Nevada Solar farm

I was driving into California when I saw in the valley far away what looked to be a something from Star Wars or Lord of the Rings. They were tall towers with beacons on top and on the ground shimmering pools like some mirage. So like any responsible photonut I found the entrance apparently never saw any trespass signs if there were any. I was looking for a vantage point to set up when I saw a caravan! of SUVs coming down the road towards me and my Spiderman senses told me to move my ass. I got out of the access road passing all of them. They were civilian vehicles of the same color but unmarked. I googled mapped the location once I confirmed to be safe and turned out it was a solar farm. It was so beautiful at sunset with the beacons all lit up like Eyes of Sauron and the lake of light below. I wonder if any one had taken nice 8x10 photos of it? No doubt it was a sensitive area and I was in the wrong but I didn’t see signs.

You were lucky. Next time expect black helicopters. Or drones...

This has been up and running for years. No secret. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpa...Power_Facility

It breaks my heart to see the glare of solar farms cluttering once pristine remote vistas. I need to drive past the largest one in the country soon to get a big wildlife refuge. But at least they're hypothetically far more removable some day than dams, and don't mess up the air like coal-burning power plants do. This particular one has elk and antelope grazing between the many rows of panel installations.

The type with towers works on a different premise than regular solar panels. They use mirrors to focus desert sunlight heat on a centralized collector which boils self-contained turbine fluid over and over again, to generate electrical power. Most of the controversy about one such giant experiments revolved around how it potentially affected rare desert tortoise habitat. But it too ruined the view from a nearby designated Wilderness Area.

We have once chance to choose our poison wisely - and choose (and act!) we must!

Already too late. Now it's all about how best to crash land with the most survivors.

...not sure if I'd want to be among them. Sometimes I think its time for all of us to drink that (J. Jones) cool-aid and give the planet a fair chance.

Makes me think of an interesting premise for a movie: to cryogenically freeze maybe one million otherwise young and healthy people, and at a time when associated sensors indicate that all is completely well with our planet...these folks will be brought back to life, with very explicit instructions on how to proceed in a way which will ensure a healthy future for the entire ecosystem. (hmmm...maybe implant something so whomever deviates from these instructions in the slightest - they will automatically be taken out, or maybe implant something so that they will just do what's right and not totally screw things up as we have been doing for so long).

What if all those mirrors somehow got out of sync and focused on the giant thermometer in Baker instead? It could be the plotline for a new Netflix series!

Baker doesn't need any extra help, nor Bakersfield, nor Barstow - already uninhabitable, at least for intelligent life. Gosh - wonder how much of that toxic yellow-green atmosphere will filter over Elkhorn Ridge if I drive down to the Wildlife Refuge later this month. I've sure gotten some incredible sunrise and sunset colors there before. Maybe that's what the atmosphere and heat of Venus is like, just minus the sound of the Merle Haggard bar an hour away. Loudest thing in the vast Refuge are meadowlarks. I'm sorta in a conundrum whether to take 4x5 or thaw out a box of 8x10 Ektar - which would cost more than four times as much to replace today. I'll wait till more proximate weather reports. Lots of dirt roads back in there, potentially dusty, potentially mucky, potentially washed out, depending.

Right to the north of there, in the upper half of the Carrizo Plain, they just christened a whole new major solar field dedicated to supplying part of the City of San Jose, about a days's drive north. I think it too will use extant power lines along Hwy 5 in the San Joaquin Valley, hopefully preventing all the pristine backroad scenery in between from itself getting cluttered.

"Maybe that's what the atmosphere and heat of Venus is like"

Interestingly enough, there was just an article about the color of Venus and its atmosphere, https://www.theatlantic.com/science/...lantic%20Daily
Turns out it isn't yellow or orange, that's just interpretive, artificial color added to the original images sent back by the Magellan space probe and others.

Interesting. Maybe a probe can be sent to Bakersfield and hopefully survive the heat and fumes long enough to compare the results. It's the only place I've ever heard of where someone started their car across the road from a refinery, and the atmosphere literally exploded, destroying both him and his car (true story). There's a reason it's called the armpit of the West.

