There is little documentation of this short-lived effort, however the Los Angeles Times did a story on the project in their June 6, 1929 edition, shown below:

Los Angeles Times, June 6, 1929

Also, contained within the engineering drawings on file in the Mount Wilson archives is a sheet showing the Arcadia setup, including concrete piers to be constructed to support the mirror housings. It clearly appears to be a direct forerunner of the Irvine Ranch installation.

Finally, there is actually some film footage showing bits of the Arcadia setup. One of the major facilities at the US Navy’s China Lake base are the Michelson Laboratories (Michelson attended the US Naval Academy and served in the Navy). At some point in time, I’d guess the 1960s, the Michelson Laboratories made an 8 minute film of Michelson’s scientific contributions. Like so many things, it eventually ended up on the Internet, which I’ve linked to below. The parts of the film between 4:57 and 6:37 show Michelson demonstrating how he would take measurements using the apparatus set up at Arcadia.

Back to Historic Speed of Light measurements in Southern California

Yeah, that name…I know what you’re thinking….but, it’s not what you think, despite it being in California. It’s something completely different. And suitably weird.

Reefer City was a small community in the high desert of California, midway between Rosamond and Mojave. Its name came from the fact that the “dwellings” of Reefer City were repurposed railroad refrigerated cars (i.e., “Reefers”) that were used by the early residents, primarily local miners, as insulation from the Summer heat.

Reefer City, established in the 1930s, continued on until the early 1970s, when it was obliterated by its new owners.

I’ve known about the place since I was young, but I really can’t say for sure why I knew of it. Perhaps I read about it in one of Russ Leadabrand’s legendary Southern California guidebooks and this kind of weird shit in the desert burrows deep into my brain. In any case I thought it might be an appropriate addition to his website, seeing as how there’s very little info on the background of this place.

The best (and only!) historical rundown I’ve come across is a Los Angeles Times article from way back in 1971. I do take issue with part of the story where it states that Reefer City was established in 1933. Further below I have an excerpt from an aerial photo taken February 29, 1936 showing undisturbed desert where the community eventually was. So Reefer City’s true date of inception had to be 1936 or later.

Here’s part one of the LA Times piece.

Here’s part two of the LA Times piece.

In doing research on the site I did come across a couple of other old newspaper articles, shown below. Looks like fire was an issue for the place:

From the Bakersfield Californian, June 25, 1949.

From the Bakersfield Californian, January 24, 1955.

The evolution of Reefer City over time:

Image taken February 29, 1936. Reefer City will eventually be within the red oval, but it’s not there as of yet.

A 1943 USGS topo map shows Reefer City to be in place, as well as the copious adjacent mining activity, some of which continues to this day.

A more detailed USGS topo map from 1947. Looks like a community.

A 1952 aerial photograph shows the site about half occupied with significant vegetation. And a paved access road. Woohoo!!

A 1972 aerial photo shows the site with all structures removed. Thus endeth Reefer City. RIP.

A 1972 USGS topo map also shows the disappearance of Reefer City. So sad.

The site of Reefer City today. The black rows at the top of the pic are part of the many solar panel farms in the area. (2019, from Google Maps)

In June of 2019 I paid my first and only visit to the site, despite having passed nearby many times. Took a few pics. Not a lot to see beyond a cleared patch of desert.

Looking easterly across the site of Reefer City in June of 2019. The hills in the background were worked by the miner residents.

Looking north across the site of Reefer City in June, 2019. Lots of wind turbines and solar farms in the area these days.

What’s left of the community well that served Reefer City in June, 2019.

Looking south from Reefer City in June of 2019. There are still considerable gold/silver extraction operations by Golden Queen Mining in Soledad Mountain in the center of this image.

So not much to see these days, but a wonderfully, strange place that might be ideal for opening up a cannabis dispensary…..

Should you be foolish enough to want to visit the site (ya know….it’s all about the ‘gram!), access is easy. I believe the site itself is private property, but the adjacent road is public. Exit Hwy 14 at Silver Queen Road (Exit #64, Fleta). Head west 1.5 miles to Holt Street, then turn north. After 0.6 miles the site of Reefer City will be on the right (east).

This turned out to be one of those serendipitous places I stumbled across while doing something else. I had been checking out a topo map app for my iPad called Gaia, and was looking at what their mapping product showed, comparing it against what I knew to be out there. Doing so I came across a rather large area, straddling Highway 550, called the “Lybrook Fossil Area”.

Huh?? I had been up and down 550 dozens of times and never caught wind of anything by that name, and as far as I could tell it was in the middle of nowhere. Googling a bit turned up very little, just a few visits from photographers, some hiking GPS tracks and a very strange promotional brochure from the City of Aztec. Strange, because Aztec was about 50 miles away from this place, in a straight line. Much longer by road. It wasn’t exactly a local thing, but I was happy for the brochure.

I knew the general area fairly well, as it was on the way towards Chaco Canyon. It’s a maze oil field dirt roads, which needed to be used for access. These are usually pretty good (but not always!!) but unsigned and confusing as hell. Using the brochure and Google Earth I was able to map out routes in and out for loading on my iPad. I’m not going to offer up any maps here since to get to the Lybrook Badlands you really have to know how to do backcountry vehicle navigation or things may well end badly. You really need to be running a GPS setup, know how to use it and have at least a high clearance vehicle.

As Jeri and I headed north on 550, we eventually found the nondescript turnoff (after blowing right past it!) and headed in about 3 miles to what was described as an “overlook”. And wow, was it that!

A panorama of the spectacular view from the overlook. That’s a good hunk, but not all, of the Lybrook Badlands. A downclimb seemed rather impossible.

Another view from the overlook.

It was a helluva impressive sight. I had no idea this whole damn area was there, as the main route in and out of Chaco Canyon sorta circumnavigates it. From what I had read online, this overlook area can get extremely windy, but when we were there it was only a mild breeze.

Unfortunately there was no way to get down into the badlands below, not even by hiking. It’s pretty treacherous terrain. In order to get into the badlands proper we had to backtrack to Highway 550 head about a mile south, then plunge back into the wilderness on another unmarked dirt road. Like I said, gotta have GPS…. After a series of twists and turnoffs we reached a large graded pad containing an operating oil pump. This was the “parking area” for our first target, given the name Hoodooville.

When I had been mapping the trip out on Google Earth, I could tell Hoodooville was less than a half mile from the oil pump so I had figured it would be an easy walk. However I had failed to factor in the topography and now realized we were deep in field of mud hills and mud slot canyons. Worse, I hadn’t bother to bring my handheld GPS with the coordinates loaded in since I KNEW it was just going to be a simple jaunt. At that point my best guess was that it was “over there, someplace”. I’m used to this sort of ineptitude on my part, but it doesn’t sit well with Jeri, so I at least try and act like I know where things are. And I stay out of rock throwing range.

So we headed “over there”, wound around a slot canyon and finally crested a ridge. At that point we could see Hoodooville beneath us (reasonably close to my guessed direction) and headed down to it.

Jeri making the descent into Hoodooville in the distance. Note I’m well out of rock throwing distance as there is plenty of ammo.

Pretty impressive with a dense cluster of hoodoos covering dozens of acres. Lots of photo opportunities.

Part of downtown Hoodooville.

Jeri vainly trying to suggest an ice cream cone. Good thing we ain’t Instagrammers.

The return back to the truck was much quicker and simpler now that I knew where things were.

We relocated a couple miles to another spot that had many more hoodoos but dispersed over a larger area. To see all of them would have required a several mile hike, but we were already thinking ahead to green chile cheeseburgers so we had planned only a shorter, sampling walk.

We headed down the poor dirt track towards what was shown on my iPad as another “parking area”. Really, that’s what the online data I could find identified it as. Then, about a half mile short of our destination, the route we were on just sorta…stopped. Well, not exactly stopped, as I got out and saw it continued as two faint tracks through the brush.

Well THIS was an interesting turn of events! What I was seeing I’d normally consider cross country travel, but considering the route was shown on BLM maps, I guessed it to be fair game. I dropped the truck into 4wd and pushed on (It would be a big nope for passenger cars). After not much drama we reached what looked like a turnaround area which was in fact our “parking area”.

The hoodoos here, while more dispersed, seemed to have considerably more height than those of the Hoodoo City area.

The hoodoos are much taller in this area of the badlands.

Another hoodoo and some random moron for scale.

We wandered around a while until the call of green chile cheeseburgers became too loud to ignore and started our return out of the wilderness. Since the area was so unexpected to me, as well as unusual, we headed back to 550 via a different route, which was the route into Chaco Canyon. From there it wasn’t too long until the village of Cuba and El Bruno’s, green chile cheeseburger heaven.

The Lybrook Badlands are a really amazing place and we’ll probably make a return trip when we’re not jonesing for cheeseburgers. It seems like visitation is close to zero, probably due to lack of signage and publicity. But if you go you should have a very capable vehicle and know how to navigate on unmarked backcountry roads.

Since I posted my look back at the Lazar story from 2018, I received a bit of skeptical feedback as to what was observed over Groom being the testing of a proton beam. Oh you doubters! However it’s completely understandable, for the average person, who might not have the ability to crunch the numbers to verify the math in my original 20 year old (!!) posting regarding it being a proton beam. The Bethe equation, used to predict the distance charged particles will travel in a target, is damn imposing and not exactly user friendly. But what if there were a way that (almost) anybody could model a proton beam through air and see if my “theory” was correct (“Theory” is in quotes because my knowledge base includes a lot more info than I’m going to publicly disclose).

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to SRIM, “The Stopping and Range of Ions in Matter”. It’s a bit of software, written by real particle physicists, that, among other things, is used to determine the penetration depth of charged particles into targets. It’s available for free download from this website . Yeah, I know….the website looks like a throwback to the 1990s, but the software works and the price is right.

Now before you run off to download and install the SRIM software, I need to give you a heads up about something. Unless you are reasonably conversant with college level physics you may find it challenging to input the proper parameters for modeling (As an aside, I wonder why someone conversant with college level physics would buy Lazar’s story in the first place, but I guess I’ve seen weirder shit). To that end, I’ve included screen grabs below showing my input parameters and the resulting output below it. In the output screen the important input parameters are in light blue and the good stuff is circled in green.

Of particular note are the values given in the “Ion Stats” boxes. The “Straggle” and “Lateral Proj.” values strongly suggest the resultant area of ionization would be circular, as seen from below, and oval, as seen from the side. You know, like a “Sport Model”! SRIM shows a 500 MeV proton beam making it 1.22 kilometers through the atmosphere at the elevation of Groom Lake before exploding in saucer-like goodness.

Now compare this to the original analysis I did 20 years ago in terms of penetration. I’d say it was reasonably close:

So, knowing only this bit of particle physics analysis, does it seem possible what was observed on Wednesday nights in the late 1980s was proton beam testing? And of the two “theories”, saucers from a hidden base at Papoose Lake or a proton beam from Groom Lake, which seems more plausible?

Oh, and before you make up your mind in regards to this,…ummm…theory, you might want to take a gander at one last thing….

On the SRIM main menu there’s a button that will bring up “TRIM Calculation”. Press it. In the resulting “TRIM Setup” window, in the upper left you’ll see a button labeled “TRIM Demo”. Now press that. This will bring up 12 sample demos you can run to see how this all works. Now notice the sample demo offered in the lower right corner? Yeah, you’re seeing right…a particle beam being used only partially facetiously as a “death ray”. It models a 10 GeV (1 billion electron volt) beam passing through air.

Selecting this demo loads the following inputs:

And when run, you get the following output (I’ll leave it to you to play around with the available output displays):

Yep, a “death ray” with a range of just over 40 kilometers. Granted, 10 GeV is a shit load of energy (20 times the energy I assumed for the Groom proton beams), but it’s the general concept carried to extremes. I’ve never known precisely what the boys at Groom were trying to achieve with their ersatz saucers. My assumption was that it was some sort of radar spoofing effort. But hell, maybe it WAS an attempt to make a death ray. All things considered, I think I’d rather it be secret saucers from Papoose Lake. But unfortunately it’s not.

Participants: Tom Mahood

General Search Area:

Areas of Serin tower cell phone coverage southeasterly of Quail Spring.

Rationale for Search:

This was a small area of Serin cell tower coverage that hadn’t been searched before. And I wanted to go on a hike.

Impressions of Area and Findings:
A fairly rocky area that likely gets little to no visitation. Unlikely to be on any sort of route Bill would have attempted as it provides no logical path in or out of the Quail Mountain topography.

Coverage Level:
In most cases, very good. I did a lot of traversing up and down slopes, and visibility downslope was excellent.

Comments:

Jeri had some business to attend to in SoCal and needed to fly out for a few days. I decided to tag along and maybe do a bit of wandering in Joshua Tree, as it’s been a while since I had been there. But flying meant I couldn’t bring my usual heavy boots or a hiking pole. That limited me to trail shoes and my wits for balance, usually not a good combo. With these constraints, I planned a route filling in a hole in the ground search coverage which also had an area of Serin cell tower coverage. I couldn’t come up with a plausible reason why Bill could have possibly ended up in this area, but no one had yet looked there and it was within my equipment-limited abilities. And I thought it’d be nice area to cruise through.

