonia II conflict. Bandhan didn't actually arrive until towards the tail end of the fighting as part of the militia squads Dramstellar had organized as opposed to the mostly mercenary forces they'd hired for much of the conflict. Nevertheless she distinguished herself during her battles, including landing the first recorded killing blow on a Krewstarian Chubdam and earning ace status during the push to take Castle Mount and the space elevator foundations. When Dramstellar began examining their hastily thrown together squads for top pilots to hire for their formal mobile frame program, Lt Bandhan was one of the top recommendations from the militia leadership, second only to WO Vinter herself.
1st Lieutenant Bandhan's Ruschia Test Type has been fine tuned for exceptional close quarters combat, maximizing speed and aggression without sacrificing defense. To achieve this balance, armor was removed from the feet, arms, and skirt to help reduce weight, while a extra large jump thruster pack was added to the back, complete with super enriched fuel tanks to radically boost the output of all three jump jets as needed. To balance the reduction in armor, two twin auto-turrets were added to the mobile frame on the right of the core and the left of the back. These autoturrets are semi autonomous, designed to intercept incoming attacks or distract enemy mobile frames. Of course the ability to rapidly close in on your opponents doesn't mean much without the ability to wreck havoc on them, so the Ruschia striker variant is equipped with an anti-armor lance to inflict serious damage and a plasma edge moon-axe to seal the deal. To help ensure 1Lt Bandhan reaches her targets, her Ruschia is equipped with a miniaturized flash laser turret. The power cell despite its size is only good for a single burn, but is capable of burning completely through a mobile frame... in optimal circumstances. Given the need to keep the Ruschia as streamlined and light as possible, Bandhan was limited in what she could push for as far as customization goes. She settled on an elongated canopy design that mimics her old roof top racing frame, and provides improved HUD functionality.