All that is separated by a long anticline directly adjacent to the San Andreas Fault called Elkhorn Ridge, which geologically cleanly divides one of the biggest oil well forests in the US from what is perhaps the most uninhabited pristine natural grassland left in the State, thankfully oilless. It's also famous for periodic Superblooms so colorful they're easily seen from space; surreal at times, really. I prefer it slightly off season, and things somewhat less conspicuously spray painted for miles on end. Late fall is nice if one likes browns; but the constant wildfire smoke filtering in, along with sandstorms last year were quite uninviting, especially since that part of the world is the epicenter of Valley Fever, a really nasty lung fungal disease spread on blowing dust, not as statistically lethal as Covid, but with a far worse record of serious debilitation afterwards among those who do get infected. The Refuge was originally set up for the endangered tiny kit fox, a creature of small bushes and fond of kangaroo rats. About the size of a large house cat.

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Originally Posted by Drew Wiley

Interesting. Maybe a probe can be sent to Bakersfield and hopefully survive the heat and fumes long enough to compare the results. It's the only place I've ever heard of where someone started their car across the road from a refinery, and the atmosphere literally exploded, destroying both him and his car (true story). There's a reason it's called the armpit of the West.

All that is separated by a long anticline directly adjacent to the San Andreas Fault called Elkhorn Ridge, which geologically cleanly divides one of the biggest oil well forests in the US from what is perhaps the most uninhabited pristine natural grassland left in the State, thankfully oilless. It's also famous for periodic Superblooms so colorful they're easily seen from space; surreal at times, really. I prefer it slightly off season, and things somewhat less conspicuously spray painted for miles on end. Late fall is nice if one likes browns; but the constant wildfire smoke filtering in, along with sandstorms last year were quite uninviting, especially since that part of the world is the epicenter of Valley Fever, a really nasty lung fungal disease spread on blowing dust, not as statistically lethal as Covid, but with a far worse record of serious debilitation afterwards among those who do get infected. The Refuge was originally set up for the endangered tiny kit fox, a creature of small bushes and fond of kangaroo rats. About the size of a large house cat.

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If you find yourself in New Cuyama, say hello to all my drinking buddies at the Buckhorn. The coldest beer within 40 miles or something like that.
Oh wait, I just did a search and found that the ol' Buckhorn was rebuilt as an upscale Resort in 2018 (!) I'll bet the peanut shells and the rattlesnake are gone
https://www.cuyamabuckhorn.com/

Well, i probably will head down the "Airline Highway" (Route 25) - named for its directness, certainly not its smooth pavement! But I try to stay a fair distance from any evident gentrification going on, especially with vintners, around Paso Robles and some of the inland valleys. That might be a tough occupation to sustain, however, given all the extreme drought of the past decade. In general, the population of that whole inland corridor has dramatically diminished in the past half century or so. Fine with me. I've been over most of the side roads many times before, starting way back when my dad would take me fossil hunting at Reef Ridge near Avenal.

Interesting that there is a second huge Condor refuge down that way now, almost completely off-limits to the public. Of course, most people wishing to spot condors do so at the summit of Pinnacles NP, further north on that same route.

That whole area is ground zero for Valley fever. The US Navy developed a vaccine for it and was testing on sailors at NAS Lemoore back in the 80's but I never heard what became of it.

Well, I got it and ran a high fever for six months when I was 17, probably from digging out fossils, artifacts, etc. I knew athletes who ended up flat on their backs for a year or more. The spores can allegedly survive for hundreds or even thousands of years in the soil. And extreme windstorms plus droughts in recent years have spread those spores all the way across Arizona and into dryer portions of the Midwest, where many cases started popping up. It used to be called the Turkey Ranchers' disease because of all the Turkey farms around Coalinga.

There was already an endemic related variety of fungal lung disease called coccidiodomycosis in the ole Dust Bowl region. Both are tricky to diagnose and treat, and often mimic Tuberculosis. Creates similar antibodies. The only specialty clinic in the world I'm aware of is logically in Bakersfield. I was never correctly diagnosed until it was already long over. Hopefully I now have lifetime immunity, but am NOT about to take any careless chances.
Besides, blowing dust is miserable for photographic film and gear.

I'm relatively useless today. Minor aches, stiffness, and chills. Had my covid booster shot yesterday, so am not surprised at having almost exactly the same temporary effects as my previous shot.

Chills ain't fun. I hope you feel better soon!

Oh, I feel great today. And a warm week is forecast. So I'll get back to working out my knees again on some nearby steep hillsides with my 8x10 pack in a few days. We've got emerald green hills now, with a distinct start of wildflowers. I'm not going to burn any 8x10 color film on that, but might or might not bring along 8x10 color headed down toward the Carizzo. All in the timing of the color, which I suspect and hope will be a little more earthtone interspersed that farther south, since they got a lot less rain than us this winter. If I get cold feet about that, I'll take more affordable 4X5 film instead.