Driving into the park’s west entrance, I was surprised to see large areas of sand washed across the road, as well as the road inside the park. Turns out this was still remaining from a severe storm that hit the park on October 12, 2018 and hadn’t yet been fully cleared. There was also evidence of substantial water flows in all of the dry washes I crossed during the hike. Most surprising was the appearance of a carpet of new, green grass spread across the flat valley encompassing Samuelson’s Rocks. Didn’t the grass know it wasn’t Spring? In fact, this was a good thing for searching as the heavy water flows likely moved potential clues around and down washes.

As I traversed the valley towards Quail Spring, as I had done so many times before, I stumbled again upon one of the several old homesteads in the area. I had been past it before, but this time there was a carpet of new, green grass. A very pastoral look.

A homestead from the 1920s or 30s. My destination is the ridge directly behind it, and that’s the mouth of Smith Water Canyon just right of center.

This looks to be some sort of outdoor coking setup for the homestead. It’s too small to be any sort of smelter or reduction arrangement.

A car that’s been “parked” for quite some time at the homestead. The amount of new green grass growth is readily apparent. Looks strange for a desert in November.

Reaching the ridgeline, which was my initial target, climbing posed no serious difficulty for me, despite my equipment limitations. Still, I maintained a higher level of caution as one misstep could result in a pretty bad day.

Having reached the top of the ridge, a look back at where I parked on Park Road, circled in red. That’s about 2.4 miles away, a nice stroll.

The terrain was interesting, and there were a number of potential hiding places to check. However the topography of the area made it unlikely Bill would have passed through the area. He would have had to descend into canyon I was about to drop into, then climb out of, for no obvious, good reason.

Also from the ridge crest, a look towards the southwest and Quail Mountain. This gives a sense of the ruggedness of that higher terrain.

Looking north up Quail Wash. Yucca Valley is visible in the distance, while a part of the Joshua Tree community may be seen closer, just right of center. The mouth of Smith Water Canyon is just left out of picture range, left of the small, rocky hill.

Having cleared the area of cell coverage, I dropped into the canyon and started up its westerly slopes. This unsearched area had more potential, since it could have been on a descent route from Quail Mountain, but no luck. I did come across an odd cairn that I examined a bit, but figured it was merely an old mineral claim marker. After that, I exited the canyon near Quail Spring and headed back to the vehicle.

An odd cairn I came across while descending into a ravine. Most mineral claim cairns I have seen consist of stacked rocks but not this. But it’s likely for a claim of some sort.

As a closing note I should point out that with this trip, the 91st one since I began keeping track years ago, the total recorded mileage of search tracks has now exceeded 1,000 miles. Damn, who woulda thought? In truth, there have been others searching who tracks I haven’t kept record of, so this sad milestone had already been met. As point of reference, the mileage of search tracks accumulated during the organized initial search for Bill was approximately 770 miles. So this is another 1,000 miles on top of those. One would think that this vast number of ground miles should have been more than sufficient to find somebody pretty much anywhere in the entire park. But to think that, one would have to have not visited the slopes of Smith Water Canyon with its astronomical number of nooks and crannies.

GPS Mileage: 7.3 miles

Cumulative GPS mileage to date: 1,001.7 miles (Pretty much nuts)

GPS tracks for this trip in Google Earth kml format

GPS tracks for this trip in Garmin gdb format

GPS tracks for this trip in gpx format

JT91 GPS tracks are shown in dark blue. Tracks from the original search are shown in black, searches since then are shown in red and tracks from the Orbeso/Nguyen search are in green. The light blue line is the 10.0 mile radius from the Serin Drive cell tower and the orange line is the 11.1 mile radius. Serin tower cell coverage is the red shading.

Date: October 13, 2018

Participants: Adam Marsland, Teresa Cowles

General Search Area: Side washes and canyons east of northerly Quail Wash

Rationale for Search:

It is not far from a possible place Bill’s phone might have pinged, and nobody has searched this area, so why not.

Impressions of Area and Findings:

Picturesque washes framed by dramatic rock formations, with lots of potential sheltering spots, and fairly easy terrain for the most part.

Coverage Level:

Good, though in the main wash there were some sheltering rock formations that I would have liked to take a closer look at (we were walking on a height of land halfway between the wash and the rock face on the opposite side, searching both from that vantage point).

Comments:

I’m back in the United States for a short visit and Teresa took me along to Joshua Tree en route to a gig of hers, so we stopped off in the Quail Wash area for several hours and poked around.

I didn’t have very high expectations – this is very much in the “Bill got himself somewhere nobody would ever think to look” category of locations – but it wound up being a little more productive than I thought.

The wide, winding wash canyons that extend east from Quail Wash are surprisingly picturesque – I recommend them for exploration. They do not appear to see much visitation although a clear trace of a trail unexpectedly appeared from out one of the washes (at a point quite far from the main trail) and just as quickly disappeared about 100 meters up. We were able to find more traces of this trail later hugging the side of the wash that indicated (from the mode of construction) it was quite old, despite the one visible section appearing recent and in good repair. Further back into the hills we found a few cairns indicating people do get back here, though with the recent heavy rains it was hard to tell if anybody had visited recently. (Note from Tom: There are a number of non-maintained trails or routes in that area which aren’t shown on the usual JTNP handout brochures. They are shown in guidebooks and the Nat Geo Trails Illustrated map. This could be a segment of the Panorama trail.)

Mysterious trail that emerges from the wash and vanishes at this point.

It was an interesting area with many rock formations that could be used as shelters and some downright inviting flat spots that would make wonderful camping spots if they weren’t so (relatively) remote. Picking our way back down to Quail Wash from there was steep and painstaking work, but we made it safely.

The wash canyons east of Quail Wash are surprisingly picturesque and infrequently visited.

No trace of Bill, but him being here would be odd since turning up into these canyons would require him leaving Quail Wash with the community of Joshua Tree and rescue very close at hand. Still, being in the area for probably the only time, this was an accessible spot that I’d always wanted to take a look at. My ankle (broken eight months ago in Bali) is still not quite stable enough to get into rougher terrain than this, and without my stick I probably would have been in real trouble on the descent, so this is probably as much as I can do for now, anyway. Other hikers and amateur sleuths of greater skill than I have admirably taken up the gauntlet of searching for Bill, anyway. But it was nice to get back into this area, which smelled and looked wonderful after the recent heavy rains, and take one more look around. Who knows when I’ll get another chance, and it was an absolutely gorgeous day for it.

GPS Mileage: 6.5 miles

Cumulative GPS mileage to date: 994.4 miles

GPS tracks for this trip in Google Earth kml format

GPS tracks for this trip in Garmin gdb format

GPS tracks for this trip in gpx format

JT90 GPS tracks are shown in dark blue. Tracks from the original search are shown in black, searches since then are shown in red and tracks from the Orbeso/Nguyen search. The yellow line is the 10.0 mile radius from the Serin Drive cell tower.

View of the mountains north of Smith Water Canyon from a vantage point east of Quail Wash.

Damn.

Damn, damn, damn!

I really don’t want to be writing this as I have way better things to do. I thought I happily left all this crap in my rear view mirror 20 years ago, but apparently not. Recently, I’ve noted an increasing number of visitors to the ancient Bluefire part of my website , coming from the /UFOs section of Reddit . Seems like they were looking for information on Bob Lazar.

Tracking the links back to Reddit, I was surprised to find a number of current discussions on Lazar and his veracity. Sadly, there were quite a few posts saying how they believed Lazar’s story and he was the “real deal”. And I’m pretty sure many of those posters were small kids or not even born when all this Lazar stuff first went down years ago (Ummmm….What’s a “newsgroup”??). This was all news to me, as I quit following the subject 20 or so years ago when I started my graduate work in Physics and realized the basic science elements of Lazar’s tale were something well beyond wrong, and moved in other directions.

I have a great love of subtlety and in hindsight I’m afraid my final Lazar postings were lost on some. I pretty much laid the real story all out in pieces, and sort of assumed people would connect it. I apparently was wrong, and a hammer was required. What follows is the hammer, probably what I should have written 20 years ago, and then I’m done with this damn subject….forever (I can dream, can’t I?).

First and foremost, I need to touch on the basic science in Lazar’s tale. In the world of scientific research the harshest insult that can be leveled against someone’s work is that the person “is not even wrong”. In other words, the research or theory is so bad it really can’t even be discussed coherently. If I were feeling charitable, and I’m not, I suppose Lazar’s story may just barely reach the “not even wrong” level.

Now as someone with a real Masters in Physics (with a focus on gravitation, no less!) I could go on for many pages pissing all over Lazar’s nonsensical tale. But it would have to become very technical and the hardcore Lazar believers would not be swayed, so why should I bother?

But this quicky should be easy for anyone to understand…..Recall that Lazar surfaced with his tale well before gravitational wave observatories, such as LIGO, VIRGO, GEO 600 and TAMA, had even been designed, much less made operational. If Lazar’s saucers did indeed operate like he claimed, grabbing distant portions of spacetime and pulling it toward them, they would generate enough gravitational waves to knock the observatories’ interferometer mirrors off their damn mounts. OK, maybe a slight exaggeration, but any near-Earth operations of the saucers described by Lazar would result in huge gravitational wave signals. Wait…..Unless the observatories are part of the coverup!!! Um….nope.

Aside from dealing with Lazar’s science being absolute rubbish, I also need to discuss what those glowing objects, seen by many over Groom Lake, actually were. They were, as I apparently didn’t lay out forcefully enough 20 years ago, the result of the operation of a proton beam device. I repeat….THEY WERE GODDAMNED PARTICLE BEAMS!!! There, having said that I feel much better.

Now I didn’t exactly pull that theory out of my ass. It was, um….suggested to me that I might want to pay a visit to my university library and look up something called the Bragg Curve. In essence, it relates how far charged particles can penetrate into matter given their initial energy.

To be honest, my reaction was “Huh? What does this have to do with anything?”  The response was something along the lines of “OK, moron, pull a certain dusty, old physics reference book and look at the Bragg Curve equations on pages so and so”. I dutifully followed my instructions, and after staring at the equations for about 20 minutes the skies opened and the rain of understanding soaked me. It was truly an “Ohhhh shiiiiit” moment. I’m often slow, but I get there eventually. After that, the rest was just running the numbers. Oh, and BTW, you can try it yourself if you don’t believe me.

Since then, I’ve had my posting on particle beams at Groom, shall we say….vetted. I’ve also spoken to people who have seen these glowing orbs of plasma firsthand…from a distance….and very close up. Finally, I had the chance to ask a real particle physicist who worked at Los Alamos (for reals, a family friend) if dumping a high energy proton beam into the atmosphere would result in the creation of a glowing ball of plasma. He looked at me quizzically for a while and said he supposed it would, but why would anyone want to? And THAT is an extremely interesting question.

Given Groom’s primary mission involving radar measures and countermeasures, my sense 20 years ago was that they were testing something possibly for use in radar spoofing. However the fact it apparently still remains classified today (an important element in the explanation of Lazar’s tale) suggests maybe its purpose was something else, perhaps an attempt at a Star Wars-type weapon.

In the 1980s and 90s there were many reports in the southwest US of slow moving, virtually silent big, black triangular aircraft only seen at night. I’ve written a bit about those here. I was told, by those that know about this stuff, that the project’s classification, continued to this day, was due to these craft violating some provisions of weapons treaties the US had signed. I would speculate that the proton accelerator at Groom generating those flamin’ balls o’ plasma 30 years ago might in a similar manner also violate some weapons treaties and must thus stay severely under wraps.

So let me be completely clear: The Wednesday night glowing orbs seen in the skies over Groom Lake by Lazar et al were NOT “craft”, they were plasmas generated by operation of a high powered proton accelerator dumping its beam into the atmosphere. And…..Lazar knew this.

So enough of this setup. Let’s get into the meat of this tale.

From what I have seen, much of the argument supporting Lazar’s story on Reddit revolves around “waddabouts”. By this I mean that posters say that, “If Lazar’s story wasn’t true, then how do you explain <fill in the blank>?” You know, “what abouts?”.

The following isn’t a complete list, but covers most that occur repeatedly (I’m assuming you already have familiarity with the details of Lazar’s story else it’s unlikely you’d be reading this) :

• Lazar worked at Los Alamos, showed George Knapp around there and people seemed to know him. His name was in the phone book in 1982.
• The Los Alamos newspaper story on Lazar and his jet car called him a physicist with the lab.
• In Las Vegas, security personnel, observed by others, visited Lazar at his home.
• Lazar was noted by friends and family to “disappear” as part of a job.
• He was able to correctly describe certain aspects of the facilities at Groom Lake.
• He identified a location known as S-4 in the Nellis Range.
• Lazar was able to correctly name specific people involved in the security process.
• Edward Teller appeared to react visibly and uncomfortably when asked about Lazar in an interview.
• He received a W-2 form from the government.
• After Lazar’s story broke, some media members observed possible government surveillance and intimidation efforts.
• Also after Lazar went public, persons around Lazar observed what appeared to be a vigorous and threatening government attempt to silence him.
• Lazar “knew” about Element 115 long before it was ever synthesized.
• And finally the absolute best, Lazar knew about the Wednesday night tests, and showed others.

