More fun than taking a bath in pop rocks!!!
And the merry go round goes round goes round.........
I got extremely fortunate this weekend and picked up GASP!!!! a two day weekend!!!!!!!! Yay!!!!!
So, I did what any red blooded american would do, and set out to see the sights of Salt Lake City. (excepting all the LDS stuff, they're having some kind of special weekend, and every Mormon in creation is downtown at the temple.) Being a total fanatic for all things involving metal and the melting thereof, I naturally started off with the WORLD's. LARGEST. OPEN. PIT. MINE!!!!!!!!!!!! (as seen here)
(and here)
Big enough to be seen from space, big enough to stack two Sears towers in and not reach the top. BIG!!! It produces 320,000 tons of of copper a year from rock containing less than .6%. To get a feel for scale, that wee little truck in the second photo is so big, it can carry 300 plus tons of ore at a time. It's been mined for a hundred years now, and still has enough for at least another twenty to thirty years.
Even more impressive to me were the ecological statistics. Mining is a filthy filthy business. Smelting traditionally puts out clouds of sulferous smoke that kills everything for miles. It destroys the land, the air, and the water. Not these guys though.
They reclaim all their tailings. All the left over crap rock and slag doesn't get just piled up and left. They clean it up, and plant trees and grassland over it. Even better, not only are they not polluting the water, they're actually reclaiming 30,000 gallons of "dirty" water a minute from the local communities. Enough that they're starting to sell the leftovers back to the local communities as drinking water.
And the smoke? Non-existent. I went to their smelter (where they actually melt it into metal). Not a damned thing from the smoke stack. Nothing. The reclaim 99.99 percent of the sulfur and use it to make industrial sulfuric acid which they also sell. Impressed the hell out of me.
Also went to the Great Salt Lake and waded on in. Stinky and shallow. I walked out fifty yards before I even covered my ankles. It was like doing a bad Jesus on the Sea of Galilee imitation. I walked all the way out over a hundred yards and didn't have to pull my jeans above my knees. Pretty sweet. I have so got to play Ultimate Frisbee out here.......
Then pulled a lady's car out of the sand (and laughed my ass off doing it, since she was in a huge Mercury, and I towed her out with my little Plymouth Neon and a thin nylon rope) and followed up with Thai curry and fried banana (nanananananna) ice cream..........Mmmmmmm Fried banana.
Today's project; church, then Clint Eastwood movies (High Plains Drifter and Pale Rider) whilst (and at the same time even) knitting a scarf. Take warning Dharma, I will be your match in a mere ten to fiteen years!!!!!! muhahahahahahahahahaha!!!!! Toodles, I'm going running.
Until next time,
NBS.