The posters bring up some damn good points. How IS one to explain all these without there being a hidden saucer facility at Papoose Lake? Well, it turns out there is a very good reason all these things probably did, in fact, happen, and why Lazar still holds to his nonsensical story. Spoiler: It’s about saving his ass.

OK boys and girls, it’s time to strap in and begin our story. Now all that follows may not be precisely accurate, but whatever deviations that exist are pretty small. I know most of the major points of what I’m about to relate to be facts,from documents I unearthed and also thanks to the confidence of a number of astonishingly well-placed folks who I’m not about to betray.

After Lazar got to Los Alamos and set up his photo processing business, he managed to get a limited term, contract job with Kirk-Mayer. Kirk-Mayer was one of the smaller contractors supplying support staff to the Los Alamos lab, such as data entry personnel, machinists, fabricators and electronic technicians. Kirk-Mayer never did provide “physicists” or positions of that caliber. Lazar had some electronic technical education from Pierce College in Southern California and had some work experience with Fairchild, so he was hired as an electronic tech with Kirk-Mayer. I have interviews with several people who worked with him and he was described as a very clever troubleshooter and fix-it guy. He was there often enough to get listed in the LANL phone directory, with the denotation “K/M” next to his name, indicating his affiliation with Kirk-Mayer. Although the following ad is from the Albuquerque Journal in January, 1989, a few years after Lazar had left Los Alamos, it probably closely describes Lazar’s position at the time.

Lazar and his jet car established quite a presence in the small town of Los Alamos, and about a month after arriving, the Los Alamos Monitor newspaper did an article  about him. The story described him as a physicist at the lab, but that was in fact only what he told the reporter his position was. Some people who knew him at the time were quite surprised to see that claimed title. I probably should take a small detour to talk about Lazar’s jet car, the article’s focus, first to demystify it a bit, and to show Lazar’s genius talent for low key self promotion is evident even then as well as his inclusion of nuggets of truth to sell exaggerations and falsehoods.

The car was powered by what’s known as a Gluhareff Pressure Jet Engine. It’s a uniquely clever and quirky device, burning liquid propane, with no moving parts and noisy as hell. It was invented by Eugene Gluhareff, someone Lazar knew while growing up in the San Fernando Valley. There are images and videos online of Lazar as a kid with a Gluhareff jet strapped to a bike, then a go-kart. Fun stuff! Magazines like Popular Science advertised plans for these jet engines for many years and they can still be found online with a little Googling.

From G8-2 Technical Handbook, 1985, by EMG Engineering

A problem arises when you read the Monitor article’s report of the claims Lazar made for the jet in his car. His claim it produced 1,600 pounds of thrust (deliberately derated down to 800 pounds) seems unlikely. The largest (and rarest) engine designed by Gluhareff, the G8-2-700 produced only 700 pounds of thrust, and was very large (see page 4 of the PDF on Gluhareff jets I linked to above for a sense of scale of the much smaller G8-2-130, which produced 130 pounds of thrust). Also, per Gluhareff’s own technical documentation, the G8-2-700 wasn’t designed until 1984, two years after Lazar arrived in Los Alamos. The jet car photos in the Monitor article show an engine roughly the size of a G8-2-130. As far as I’ve been able to determine, Gluhareff never designed anything with thrust as great as the 1,600 pounds that Lazar claimed his engine could attain.

Another measure of Lazar’s veracity is when he states it’s the most efficient jet engine available, using 1.3 pounds of propane for each pound of thrust it produces compared to 6 pounds of fuel for each pound of thrust with a regular jet engine. This is utter bullshit.

The values Lazar was tossing around are known as Thrust Specific Fuel Consumption (TSFC). From data on page 8 of the linked Gluhareff PDF it appears a G8-130 engine has a TSFC value of 1.33, so he hasn’t left reality there. However when you look up TSFC values for regular jet engines  you find they are typically WELL below 1.0 pounds of fuel for each pound of thrust, and lower numbers are better. Hell, the Concorde burned 1.195 pounds of fuel for each pound of thrust at Mach 2, so even that fuel hog was better than a Gluhareff jet. In fact, Gluhareff jets are notoriously inefficient but were considered to have potential in some situations due to their unique construction/operation.

So having beat this horse well beyond death, given all his misrepresentation/exaggeration of his jet car, is it any stretch to think he might claim to be a physicist at the lab when he wasn’t? Yeah, I didn’t think so either. OK, back to the story…..

In an amazing display of totally fucked synchronicity, the Los Alamos Monitor newspaper article came out on June 27, 1982 and the very next day Edward Teller was scheduled to give a lecture at Los Alamos. Had this not happened, I doubt there ever would have been a Lazar story. I gleefully accept that Lazar came upon Teller reading the paper and pointed out the story about Lazar and his jet car. Since the story identified Lazar as a “physicist” at the lab, I have no doubt Lazar chatted up Teller, again a master of low key self promotion, trying his best to impress Teller.

Let’s jump forward to 1985 when Lazar blew out of Los Alamos and relocated to Las Vegas. According to the bankruptcy papers Lazar filed on July 21, 1986 (BTW, 120 pages of amazeballs freely available to anyone who wants to pay, case BK 86-01623, US Federal Bankruptcy Court, Las Vegas), he stiffed people right and left before leaving Los Alamos, including family members.

Lazar putzed around Las Vegas for the next few years. I have information from good sources that during this time he worked very briefly at a Smokey Sam site as part of Nellis training exercises in the northern reaches of the Nellis Range. I suspect he had an inkling of what was going on at Groom as I was told Lazar made a number of overnight trips circumnavigating the Nellis Range during the period.

Eventually he discovered EG&G’s connection with Groom, and also Edward Teller’s connection with EG&G, so in 1988 he sent Teller a letter. “Hey, remember me, the Los Alamos jet car physicist? I have lots of experience in particle accelerators, since I worked at Los Alamos’s Technical Area 53, the Meson Physics Facility, which has an 800 MeV proton accelerator. Do you know of any interesting positions where I might be able to put that experience to use??”

Knowing Teller’s Strangelovian background, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for the man. But in this one case I feel for the guy. Like so many in Lazar’s sphere of influence, he was had. Maybe it was because he was 80 years old at the time and not as sharp, but perhaps he thought Lazar might be an excellent candidate for the proton beam project and made some calls. Things happened and Lazar gets called in for an interview. Catastrophes are seldom the result of a major, bad single decision, but usually a cascading series of unwise choices. Such was the case here.

Now it boggles my mind how someone with Lazar’s bankruptcy record would be granted any sort of clearance but perhaps it hadn’t been immediately unearthed. And maybe Teller passed on a crazy, glowing recommendation. And possibly Lazar had a previous Q clearance from Los Alamos. In any case, security guys visit Lazar’s home and check him out, they decide he’s their guy (at least for now), and he’s soon on a Janet flight to Groom on a very limited basis doing non-classified grunt work until his clearance is updated. In any case, if he didn’t already fully know, he does now that they’re operating a proton accelerator at Groom, and oh, BTW, they usually fire it up on Wednesday nights. Sounds like it’s time for a party to me!

Figuring out another’s motives is difficult, especially with Lazar. Specifically, I’m speaking of why the fuck, WHY(??) did he decide to bring his friends out to see a Wednesday night test? It could be that he realized his clearance was going to fall through due to the bankruptcy. Or perhaps it was an attempt to prank his friend John Lear, who Lazar often made fun of for his UFO interests. Or maybe Lazar just thought he was smarter than all those security guys at Groom and no one would ever know. Or it could have been something as simple as wanting to impress his friends. Dunno. But in any case, he brought them all out.

But here’s the important part…..Lazar never told his friends/family the truth, that they were seeing the effects of a proton beam. Lazar spun his crazy saucer story to them, in his mind thinking that as long as he wasn’t revealing what they were actually seeing, he wouldn’t be violating security (setting aside for the moment he was bringing visitors to observe classified tests). The people Lazar brought out to see the tests became his most ardent supporters and defenders, because, hell, he showed them flying saucers and called the days they’d show up. That’s pretty damn convincing. Alas, in a familiar pattern, they were played for fools. I suspect, but do not know, that some of this group may now know the truth. But they didn’t then.

So, April 5, 1989…..It all comes crashing down. Security discovers our little band of partiers and Lazar bolts into the desert. It’s starting to sink in that he could be in some serious shit. The Lincoln County Sheriff later questions the merry makers and lets them go, but they had Lazar’s ID and he knew word would quickly get back to Groom. Uh oh….he could be looking at serious jail time.

The next day Lazar is summoned to the Indian Springs airfield and the full force of the Groom security apparatus is directed at him. He now realizes how close to jail he is. His only defense is that he didn’t tell his comrades what they were actually seeing, but rather it was a made up story of flying saucers. This, of course, doesn’t go over well with the security guys, but they are somewhat stymied. Their choice is, do they prosecute this guy and draw further attention to Groom’s operations, or just kick him out and intimidate the hell out of him to get him to speak no further? I guess, in hindsight, they picked wrong.

Unbeknownst to the Groom guys, Lazar’s tale to his friends cast him as the hero against a hopelessly inefficient, secret government bureaucracy. Their rallying around him and support emboldened him, eventually granting interviews to KLAS due to John Lear’s urgings. Lazar also may have viewed that action as insurance, heightening his profile, should Groom security decide to come after him again. But it required him to fully double down on the alien saucer tale he had wove.

Not a bad gig, really. Some minor celebrity and attention, along with occasional paid interviews. And he maintains it to this day, because, well…he has to. It keeps him out of jail. I’m certain the Feds have a long memory when it comes to Lazar and would love to get even for him trashing Groom’s abilities to run secret operations.

So that’s what really went down, more or less. No saucers, just a really neat proton accelerator and a guy spinning a crazy story to stay out of jail. I’ve covered most of the waddabouts in the course of this way-too-long narrative, but I’ll address the leftovers.

Lazar could name security personnel because he interacted with them for his initial access to Groom and later when he was drummed out at Indian Springs.

As for poor old Ed Teller, I’m guessing flaming piles of shit came back to him for recommending Lazar to the Groom project. That would more than explain Teller’s infamous reaction when a TV interviewer directly asked him if he knew Bob Lazar. Well, he knew OF him, and no good came from it.

Lazar’s “outing” of S-4 was anything but. Clearly there’s nothing at Papoose Lake as a number of people have stated since. I know folks who have been there, including a helicopter pilot who landed on Papoose Lake. Hell, with a good spotting scope there are even several perches in the Mt. Charleston range which would give a clear view right into the hangar bay doors, if they existed (Not that I’d know anything about that). Yes, there IS a “Site-4” associated with the Tonopah Test Range, tasked primarily with radar issues and nowhere near Papoose. I wrote about the place years ago, and it was no secret, clearly displayed on maps John Lear would have likely had.

They W-2 form that Lazar claims just showed up one day in the mail may or may not be legit. It could have been forged, as some have argued to debunk  Lazar’s story. But it also could be real, representing Lazar’s few days of work at Groom. In any case, it doesn’t mean saucers exist at Papoose.

Many people claimed that Lazar had inside info about Element 115 before it was actually synthesized. Well, no. Lazar’s main claim about Element 115 was that it was stable, which amazed folks. But here’s the thing….that concept is really old news. I have a 1969 article from Scientific American with a cool 3D graph showing an “island of stability” around 114. This was also repeated in my undergrad physics textbook. But maybe most interesting is an article (“Creating Superheavy Elements” by Armbruster and Munzenberg) published in Scientific American again talking about a potential island of stability around 114. The article’s date? May 1989, the same month Lazar began his interviews with KLAS TV in Las Vegas. Yeah, probably just a coincidence.

Oh, and since we’re speaking of coincidences, I’m sure that’s the case with Lazar and his particle accelerators. When he first surfaced with his story in Las Vegas, media accounts of him were sure to mention that he had a particle accelerator in his bedroom, you know, ’cause that’s the mark of a true scientist. Later, after the Feds busted his operation in Edgewood, NM for selling controlled materials (and all the fascinating court documents are now online, Yay!), Wired magazine did a piece on Lazar in June of 2006. In it he has yet another particle accelerator which he says he uses to produce a compound for gaseous hydrogen storage. This is a pretty farfetched claim, as the ability to make useful quantities of the compound would take forever with an amateur particle accelerator. I wonder what he really might be using those accelerators for? Again, must be a coincidence.

Oh, and if you’re impressed that someone has their very own particle accelerator, well…you shouldn’t. Way back in the early 1960s Scientific American published an article on how to make a “homemade atom smasher”, AKA, particle accelerator. As a kid I lusted after that project, but its crux was the need to build a mercury diffusion pump (!!) to achieve the hard vacuum needed in the beam tube. Beyond the need for a hard vacuum (with pumps now available on eBay) the rest is trivial. But, you know, why? Unless you want to impress others and make plasma balls.

A last item for your consideration to assess Lazar’s veracity is his academic background. He claims Masters degrees from BOTH Caltech and MIT in subjects they don’t offer and during time periods he couldn’t have physically been at either campus. In response to questions at the “Ultimate UFO Seminar” in Rachael, NV in May of 1993, Lazar was so kind as to offer up the names of two of his instructors at Caltech and MIT, a “Dr. Duxler” as well as “Hohsfield”. He even spelled them. Stan Friedman told me he went searching for Duxler and no such person ever taught at Caltech or MIT. However he did find a William Duxler who taught Math and Physics at the previously mentioned Pierce College and confirmed to Friedman that Lazar had taken at least one of his courses in the 1970s.

As for finding Hohsfield, Friedman rolled snake eyes, beyond confirming no one by that name ever taught at Caltech or MIT. However did you know that in this amazing 21st Century you can buy reprints of all sorts of old high school yearbooks? Like, for example, the 1976 yearbook for W. Tresper Clarke High School? And if one were to do so, one would find that there was a Technical and Vocational teacher there by the name of Frederick Hohsfield. Looks like he was teaching electronics. Interesting, no?

I’ve never understood why Lazar clings to these imaginary Masters degrees when they have been so thoroughly proven to be lies. Lazar’s fans would easily accept an explanation of simple resume padding. But I have to grudgingly concede Lazar has some mighty huevos in the matter. I have read the probation report submitted to the court when Lazar was busted for pandering in Nevada in 1990. Under oath, to the probation agent preparing the report, Lazar continued to claim he had these degrees. Dude, you got some game!!

As for the saucer stories and the rest, that was just a story told to keep him out of jail, to which he must still firmly cling. So you have to ask yourself, am I going to believe a fantastic story told by someone with a well established record of exaggeration and deceit when there is a much more plausible explanation for the same events? And if Lazar’s story is false (which I KNOW is the case, although your mileage may vary) it then follows that individuals who have come forward after Lazar with claims of working at S-4, corroborating his story, are also lying. There, see how simple life can be when reason is applied rather than wanting things to be true?

Some will certainly dismiss all the above and say that I’m just a debunker or even an agent of the government (my favorite!) out to get Lazar. Far from it, I just happen to place a premium on truth and folks that waste other’s time annoy me. When I first heard Lazar’s story, many years ago, it sounded plausible. Thus I do have some empathy and understanding of those that have watched his interviews and were taken in by his story. He’s amazingly believable. It wasn’t until I actually starting looking into the details of his claims that I began to think he might not be telling the truth. Fun fact, my very first investigatory act was to spend time going through Caltech yearbooks to find a passing mention of him, as I actually expected him to be there. Surprise! He wasn’t there.

As for my beliefs, I happen to think that UFOs are a quite real phenomena. I’m not inclined to take any strong position on just precisely WHAT they are, but I’ve read too much and know too many well-connected individuals to dismiss them. And beyond that, I think it’s highly likely we are in possession of some sort of “stuff” from this phenomena from “crash recoveries” or whatever. Finally, I’m sure there are at least a few very dark government programs dealing with this sort of thing, but Lazar never worked for any of them.

To wrap this up, I’d like to leave you with a quote, reportedly straight from the mouth of Lazar, related to me by someone who once knew him:

“The more incredible the lie, the more people will believe it.“

Thus speaketh the Bob. On this one point, I guess I gotta agree with him.

Sorry about the legibility, but it’s about the best I can do. It looks like it might be a copy of a copy. Right click to download the full sized version.

Fun fact….In the center right part of the map is visible “Site IV Area”, which Lazar hijacked for his bullshit story. If you want to know more about the real Site 4, I wrote about it years ago on my old Bluefire website.

Map of the Tonapah Test Range, date unknown

Well, first of all I guess I need to explain what the hell “Bayesian” means, as it’s a big, weird word and is actually in the title of this post. It’s a statistical approach, named after Thomas Bayes, a mathematician who lived in the 1700s. It’s used in many areas, but I want to write about its use specifically in search operations.

Bayesian search theory  has been used for many years in ocean searches, especially by the U.S. Coast Guard. It’s only been in more recent times that computational capabilities have improved and become accessible enough that the technique is being applied to land searches. I’m far from an expert on this (the Ewasko work I’m reporting here WAS done by experts), but I’ll take a stab at explaining the basics. Those readers who know of this stuff will not be discouraged from snickering.

The process is all about creating an optimal search map based on the specifics of the case. Suppose you have a subject who went missing on a hike in a certain area. If the area is bounded by roads or other impassable topographical barriers, it’s then possible to put a firm boundary on the search area, no matter how large it may be. The base assumption here is that there’s a 100% chance the subject is within the established boundaries (theories of foul play or alien abduction notwithstanding).

The next step is to subdivide the search area into equally sized cells. Depending upon the type of search the cells could be as small as 50 meters square for a detailed land search or up to a kilometer square, or more, for an ocean search. But usually the cells are all the same size. Yeah, this could end up being a lot of cells, but what do we care if we have a computer doing the math?

Next, the total probability of 100% is divided by the number of cells to give the average probability of the subject being in any one cell. If you’re dealing with a large number of cells, then that’s a pretty small probability for each one, isn’t it? But here’s where things get interesting.

While all cells start out as being equally sized, they are far from equal. Each cell has a set of attributes, unique to that cell, which can greatly modify the actual probability of the subject being in that cell. And by using each cell’s attributes to adjust its base probability it can provide a more realistic probability of the subject being in that cell.

An example……Consider the distance from any one cell to the subject’s last known point (LKP). The chance that a subject might be in a cell at the very perimeter of the search area is likely much lower than the chance the subject is in a cell much closer to the LKP. So a probability factor can be developed for each cell based upon distance from the LKP. Whether that factor is linear, exponential or even Gaussian (a bell curvy thing) doesn’t matter so much as there IS a factor.

Another example might be a factor allowing for proximity to hiking trails in the search area. Assuming the trails within the search area get reasonable hiker traffic, perhaps the further from a hiking trail, the higher the factor. Or perhaps based upon typical lost person behavior in the search area, maybe the factor would be highest at, say, a mile away from the nearest trail (assuming lost people don’t usually stray much further than that), before it starts dropping off. But an interesting aspect of this factor would be that the assigned probability of any cell directly on a trail would be zero because other hikers on the trail would have come across the missing subject. So some cells can be zeroed out and not require searching.

Depending upon the nature of the search area and the specific circumstances of the case, it’s possible to come up with a number of probability factors for different attributes. These factors can either increase or decrease the likelihood the missing person will be in a particular search cell. In addition to the two factors already mentioned, other possibilities could include terrain steepness, elevation change from the LKP, brush/tree coverage (i.e., visibility), even distance from cell phone coverage zones if the subject was known to have been carrying a cell phone.

Once a SAR analyst is happy with the factors selected, each search cell has its different factors multiplied together to give a total probability factor for that specific cell. Some cells, like those on a well used hiking trail, may end up having probability factors of zero. In any case, that 100 percent probability of the subject being within the search area is now redistributed to all the cells based on their different factor probabilities. If you add up these adjusted probabilities of every cell within the search area, it should total 100%. Granted, the probability of any individual cell again may be quite small, but relatively, they tell the searchers where to look first.

OK, this is kind of obvious, right? Most experienced SAR people can look at a map and based upon their experience know where to look first. But where do you look second, third or even tenth? That’s where this Bayesian stuff starts to rock.

So let’s say the first day of searching has concluded and the subject is still missing. Once the incident command post has all the searchers’ GPS tracks for the day, the search manager can then enter them into a computer and adjust the Bayesian model. In essence, with the searchers having passed through a number of cells and clearing them, it can be said with some certainty that those cells now have a probability of zero. In practice, it’s a bit trickier than that, as a searcher’s Probability of Detection falls off with distance from the centerline of a searcher’s travel. In some cases, the ground may be visible for a hundred feet on each side, and in others perhaps only twenty feet. Ummm…see where a terrain steepness factor might be useful?

So after the first day of searching with this new (and any other) information in hand, the computer rebalances the probabilities for each cell. The accepted search area must still equal 100 percent, but now many cells have had their probabilities diminished or reduced to zero by the searchers passing through them. The probability rebalancing thus raises the probabilities in the remaining cells and tells the searchers where the next best odds are. Lather, rinse and repeat until the subject is found.

So all that blathering is a very rudimentary explanation of how Bayesian techniques can be used in SAR. But what, you ask (and I can hear you asking), does this have to do with Ewasko? Ahem…

Some time ago I was contacted by a GIS specialist by the name of Lorie Velarde (AKA the GIS Queen) with the City of Irvine Police Department who came across my Ewasko postings and thought it might be “fun” to play around with the case from a GIS viewpoint. I cannot explain such inclinations, I can only exploit them. Bayesian techniques, while I understand them and can spell the name, are well above my pay grade. Apparently not so for Lorie and her contacts. So she was interested in tackling the Ewasko incident to see if she could create a mapping of likely spots Ewasko may have ended up.

To this end Lorie enlisted the help of Dr. Kim Rossmo of Texas State University who has used Bayesian techniques for criminology purposes. Dr. Rossmo developed the probability factors involved for this simplified Ewasko model. Taking the factor data, Lorie used ArcGIS to create a little over 300,000, 100-square-foot cells and produced a probability model she was able to export as a kmz file for Google Earth. The area used to apply Bayesian techniques to is shown below.

The assumed boundaries for this Bayesian analysis are shown in dark blue. They follow roads and major discontinuities in terrain. The base assumption is there’s a 100 percent probability (or pretty damn close) that Ewasko is within this area. We just don’t know where. Yet.

Notice I used the term, “simplified Ewasko model”? in this case there were only three probability terms:

• Distance from the 10.6 mile Serin tower cell ping. The further a cell was from the recorded Verizon 10.6 mile distance, the lower its probability factor.

Probabilities used for a cell’s distance from the 10.6 mile Serin cell tower distance. Probabilities were calculated at 0.1 mile intervals using an Excel spreadsheet.

• Whether or not there was cell phone coverage in all or part of a cell. If Verizon cell coverage exists, from an ArcGIS generated splash map of the Serin Tower, covered part of a cell, the probability was adjusted proportionally. The tower was assumed to be 200′ tall (about twice actual), which would show up fringe areas in the splash map.

• If searchers (during the original search or anytime after) passed through all or part of a cell. The factoring assumed a searcher’s line of sight would be good for 50 feet on each side of the recorded GPS track. Anything within this 100 foot swath was assigned a probability of zero. If a search happened up the middle of a 100 foot square cell, the entire cell went to zero. Otherwise the probability was factored proportionally.

Now a few caveats/disclaimers/weaseliness are in order here. The first is while there are a lot of other factors that could have been used, for simplicity and reliability these were selected. They were somewhat championed by moi, and as a result reflect my previously stated prejudices as to what I think are important clues. I’ll freely concede it could be garbage in-garbage out, but if it is, it’s no fault of Lorie or Dr. Rossmo.

Finally, in a traditional Bayesian analysis, the probabilities get readjusted after additional searches take place or new data comes to light. That hasn’t been done here, but rather represents a snapshot in time after the JT88 search of April 19, 2017, and also the portions of the Orbeso/Nguyen search that occurred in potential Ewasko areas in August of 2017 However, future searches could be incorporated into this model and lead to additional adjustments.

So with all that blathering out of the way, below you’ll find a screen grab of Google Earth showing the relative probabilities of unsearched areas You can download the kmz file and play with it yourself in Google Earth by grabbing it from here.

Final probabilities after Bayesian analysis. The redder the higher the probability, bluer the less. Empty areas between spots (cells) may be due to searchers having passed through. The yellow arc is the 10 mile Serin tower radius, blue is 10.6 miles and orange is 11.1 miles.

Is this truly an accurate representation of the best places left to look? Probably (pun intended, of course!) However I’ve spent enough time wandering out in Joshua Tree to retain some skepticism. Also, the model is rather simplistic and could be improved with the additional of more probability factors. But at worse it offers up some new ideas about where to look, and as many know, I’m flat out of ideas. And at best, maybe Bill’s resting in one of the colored squares. Either way, we’re indebted to Lorie and Dr. Rossmo for their work on this and I extend my thanks to them.

The reason for my radio silence is that over the past 6 months or so, Jeri and I sold our place in SoCal and relocated to the wilds of New Mexico. “Relocated” as in selling one house, buying another and managing the move without a host of “people”. For a variety of reasons, it turned out to be far more of a pain in the butt than we had imagined in our wildest dreams, and so was the stress.

Ummm…Why the hell New Mexico??

A lot of reasons, but really a combination of push and pull. The town we lived in for many years, Irvine, is a wonderful place on many levels. So wonderful that it’s being loved to death by all the new development. Anyone with kids wants to get them in to that damn school system. Since we’d been traveling rather extensively the past few years, we really hadn’t noticed the marked changes around us. But since we decided to slow it down, we started looking around and said “Wow!”

Of course that problem is not unique to Irvine, but is true for much of SoCal. Readers of this site know that I’m all about adventuring, but it’s just getting harder and harder to do because of the regional traffic increase. For example, should I want to head out to Joshua Tree National Park (can’t imagine why), I’d have to get up just after 5 AM and be sure and get on the road well before 6:00 if I wanted to avoid getting stuck in traffic! That’s earlier than I’d get up when I went to work, and I hated that. All the development in the loftily named “Inland Empire” has created a barrier of traffic I’d have to fight to get through if I wanted to go anywhere fun. As a result, many things just weren’t worth it any more. And what’s the point in living that sort of life?

Too many people and too many cars are just beating the shit out of Southern California.

But why New Mexico? Aren’t there so many other more reasonable places to relocate? Who has ever heard of anyone retiring to New Mexico? Ummm…Exactly.

My first experiences with New Mexico were while attending scientific conferences in Albuquerque in the late 1990s. Turned out to be an interesting place. And relatives in Santa Fe caused Jeri and I to visit numerous times. This culminated in our renting an apartment in Albuquerque around 2012 where we spent much of a year to see if we liked it. We did, but weren’t ready to make a move at that time.

It was during this period as semi-residents, that we really “got” New Mexico. There are some many subtleties to this state that don’t present themselves to someone just vacationing. You actually have to be here, quietly observing, to see all the neat stuff going on and the nature of the people.

Now I could literally go on for pages about the attractive points of this state, but here’s a brief outline:

The food is beyond amazing! Things like carne adovada, green chile cheeseburgers (!!) green chile stew and sopapillas. There is a vast difference between Mexican food and New Mexican. If you like Mexican (and we do), you’ll love New Mexican cuisine. And it’s next to impossible to get real New Mexican cooking outside the state. A corollary to this is that chile is a REALLY big deal, and you do get addicted to it.

So much of this state is more than it appears. For example when we stayed in the apartment for a year, I was surprised to find not only bike shops all over the place, but there was a large system of bike trails, both on and off road. And all these people were out riding or running. Turns out Albuquerque has a vast park system with more park land per capita than Irvine or even Portland. Hell, this place even has a zoo, an aquarium and a damn good botanic park. And the annual Balloon Fiesta is an amazing full-on Rose Parade-level event.

In terms of access to doing fun shit, it’s just overwhelming. We can leave for anywhere just about any time of the day and there’s no traffic problem. And anyone reading my older archaeology posts while we were here last can sample a taste of what’s out there: Thousand year old Anasazi ruins and bits of equally ancient pottery everywhere. Not to mention the places I won’t write about.

And we really like the vibe the state has to offer. It’s very understated. It’s a great mix of both liberal and conservative viewpoints and lacking the political polarization that’s developed in many other places. Everybody just seems to get along (and they truly are damn nice people). Maybe some of it is having a part time legislature that only meets once a year in January. Cool.

As I said, people here are so much more polite and relaxed versus what we were used to in SoCal. About the only thing that really annoys them are Texans, who have “discovered” New Mexico, toss money around madly and engage in generally boorish behavior. Oh, and there was a time in New Mexico’s distant past where they were actually under the jurisdiction of Texas and never got over it.

Seriously, if you could pick up the states of Arizona and New Mexico, and flip locations, it would make all parties involved so much happier. New Mexico has much more in common with California and would enjoy the distance from all those Texans. And Arizona, perennially a Texas wannabe, could have its wet dreams come true. If I’ve said anything to offend either Texans or Arizonans….well…that was my point.

Of course if Jeri and I want to head out for fun, we really don’t have to drive. We can walk out of our front door, and a quarter mile down the street we’re on dirt trails leading into the Sandia Mountains, which are just amazing. The trail system in just the Sandias alone, and there are many other mountain ranges around here, are the equal or exceed anything found in SoCal. And with VERY few people on them. Jeri usually gets in over an hour hike every day, with any combination of trails.

As I write this I can lean back in my chair and look out my computer room window at a stunning view of the Sandias. Maybe later Jeri and I will head to the deck on the other side of the house and watch the sun set near Mount Taylor, almost 65 miles away, after which we’ll see the city lights start twinkling on in the valley about a thousand feet below us. Not a bad life.

So….adventures ahead! (But first, we need to go out to eat….)

The view out the computer room of the Sandia Mountains. That crest at well over 10,000′ is about 4,000′ above us, with trails reaching from our place all the way to the top, and everywhere in between. We can get as stupid as we want!

Date: April 1, 2018

Participant: Bret Lamb

General Search Area: Major drainage southerly of Eureka Peak and westerly of Upper Covington Flats

Rationale for Search:
Trying to think outside of the box on this one. The geometry of this canyon is close to being a radial line on the 10.6 mile circle, with Serin Drive Tower being at the center. Perhaps this could have allowed for a cloud to have reflected a signal down into this area. Also this area is seldom, if ever, visited, not near a trail, and completely unexpected for Bill to be in. Check, check, and check. The only problem is there’s absolutely no reason for Bill to have ended up here. As Tom’s mentioned before, Bill would have to fight against the terrain to get here. That being said, this canyon has long been a pet theory of mine that I want to finally put to bed.

Impressions of Area and Findings:
My plan was to start into the canyon from the north so I could explore more terrain that was on the nearer side of the ping radius, and only go about a half mile past the ping radius since the margin of error for the ping’s distance is more generous on being nearer to Serin.

Hiking in this area you quickly understand why the topography is so extreme. The earth gives way under your feet on just about every step down these steep canyon walls. Driving my trekking poles into the ground to gain some purchase wasn’t very helpful either; the sand swallowing up about one foot of pole. Even the slabs of rock jutting out of the canyon walls that look like solid granite crumble into huge chunks with the slightest pressure. It was hard not to trigger multiple slides of water-like flows of sand and rock.

Steep and quite treacherous descent down into the canyon.

Once I got down to the bottom of the canyon the hiking got much easier, dare I say pleasant, and the scenery was actually quite beautiful. If it weren’t so difficult to get here I wouldn’t mind returning for a leisurely stroll. This area is also extremely isolated, which is quite nice, to my liking anyway. The only signs of humanity were an old prospectors food can and about 8 or 9 Mylar balloons strewn throughout the canyon.

View from the main canyon bottom looking NNW. The saddle in the left third of the picture more or less lines up with Serin tower.

One of many mylar balloons collected on this hike.

Old food can.

I climbed up a small ridge that was just about on the 10.6 mile radius, and scoped out the area with some binoculars. I was able to scan the entire canyon floor from there. I spotted what looked like a bleached white bone propped up against a yucca. I trudged over to it, and found it was merely a dead leaf of the yucca that had turned white and was drooping.

View from the top of a small hill on the Westerly side of the canyon around the 10.6 mile ping radius.

I continued up to and past the ping radius for half a mile, finding nothing. I turned around and on the way back decided to check out a couple of interesting looking side canyons.

My exit out of this area was much better than my entry. I gained a good amount of elevation via pretty gradual drainage that had one 10 foot dry fall thrown in to keep it interesting. Once the drainage dead ended I climbed up out of it onto a steep ridge, but being pretty well vegetated, the earth was much more stable to hike on.

Found an easier way out. Still not easy, but easier. The main drainage continues off in the distance down to Desert Hot Springs.

Coverage level:

Very good. The canyon bottom is fairly narrow, so if there was something to be found down there, I would have seen it.

Comments:

This hike was very successful for me in that I can unequivocally put to bed my harebrained theory Bill could have ended up here. I think it’s safe to say that this is my first and last foray into this area of the park.

I’m currently leaning back to the idea that the Bill is somewhere between Smith Water Canyon and Quail Mountain and that maybe 10.6 miles should be taken with a grain of salt. There is still a lot of unsearched land (compared to SWC) in the hills NW of Quail Mountain, perhaps 11 to 13 miles from the Serin tower, that is also hard to get to, sees little traffic, is close to cell coverage areas, and a much more likely place for Bill to have ended up. Some of this unsearched area also includes some drainages where debris from Bill may have collected.

GPS Mileage for this trip: 7.2 miles

Cumulative GPS mileage to date: 987.9 miles

GPS tracks for this trip in Google Earth kml format

GPS tracks for this trip in Garmin gdb format

GPS tracks for this trip in gpx format

JT89 GPS tracks are shown in dark blue. Tracks from the original search are shown in black and searches since then are shown in red. The light blue line is the 10.6 mile radius from the Serin Drive cell tower, the yellow line the 10.0 mile radius and the orange line the 11.1 radius.

Ahem….Let’s begin..

When I was a kid, I loved any sort of lost mine or treasure story. Practically speaking, I never had the chance to go look for anything good, but I enjoyed at least reading about the subject.

Keeping this personality defect in mind, while in college I ended up working with an older guy who told me a pretty good story. When he was young, he’d gone hiking up the East Fork of the San Gabriel River, in the San Gabriel Mountains with members of his family. One time, he related, far up the river they came upon an old cabin. He said it was in excellent condition, like the owner just left. There were still furnishings and stuff hanging on the walls. But it was definitely abandoned.

Now this definitely got my attention, even though at the time I had no idea exactly where the East Fork of the San Gabriel River was. I peppered him with questions, and due to the number of years since that hike, his memory was a bit vague. He thought it was up as far as Fish Fork, but maybe between Iron Fork and Fish Fork (I’m offering these local landmarks only for those familiar with the region….everyone else can ignore them.)

This, combined with a fascinating story of a lost mine “somewhere in the vicinity of Mount Baldy” published at the time, launched me on a multi-year exploration of the area. Several trips pushing up as far as Fish Fork, about 7 miles upstream, and finding nada, indicated this might end up being more of a challenge than I expected. A blueprint for my later life.

Keep in mind that there was no GPS system in the mid-1970s. Best you could do was a good topo map, and possibly a compass. But I got good enough with topo maps I seldom bothered with compasses. And so much more awful than that, there was no Internet. If you wanted to do research, you had to go to assorted libraries, and it was HARD. I think it involved walking through snow to get there, also.

During this exploration period I first became aware of the writings of John W. Robinson, a historian of the San Gabriel Mountains. In his book on the San Gabriel Mountains he had a section on the East Fork region I was exploring (and later he did an entire book on it), so this was just dumping gas on the fire for me.

Well, hey! My topo maps showed many of the mines Robinson mentioned, some high above the very stream I had been exploring. In particular, I locked on the Stanley-Miller Mine, which appeared to be located disturbingly high above the canyon bottom near Iron Fork, an area I knew all too well. How ’bout I just pop back up the East Fork, find some of these old trails shown on my USGS topo maps, and visit the Stanley-Miller? Thus launched what turned out to be a two year saga of misery to find the damn bastard.

My primary failing in this effort was thinking I could locate and use one of the very old trails shown on my topos to access the mine. I knew the trails might still be there as I used one on the opposite canyon wall to return from one of my Iron Fork/Fish Fork explorations, worth a minor digression.

I had become sick of all the stream crossings required for travel in the canyon bottom, so I thought I’d try an old, high trail shown on my maps that started at Iron Fork and headed downstream. Unfortunately, I quickly found the trail, and while overgrown, seemed doable, so off I went.

This all seemed pretty good to me until I reached a washed out portion of the trail, with the East Fork looming hundreds of feet below. I could see the trail continued beyond the washout, and only offering up the excuse of my youth, thought it would be just fine to work my way across it.

So I’m about halfway across, pretty much spread-eagled with a view between my legs of the East Fork far below, when it occurred to me this might not have been a wise choice. In the past, in situations where I could have done myself real damage, I really wasn’t concerned. However I was now somewhat of a newlywed, and for the first time it hit me that someone else might have some big concerns over my stupid activities. Those sort of thoughts floating around in my head certainly didn’t help with my anxiety level, but I took a deep breath and made it to the other side. (In hindsight I realize it was just the first pangs of what’s called “maturity”, but at the time it was annoying as hell. I am a very late bloomer.) Eventually I was able to descend downstream of the bridge to nowhere and kissed the ground. But because of that misadventure I knew the old trails might still exist.

I became rather fixated on hooking up with these old trails heading toward the Stanley-Miller and made a number of fruitless trips. That was how I first stumbled upon the Allison Mine, from which a trail at one time continued on to the Stanley-Miller. I really didn’t care about the Allison though….I wanted the Stanley-Miller!

Skunked at every attempt, as a last resort in 1975 I finally just decided to do the 6 mile hike up the East Fork and attempt to scale the slopes for a thousand feet or more. I’d been hesitant to try this previously as the slope looked pretty damn steep, and this newlywed-maturity bullshit was cramping my style.

In a bit of irony, the morning of that hike I ran into a ranger at the trailhead and took the opportunity to quiz him about the mine. “Oh, the Stanley-Miller? There’s nothing there anymore. That’s long gone”. Well, crap.

As an aside, the ranger did suggest an interesting alternative. He related that at one time there were plans to build some sort of power generation facility, possibly a dam, high in the canyons westerly of the Narrows, and that if you found the right spot there were still old boxes of insulators stashed. I dismissed it as the terrain was really nasty and I generally found it an uninteresting target, but in later years did come upon land records identifying several full sections identified as a “power line withdrawal”. The withdrawal was later rescinded and the land returned to the forest service. But enough of these digressions.

I charged up East Fork and reached Iron Fork with minimal effort. Sadly, I was getting good at this. I picked the most likely line up a scree slope on the east slope and just started climbing. It turned out not nearly as bad as I had expected, not that it was easy.

What did creep me out on my ascent, for a couple reasons, was the herd of about 8 bighorn sheep I rousted. They stayed about 50 feet above me for much of the climb, giving me a pretty extreme stinkeye. With them having lambs present, I was worried about these rather big suckers charging. Also, given the relative rarity of bighorn sheep at that time, to me it was always a good indicator that I was in the middle of bumfuck nowhere and subject to getting myself into deep crap should anything go wrong. Wunnerful.

But after 45 minutes of climbing, none of that mattered. I came upon a rusted can! Since junk usually heads downhill, it was the first sign in two years that I might be getting close. This was underscored as the junk started showing up more often.

I saw a few trees above me and angled in that direction. All of a sudden I crested on to a flat pad with rock walls and a chimney! Finally made it.

Looking around the cabin area there were just piles and piles of interesting “stuff”. Clearly a few others had been there before me as things had been placed on rock walls, perhaps for pictures. But there was plenty to be found (I suspect today, with the mine’s considerable footprint on the Internet, anything carryable is gone)..

At the Stanley-Miller Mine in 1975. Yes, I still look exactly like that. Note high tech green water bottle. I have no idea why I loved it so, it always tasted of plastic.

A small sample of all the stuff at the cabin. I didn’t place these there, someone earlier did.

Even more stuff on a wood burning stove. Knowing human nature, I’d bet this is all gone, except maybe the stove. Hell, maybe even that!

I probably stayed for less than 30 minutes before heading back down. I had got a late start and wanted to be back at the car by nightfall, with along hike ahead. It was also one of the remotest areas I had been into solo, at that point, and with the creepiness of the ascent I wanted the hell outta there. I’m a bit embarrassed to admit I managed to completely miss the mine and all its equipment, located several hundred feet away. It didn’t occur to me to look beyond the close proximity of the cabin. Duh!

After that, I had no burning desire to return to the Stanley-Miller, but then a couple years later a foolish friend thought it would be “fun” and we did it. We finally found the very cool mine and all the neat machinery. There was a large diameter iron pipe, running down the slope that apparently brought water to run the milling equipment. We followed it a bit, but that damn thing just kept heading up the slope out of sight. Since we were doing this as a day trip, we didn’t have the energy to spare to chase the pipe up the hill.

The pipe mystery was solved a few years later with a couple of friends. It was clear doing it as a day hike left little time or energy to explore it properly, so we decided to overnight at the bottom, near Iron Fork, and do the climb to the mine fresh in the morning. This time we did follow the pipe up, and that sucker went a full thousand feet higher! They had some serious water pressure. At the top of the pipe’s upper end, it joined a rock flume we followed a few hundred yards until it stopped at a ravine, apparently the mine’s water source. Looked in surprisingly good shape at the time. Oh, and the reason I know the height the pipe gained is that if you know just where to look, you can see it in Google Earth. Google Earth spoils so many mysteries…..

I think my last trip to the Stanley-Miller was a day trip with a friend in 1987, and that’s been it. I learn from my mistakes.

So with all that contextual nonsense out of the way, let’s return to the present, shall we?

I’ve been working on a number of projects lately requiring the use of old aerial photos, and I stumbled upon a new, unfamiliar source, the UC Santa Barbara library. I found some very useful images from 1928 for what I was interested in, and then I started to look around at their other holdings, looking up my old haunts.

Poking around up East Fork there clearly were what appeared to be structures in the vicinity of the Stanley-Miller, but they seemed to be too close horizontally to the canyon bottom. However, once I had a chance to look at the site in Google Earth, I remembered just how steep the slope was. Those were indeed the Stanley-Miller structures.

The image also shows the many trails that provided access to the mine, the object of my old, fruitless quests. Further, I could trace the “high trail” that ran to the Allison Mine. Turning to Google Earth, it was possible to see that at least some portions of this mysterious route still exist. While I admit to twitching a bit, that high trail is some serious shit and not something I’d risk today. You know…..maturity and all.

Anyway, my apologies to those of you that have waded through all this preamble. Here’s the pic of the Stanley-Miller Mine area in 1928:

Aerial photo of the East Fork of the San Gabriel River showing the Stanley-Miller Mine in 1928. Note all the old trails are visible. (Courtesy of the UC Santa Barbara Library)

I’m getting too old for this shit. Or at the very least I should know better at this point in my life.

Once I started getting into the GPS on Benchmarks program and discovered no surveyor had visited or checked the position of the Antonio benchmark since 1951, I knew I was doomed to do so. I dearly wanted my first visit to the site of Michelson’s Lookout Mountain station to be my last, beyond a visit via drone for pics from a paved road 2 miles away. Not only would I have to haul my sorry ass up to the top, I’d have to bring along a crapload of GPS survey gear, including a tripod that would have to sit on the benchmark for at least four hours.

The Antonio benchmark

And that sitting on the benchmark deal was a bit of a problem. I knew from Pease’s original drawings for the facility that the top of the concrete pier the Antonio benchmark was set in was only 16” square. And it was about 3-1/2 feet high. My saucer shaped GPS antenna sits on top of a 2 meter pole, whose bottom point sits in the dimple in the center of the benchmark. The antenna pole is held upright and plumb by an adjustable leg bipod. This meant that with the antenna pole in the center of the pier, on the Antonio benchmark, I’d only be able to spread the bipod legs 11 inches open. And it would have to be stable in the event of wind, and not fall over during the four hour minimum measurement period.

Hmmmm…So just how does one balance a two meter tall GPS on a 16″ square concrete pier? It falling off could be…..expensive.

I made a mockup on my garage floor and found a possible solution. If I took a couple of aluminum “L” channels and cinched them to the top of the concrete pier with webbing, they’d form corners to hold the bipod legs in place. I could then use stuff sacks filled with rocks to weigh down the entire, precarious setup. It just might work. But the planning junk was the easy part. I still had to get it all up there.

I knew from my previous experience there were three routes up to the top of Lookout Mountain and were listed by the Hundred Peaks Section of the Sierra Club. The route I originally took was a steep sucker, but it was a known quantity, with 2,300′ of gain in only 1.9 miles. However there was some hinkiness about it, with it crossing private property on its initial portion that made me uncomfortable. When I did my original trip there was some sort of “permission slip” from the owner that could be printed out online, which I did. However ownership had changed and there didn’t appear to be a way to obtain clear legal permission. Checking with the ranger station in Baldy Village failed to clear up the route’s legal status. Not being the sort that likes to trespass (or at least unburdened enough to be stealthy!), I looked at my other two options.

One, via Bear Flat was easily dismissed for being too many miles (2,800′ gain over 5 miles). I ain’t hiking that far. But there was an interesting middle route that intrigued me. It started the same as the Bear Flat route, from near the Baldy Village ranger station, then left it and ascended up a ravine to join the route I had used previously. At the time I recall seeing what looked like an old trail descending to Baldy Village, which would have been this route. At only 2 miles to the top, with a 2,600′ gain, compared to my original route it shouldn’t be any worse, and perhaps even better. It looked interesting, and well……how hard could it be?

My route up/down Lookout Mountain is shown in red. The route use for my first trip up is shown in violet. The route via Bear Flat is shown in cyan.

Since I wanted to do this only once, and wanted it as accurate as possible, I initially considered doing it as an overnight trip and leaving my GPS rig up and running during the night. This would provide a longer measurement period, thus increasing accuracy. Further, the measurement would be taken when the ionosphere is much quieter, further improving accuracy. However I was very wary of hauling all the gear required to do the GPS measurements as well as normal camping gear. So when I discovered I could get sub-centimeter accuracy with a good satellite sky view and a long enough data gathering period, I ditched the overnight idea. Good thing.

My plan was to get up stupidly early to arrive and park at the Baldy Village ranger station just as it became light. I also needed a time when it wasn’t forecast to be too windy since I wasn’t overly confident in my rig’s stability on the pier. Between that and other stuff going on in my life, October 9, 2017 seemed like the day (Turned out this was one day off from the nine year anniversary of my first trip up Lookout Mountain). I left the truck at the ranger station just as it was getting light, per plan.

The route I chose had three basic components. The first section was along a paved road serving some cabins, then a short distance along the trail to Bear Flat. At a certain point I’d need to leave the trail and ascend a “route” to a saddle where I’d join a small but obvious use trail I had used on my first trip up Lookout Mountain. Pretty easy to understand and follow. And it was only two miles. Yeah….

Despite my heavy load, the part on the trail wasn’t bad and I motored along marveling at the number of cabins tucked away in the canyon. For some reason, I had it in my head my turnoff to the route portion was after I got past the cabins. What can I say…..sometimes the voices I hear are wrong.

It wasn’t until I was disturbingly high on the trail, well past the last of the cabins, that it occurred to me that just maybe, sorta I should have been headed toward that saddle I could see way across on the opposite side of the canyon. Oh shit.

I whipped out my GPS, and sure enough I had blown right past my turnoff which was now some distance below me. Stupid, stupid, stupid. To add injury to insult, I could see the ravine I needed to ascend opposite me, and I had climbed at least half that height already. Which I now needed to descend and climb for reals. I briefly considered continuing on via Bear Flats but I knew there were some off trail portions for that route and I didn’t have the specific info with me. So back down I went.

By the time I got back down and started up the ravine route, I figured I had lost “only” 45 minutes. Not too bad. I should be able to reclimb quickly. Uh, no.

Between the load in my pack, and carrying the pole/bipod sack, this route was a nightmare. My only consolation was that I was following a GPS track that had been posted for the route so I didn’t get stuck in the brush. But the steepness was kicking my ass and since it was now warmer than when I had first departed I was starting to burn into the 3 1/2 liters of water I assumed would be sufficient.

Eventually, I stumbled up on to the saddle where I joined the route I had used on my first Lookout Mountain trip nine years earlier. Now maybe I was fitter then, and definitely carrying less weight, but damn, I don’t remember this use trail as being that steep. There was sorta a trail, and I kept to it as best I could. However I was stopping to rest far more than I should have and was rapidly running out of energy.

Based upon the projected numbers of GPS satellites in view for highest accuracy, my original plan was to start data gathering around 9:20 AM and continue as long as I could but ensuring a return to the truck by sunset, which would be 6:24 PM. Well, I didn’t even reach the site until 11:15 AM, a damn four stinkin’ hours after leaving the truck. Rather than having a leisurely time to do my equipment setup, I raced to get it all up and working and got it going in only about 10 minutes.

It ain’t pretty, but it worked. The stuff sacks contain rocks to weigh the bipod down and help keep it in place without moving in the wind. When you’re measuring down to a few millimeters, you don’t want ANY movement.

Using webbing to hold aluminum angle pieces at the corners provides a retention to ensure the bipod legs don’t go flying.

Right in the dimple in the benchmark.

That accomplished, I retreated to the shade of a large bush to take stock of the situation. I knew I needed a minimum of at least four hours of data gathering for submission to the National Geodetic Survey (NGS) and thus enshrine myself into the Antonio benchmark’s data sheet for all eternity. Such is the price of fame. But the longer I left it running beyond that, the more accurate the resulting measurement should be. However I had to be down by dark, and there was the little matter of the amount of water I had burned through. It was comfortable in the shade, but I decided to wear long pants and a long sleeved shirt for protection which increased my perspiration and water burn rate.

My one luxury was a lightweight REI folding chair so I sat in the shade and did the math. I could see Baldy Village below me and it seemed deceptively close (this is how people get into trouble). I felt 4:30 PM was a reasonable “must leave by” time to reach the truck by sunset. I was troubled by the unexpected level to which I was exhausted, which probably would have been eased had I gulped down the bulk of my water. Which I couldn’t. I decided to ration my water while I kept quiet, reading under a tree, leaving one liter for the start of my descent. Granted I was the only one requiring I be there, and I could leave at any time, and it was only about two stinkin’ miles back to my truck, but for the first time in recent memory things felt a little sketchy and vulnerable. Did not like. It’s a series of mistakes and bad decisions like these that get people into trouble, and I should know that better than most. Or maybe it was just me knowing that generated my misgivings.

An overall view of what’s left of Michelson’s Lookout Mountain site with my GPS rig on top the pier with the Antonio benchmark.

Picture taken from the easterly pier, where Michelson’s mirror had been located, looking back towards Mount Wilson. The white observatory domes are just visible on the ridgeline to the left of the center pole. That’s 22 miles distant.

Anyway, come 4:15 PM I had everything staged and ready for quick disassembly and packing. At 4:25 I had just over five hours of data and deemed it good enough, stuffed everything into my pack and got the hell off the mountain. I drank half my remaining liter of water and started down with my headlamp already in my pocket, ‘cause, you know, just in case.

Part of my nervousness about the descent was I was heading down a different route to the saddle than my ascent. The GPS track I was using as guidance showed the route running up the spine from the saddle to the peak, something I couldn’t have done with my load, hence using the crappy, but more gradual, old use trail. I figured descent would be a simpler matter, but I didn’t really know the condition of that route. Turned out to be somewhat challenging, considering my low energy level, and I was ready to kiss the ground when I finally reached the saddle. But it saved me time over descending via the use trail.

I had guessed it would have taken me 30 minutes to reach the saddle but it was a little over 40. Still looked like I’d make it out by dark, or at least off the damnable ravine route in front of me. Since my GPS showed my route on the ascent, I just tried to stay with it on my way back down. I was pretty beat and stupid and managed to fall a few times. Fortunately the area was covered by oak leaf litter so the worst of it was I just looked stupid. And since there was no one around to see me, then I guess they really didn’t happen (Hey, I don’t make up these rules!)

It wasn’t until I had reached the paved road and the cabins that I could unclench. I made it back to the truck at 6:15 PM, where I had a number of cold drinks waiting in an ice chest. Cheated death again, but not by as much as I would have liked.

Three dumb-ass things I did I will not forget on future excursions:

1. Took a heavy load on an unfamiliar route with self-imposed time constraints.
2. Was overconfident on such a “simple” route and missed the turnoff, wasting time, energy and water.
3. Only brought enough water for a best case hike, and my decisions/mistakes made it anything but.

So, to the point of it all…….what about the data?

The way the data processing works with the NGS is that they match submitted GPS data against data they have from nearby fixed data acquisition stations, which allows the submitted data to be corrected for atmospheric and satellite errors. They get quick and dirty correction data in a day or so, pretty good corrections in two days, and their final corrections in about two weeks. Since there was no way in hell I was ever doing that hike again, I waited until the best satellite data was available. It was worth it.

Based upon the final satellite data my Longitudinal error was 7 mm and my Latitude error was 9 mm. Vertical is typically never as good as horizontal, but it still came in at 12 mm. So, an overall error box significantly smaller than a sugar cube. Here’s a link to the datasheet itself.

An obvious complement to this measurement would be to obtain permission from the Mount Wilson Observatory to do a similar measurement at the Michelson benchmark on the observatory’s grounds. This would allow for an interesting comparison of the distance between the two points as surveyed and calculated in 1923.

Unfortunately, the original site of Michelson’s facility at Mount Wilson is now surrounded by large pine trees. I know from experience my GPS-only receiver does not work well under tree cover (Some newer multi-system receivers might work, but those are tens of thousands of dollars, so……no). However, from the Michelson benchmark’s data sheet I see it was visited and its position adjusted by NGS surveyors in 1995, so its position is probably pretty accurate.

What I needed to do was take those 1995 coordinates for the Michelson benchmark, and bring them up to match what I had for the measurements I just acquired. This I did with the HTDP tool, available on the NGS website. Once I had the XYZ coordinates for the two benchmarks in the same datum, I used the Pythagorean theorem to compute the line-of-sight distance between them (Surveyors call this the chord). Computing the distance between the two Lat/Long coordinates would not have been correct since that computes an arc length, taken at sea level. So, after these assorted data manipulations I obtained a present day distance between the two benchmarks of….tadaaaaa!!!….35,385.576 meters.

Michelson’s 1927 paper on his experiment  contains an appendix written by William Bowie, then with the US Coast and Geodetic Survey. Bowie describes in detail the surveying effort and states they obtained a distance between the two benchmarks, in 1922, of 35,385.53 meters.

Subtracting the two values indicates the distance between the two benchmarks has increased approximately 4.6 centimeters in the past 95 years. Well….Not really.

You see, Bowie also discussed what the actual error might be for the original survey’s distance between the Michelson and Antonio benchmarks. He estimated the actual error to be between 1 part in 500,000 and 1 part in 1,000,000 (Don’t confuse Bowie’s much lower “probable error” of 1 part in 6,800,000 as the actual error since probable error is merely a measurement of how consistent a series of survey measurements are. Probable error is a measure of precision and actual error is a measure of accuracy. For my purposes here, I want a measure of accuracy.)

Translating these values into an easier to understand format, Bowie’s error estimate for his measured straight line distance is between 3.5 and 7.1 centimeters. If you combine the error I obtained for my Antonio GPS measurements (about 1.5 centimeters) with Bowies’s error estimate, it turns out the likely total error range is larger than 4.6 centimeter difference I calculated.  So the measurement difference could be due solely to measurement errors and not mountains moving. So I can’t say anything one way of the other as to if the benchmarks have moved.

On Lookout Mountain. You will NOT see me here again…

Back to the The Mount Wilson-Mount San Antonio measurements (1922 – 1926)

I have a subscription service that can tell me what award tickets are available on various flights and it all looked pretty decent. We wanted to burn up our AA miles, and could do so with a certain number of trips. After some discussion Jeri and I decided to use AA’s nonstop between Los Angeles and London and build a train trip around that. We really, really like the business class setup in the aircraft they run on that flight, and we’ve become firm believers in the benefits of nonstop flights. So with destination and dates worked out, I went online to book the trip on AA’s system. Uh….no.

AA’s web page was telling me no such Business saver awards were available. Checking back with my fairly reliable subscription service showed the seats plainly available. Huh?

Pulling up the original forum discussion I found there had been a bit of chatter since I first read it earlier in the morning. Apparently others found this same issue and labeled it as “phantom availability”. It’s a thing and it happens. But more interestingly, some had actually called into AA’s booking line and were able to book these award tickets. It would seem AA’s computer system showed availability to its agents but not the public. Ah, good old AA!

So I immediately called AA and told the nice lady I was interested in a couple of saver level business tickets between Los Angeles and London for dates in October. Perhaps it was merely my imagination, but I’d swear she actually snorted. She immediately launched into a spiel about how such tickets were very rare, hard to come by and keep my expectations low. I said I knew, but would she please check those dates. The change in her tone was funny as hell. Why yes, there are tickets available and she’d be happy to process my request!

Fortunately it only took us only about 45 minutes to work out our entire trip concept and lock it all down. By 11 AM that same morning AA caught on and all that saver ticket availability vanished from my subscription service. It was never at any time shown to the public on AA’s website and was an apparent computer system glitch. It’s just a damn fine airline, but hey, we scored some nice tickets.

The trip concept was one we had kicked around a while and involved training through Europe. We had been on a number of fantastic high speed trains in Europe and really enjoyed it (As contrasted with a trip we made on Amtrak from Chicago to Los Angeles that was so amazingly awful it became funny).

The plan was to fly into London, overnight there and take a Eurostar train to Brussels, which seemed boring and only worth a single night. From there a Thalys train to Amsterdam for three nights, then a German ICE train to Frankfurt for two nights, a French TGV train to Paris for three nights, and finally a Eurostar back to London for night before flying home. In hindsight, that sounds tiring just writing it. With the exception of London and Paris these were all new countries for us and were looking forward to it.

Map of our overall trip showing our train routes.

London

The overnight flight to London was really nice and we managed to get maybe 6 or 7 hours of sleep. We’ve stayed at various places in London before but tried a different, less tiring approach this time. We took the Heathrow Express directly from Heathrow to Paddington Station in London in only 15 minutes. Our hotel that first night, a Hilton, was actually part of Paddington Station, so our travel upon arrival was minimal. Got off the train and walked right into the hotel. We still had enough energy left before dark to take the tube over to Regents Park and explore it, one of the last major parks in London we hadn’t been to.

The next morning we got up reasonably well rested and took the tube over to Saint Pancras for the Eurostar ride to Brussels. We always get lulled into a false sense of well being the first day of an overseas trip, as jet lag usually hits us hard on day three. It did not disappoint.

Brussels

The weather was really nice upon arrival in Brussels. We arrived at the city’s southern station and transferred to a train to the central station. Wonderfully, our hotel was just across the plaza from the train station so that was about as easy as it could get. After settling in, we did a bit of a walkabout.

We’re probably shallow travelers but it seemed one night was indeed enough for Brussels. The Grand Place itself was labeled correctly as it was very grand (It’s sort of a big square and marketplace). And it was even better after dark. I never would have imagined it, but there is such a thing as too many chocolate shops as they were simply everywhere. It was hard to tell the junk, tourist places from the good ones, but we made a valiant effort. Oh yeah, and way too many Belgium waffle houses. But it was, after all, Belgium.

In Brussles, the Grand Place at night. It looks interesting during the day, but at night it becomes magical.

Apparently the other thing Brussels is known for is that damn statue of a peeing boy. Not sure why that should be, but it was only a few blocks away from where we were staying and it felt like an obligatory tourist thing. What a friggin’ gimmick! That sucker is 18″ high, at best. Jeri’s first reaction, “It’s so small…..” was both appropriate and thankfully direction in another direction for a change. That statue has to be some sort of Brussels practical joke on tourists. Rather than the statue, what was much more fun was to see the crestfallen look on the tourists’ faces when then came upon the little guy.

Photobomb of the stupid pissing statue. The thing’s so damn small I circled it in red. WTF Brussels?? Is that the best you got??

Oh yeah, we sorta got stuck in the hotel stairwell. There was that Brussels memory. Since some European elevators are rather small, we’ll often take the stairs if available. Since we were only on the third floor it’s not a long trip. In my defense I always check that there’s no “emergency exit only” or “alarmed” signage on the stair entrance, cause I ain’t no stupid American tourist. So we were somewhat concerned to get to the bottom of the stairwell and find the door held shut by a magnetic latch. On the door was a sign that said, “To open door in an emergency, push button” and an arrow pointing to a big, ominous button next to the door. Well……crap.

So back up a floor to go back into the hotel. Oops…that door won’t open and I’m starting to get a bad feeling about this. All the way back to the floor we entered on, and no door would open. They were all exit only. Crap! Back down we went to ponder our situation and stare at the big button of freedom.

We thought we found an out when we saw a speaker with a push button next to the button of death. We figured it was a way for stupid tourists to plead for an exit and to amuse whoever runs the hotel’s security. But pushing it repeatedly brought no response. I didn’t consider my position too dire since if I used Jeri as food I could probably last a couple weeks in the stairwell, but I’d miss the damn train. Oh, and I’d miss her.

So I looked at Jeri, she looked at me, and I pushed the frigging button. Immediately a siren started blaring but the damn door opened right out onto the street. We bolted past some curious pedestrians and took off down the street at high speed. And that is our best memory of Brussels.

Amsterdam

The train trip to Amsterdam from Brussels was just under two hours through some wonderful country. We hadn’t been on a Thalys train before and it turned out to be very nice, free wifi included.

Our Thalys train from Brussels to Amsterdam.

Our hotel for the next three nights was the Doubletree Centraal, which was right next to the train station. There may or may not be a story of me thinking is was supposed to be directly above the train station and wasting much time looking for it instead of asking directions. But if such a story did exist it would reflect badly on me and thus won’t be told. If it happened. In any case we lucked out mightily and scored an upgrade to a junior suite overlooking the water (the Oosterdok).

The view out our room in Amsterdam. Train station is just out of sight to the right.

The weather was starting to become challenging so planning for our two days there was tricky. Periods of rain were now expected. Also since we were now in the worst part of jet lag, things that once seemed like a good idea were now much less so.

Since we had transit passes for a couple days, we decided to take a bus out to a historical park called the Zaanse Schans, (think colonial Williamsburg in the US) to see windmills. I make no apologies for this. It’s Holland and I want to see some damn windmills. And cheese. And while a bit touristy, it was really, really neat. Multiple museums and a few working windmills which we’d duck into between passing rain squalls.

Yep, it’s Holland, so how about some damn windmills? I’m not above being clichéd. Welcome to the Zaanse Schans.

Why they are called windmills. The milling parts down in the bowels of a windmill. Keep fingers away.

At Zaanse Schans, hiding from the rain in a real Netherlands moment.

One wind mill was a working sawmill and we were invited by one of the volunteers to walk around the logs as they were being slowly sawn into planks. No OSHA here! We had only expected to spend a couple of hours at Zaanse Schans but ended up killing most of the day.

Sawing Larch logs inside a Zaanse Schans windmill. Pretty impressive to see and we were surprised they let us so close to the sharp stuff. This mill actually sells lumber commercially.

The chocolate museum at the Zaanse Schans, because….chocolate. And it wasn’t raining inside.

In the cooperage (barrel maker) in the Zaanse Schans

A re-enactor weaving at Zaanse Schans

The next day we did a lot of walking around Amsterdam, exploring different parts of the city. For a respite from the noise and bustle of cities, we often check out parks and botanical gardens and Amsterdam’s botanical gardens (Hortus Botanicus) were quite a surprise. They even had a butterfly house full of butterflies we could walk through.

Butterflies in Amsterdam in October…..In a greenhouse at the Hortus Botanicus

We really liked Amsterdam. It felt as if it were some sci-fi city of the future where its people, not business or corporations, come first. As someone whose career was in transportation, I was blown away by the city’s transportation system. I wouldn’t have thought it possible for something to work that well, although there may be a thing as too many bicycles. Cars you can hear coming, but bikes, not so much.

Obligatory Amsterdam canal shot. You know these come after windmills, right?

I’ve been to more than a few places, but this is the first time I felt embarrassed on behalf of the US. Compared to places like the Netherlands, we are a harsh, mean country and becoming more so. I guess that’s one of the pitfalls of traveling……you discover we aren’t exceptional after all. I’m not sure I’d even consider us above average anymore.

The pointy end of the German high speed ICE train from Amsterdam to Frankfurt. That’s the engineer in his seat. Yeah, you can actually go and peer over the shoulder of the guy running the train at 180 mph. Pretty damn cool.

Frankfurt

Truthfully, we didn’t have any grand desire to visit Frankfurt. We wanted to visit Germany, and Frankfurt worked out well with where we needed to be with our train scheduling. It was just sorta a random German town to get a flavor of the place. And it turned out great.

We walked our asses off in that town. We discovered, somewhat serendipitously, that our hotel was located on sort of a green belt or ring park that circled the main part of town, lined with walking and bike paths, and partially running along the Main River. The hotel we stayed at, the Hilton City Central, was gorgeous with a massive central atrium, with a glass wall as the fourth side of the building looking out on to the park. And it didn’t hurt we scored another suite upgrade, our luck in that area being amazing.

In the park next to our hotel in Frankfurt.

Part of the riding/hiking/whatever trail along the Main River in Frankfurt.

Palm trees in the Palmgarten. This has to be a fantastic place to be in January.

Some idiot tourist in one of the Palmgarten greenhouses barely not falling in.

Peering out the lounge window in the Frankfurt train station. Pretty typical European train station which is head and shoulders above anything in the US.

Aboard the high speed TGV train from Frankfurt to Paris. A grueling way to travel.

Paris

We were pretty beat by the time we arrived in Paris so we deliberately had no plans. We were staying in an apartment in the Saint Germain district we had stayed at during an earlier visit so we knew our way around the neighborhood and where all the (many!) good chocolate places were.

Looking left out of the window of our apartment in Paris. That’s the Senat at the end of the street.

Looking right out our apartment window. That red and white striped awning at the far right is the shop of baker Gerald Mulot, which means for us this is pretty much the bestest place to be in all of Paris. Gotta love the Saint Germain District.

Since our Paris stay included a Wednesday, we knew that was a day the Louvre Museum stayed open late in the evening. It’s a good method to miss the tourist hordes that show up during the day. We left the apartment, took a nice walk down to the Seine and rolled into the Louvre around 6 PM with absolutely no plan whatsoever. We didn’t even bother to pick up a map. And despite having been there several times before we saw a lot of things we hadn’t seen before. Like, wow, how did we not see this?? We of course did seek out the Winged Victory statue, since it’s the best thing ever and we’ve been there enough we can pretty much find it, sometimes. And rather than go see the Mona Lisa it’s much more fun to watch the crowds looking at the Mona Lisa. It’s quite a cross section of,….ummm …humanity. So a pretty wonderful evening wandering the Louvre totally planless.

An evening walk down to the Seine and then the Louvre, on the right.

In the square of the Louvre Palace at night. No, not the one with the pyramid, the quiet one without the tourists on the other side of the building.

The Winged Victory of Samothrace, the best damn thing in all the Louvre. We always manage to swing by it on our visits unless hopelessly lost.

On our second day we decided we should go over and have at least a look at the Eiffel Tower, since it seemed wrong to be in Paris for a few days and not even glance at it. It turned out rather depressing.

The park in front of the tower now has fencing around it to keep people gathering on the grass. As this is a very Parisian thing to do, I don’t know how they pulled it off without a rebellion.

When you’re in Paris you gotta see the Eiffel Tower, right? Interestingly, the park in the foreground, which had always been open for Parisian picnicking, is now fenced off. Not sure if it’s a new security thing, but the fencing doesn’t look temporary.

But under the tower itself was even worse. Due to terrorism concerns authorities have enclosed the base in an ugly security perimeter and people can’t walk under the tower without passing through airport-style security checks. There are very ugly corrugated walls newly installed on the sides of the tower base and two or three level modular security buildings in the now closed off street at the base of the tower.

The sucktastic security now in place under the Eiffel Tower. It’s a security check to walk anywhere near it.

I get it. The French have taken some pretty hard terrorist hits lately and a response is understandable. But in the past, when crap happened it never stopped them from being French. But it feels like something has changed. It felt like they’re becoming more like the US.

We were glad to take leave of the tower and walked along the Seine all the way back to the Louvre and caught a Metro back to the apartment. After more pastries (what else?) we went over and hung out in the Luxembourg Gardens and pretended to be Parisian.

“These are the Luxembourg Gardens and I’m not going ANYWHERE!”

London

The Eurostar trip from Paris to London was uneventful, beyond the lengthy security queues to board the train. This has been ramped up from our earlier visits where you could almost show up and board the train. Now there’s a lot more scrutiny and you need to allow for time more in line with an airport. But our reward was a shiny, new Eurostar train, much nicer than the older model we took to Brussels on our outbound leg. I had no idea newer Eurostar versions even existed.

We again stayed near Paddington Station (to utilize the Heathrow Express to get to Heathrow) and found we were within walking distance of Hyde Park. So we wandered around the park for a while and slipped in a detour to Harrod’s to lay in a supply of Jeri’s favorite tea. Harrod’s was a complete tourist zoo, and I can’t understand why Lipton’s tea isn’t good enough for her, but not a issue I want to press.

Our last night, in London, walking through Hyde Park checking out the wildlife and the trees changing color (or colour, as they say there)

The flight back to LAX was the typical daylight flight with Jeri watching every movie in the world and me just screwing off while maintaining a slightly vegetative state.

We really enjoyed getting around by train in Europe and saw a lot of unexpectedly neat stuff. Only one more long haul trip on our travel horizon, but not for a number of months. We flew over 100k miles last year and over 55k miles this year and pretty much have had an assfull of traveling. We both think it’s time we moved on to other, less tiring interests. But it is nice to know our way around a number of major cities in the world, a couple of which almost feel like home.

As the four or five regular readers of this bloggy thing may have noticed, I am prone to go down assorted rabbit holes with my interests. Rather than Jeri’s view of this as being tiring at best and annoying at worst, I choose to simply embrace it as part of my charm. And my latest little, um…. interest is contributing to a government program called GPS on Benchmarks.

I’ve been working on a few recreational mapping projects lately, and a side effect has been upping my GPS game. Unfortunately as expensive as consumer GPS units can be, they by design lack the accuracy to do any sort of detailed mapping. To do that you need a mapping grade (better) or survey grade (best) GPS receiver. However those suckers are stupidly expensive….sorta.

It used to be that the US had the monopoly on satellite navigation systems with our Global Positioning System (GPS). No longer. The Russians have implemented a similar system called GLONASS, the Europeans have Galileo, and the Chinese are starting their BeiDou system. As a result, manufacturers of survey and mapping grade GNSS receivers (the correct designation for satellite location systems) are now selling units that receive ALL satellites, not just the USA’s GPS system. Since most surveyors want the latest and greatest equipment, they have been offloading their older GPS-only units at a tiny fraction of what they originally sold for. And I loves me a bargain.

In the world of recreational and consumer GPS Garmin is sorta king. I’ve had various models of Garmins for many years, and while I found their interfaces annoying, at least it was annoyingly familiar. But in the professional survey and mapping world, the crown is held by a firm called Trimble.

So why, when I’m supposed to be writing about a program called GPS on Benchmarks, am I digressing into a discussion about who makes what? (Beyond my usual tendency to ramble). Well, it’s because for a non-professional, Trimble stuff is damn hard to figure out and operate. I mean, it makes Garmin stuff seem warm and fuzzy. Add to that the fact that Trimble pretty much locks down their hardware so that you have to use their damn pricy software with their hardware. It makes Apple look like amateurs. And……wait for it……it was while Googling like crazy to find an end run around Trimble to get some use out of my new, used mapping handheld (Spoiler, there ain’t one), that’s when I stumbled across the GPS on Benchmarks program. Says me….”Wait…..what??”

So with that tedious bit of foreplay out of the way, I’ll move on to some more. Yeah, this could be a long piece. So, just what the hell are benchmarks?

If you’ve been hiking at all you’ve seen benchmarks on quite a few mountain peaks and perhaps some other areas where you’ve wondered why they were there. These marks, usually some variation of a brass disk set in the ground, are used by surveyors to designate a specific spot in space. This is what excites surveyors.

A typical benchmark cemented into the top of a boulder.

A typical benchmark, in this case a triangulation station.

While there are a number of different kinds of benchmarks, I’m going to lump them into only two categories for the purpose of this piece, those of triangulation and leveling. That sound you hear is the gnashing of the surveying profession’s collective teeth over my arbitrary division.

Most benchmarks found on mountain peaks are actually triangulation marks, properly known as triangulation stations. Surveyors, by sighting on other known peaks with similar triangulation marks, can fix a location horizontally in space quite accurately. Vertically is more of a challenge since, you know, the Earth curves, but the results can be close if you know the heights of the locations you’re sighting at. So somehow, someway, some poor soul is going to have to figure heights, which brings us to the second type of benchmark, leveling stations. (Actually the term benchmark is properly defined as a measurement of vertical height, but all us normal people usually call anything we see on a peak a benchmark. Shows what we know.)

Since leveling stations are a little weird, let me pose a question….how do you figure how high Denver is above sea level? Well in the eighteen and nineteen hundreds a bunch of poor schmuck surveyors started at some average sea level location, say the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, and inched their way to Denver a few hundred feet at a level sighting. Some guy would stand at the edge of the water at the gulf with a survey rod, and the guy using the level instrument (the smart guy) would read a height. The rod guy would then go to the other side of the instrument guy, toward Denver, and the instrument guy would get a new reading. The difference in readings was the change in elevation between these first two points. Wash, rinse and repeat until Denver. Over a great deal of time the entire country was crisscrossed in this manner, which is how we know how high things are above sea level. And once heights were accurately known, the triangulation guys on peaks could tie it all together. I doubt anyone has ever presented a more fractured or screwed up history of surveying in the USA, so….you’re welcome.

A couple things to know about these leveling runs, which will have some importance when (eventually!) discussing the GPS on Benchmarks program. First, the difference from one leveling station to the next was limited to the height of the survey rod. This meant leveling runs usually followed gradual terrain, like railroads and roads. It was the scenic route to Denver.

Second, while the surveyors could measure the change in elevation to insanely high levels of accuracy, they didn’t care much about where they were horizontally. That wasn’t their point. But they marked the locations of their leveling locations on maps the best they could and moved on. And by the time they got to Denver they damn well knew how high it was above sea level.

So over many years, we ended up with around 430,000 benchmarks scattered across the US. And guess what, we don’t know precisely where they all are. About 200,000 haven’t been checked in 30 years and may not even still exist. They could have been damaged by floods or covered by mud or soil.

And the leveling benchmarks, boy they are even sketchier. When the National Geodetic Survey (NGS) created a database of all the country’s benchmarks in the 1970s, they hired contractors to digitize all their paper map data. The accuracy required was that the location had to be scaled off the maps to within six arc seconds, which sounds sorta accurate but actually works out to be around 600 feet. If you’re looking for a benchmark in a brushy or wooded area, you might be looking a while. Feeling lucky, punk?

“So what”, you ask. “That wasn’t even interesting. Why should I care about any of this?” I sympathize with you on the first part, however the latter comes down to three letters: GPS.

GPS uses time signals from a constellation of orbiting satellites to derive a point above the center of mass of the Earth (or magic, I’m not sure). It has no frigging idea where sea level is, it just tells you how high you are above that center point of the planet. And guess what, the Earth isn’t round. It’s sort squashed at the poles and bulgy at the equator and other weird lumps here and there. Sea level is sorta a fluid thing.

So then how does your trusty Garmin tell you your height above sea level when standing on a peak? Something called a geoid model. GPS units have a simplified model of the entire Earth’s lumpiness in them so that when they figure out a position on the planet’s surface they can look up how lumpy the Earth is at that point and calculate a height above what sorta, kinda would be sea level. So it’s important to have a good geoid model.

The Feds think so too. To that end, they are using our tax dollars to generate a new, more accurate geoid model by 2022. And it’s a big damn deal. They are taking benchmark measurements from all over the US, throwing them in to a computer and out will come a shiny new lumpoid….I mean geoid for the country.

But here’s the rub. The Feds can only produce a model that’s as accurate as the data generating it. Garbage in, garbage out. So all these leveling station benchmarks (if they even still exist) while likely very accurate vertically, may be as much as 600 feet off horizontally. That’s terrible for the level of precision wanted in the new geoid model.

Enter some clever individual at the NGS. They thought, “Hey, all these people are running around these days with GPS units accurate to within 20 to 30 feet. That’s way better than our current 600 feet off our old-school maps accuracy. Maybe we can think of a way to sucker them in to help us!”

Enter, at god-damned last, GPS on Benchmarks.

The program allows ordinary folks with Garmins or even GPS enabled phones to report the locations of benchmarks which the NGS can incorporate into their upcoming model. And not just GPS data, they also want pictures to show the condition of the benchmarks. They would be thrilled to know if their benchmarks are still there and that you care about them.

Yeah, yeah, it’s geeky beyond belief. But it’s a good excuse to hunt stuff down in the middle of nowhere (or even down your street if you’re not feeling adventurous) with a socially redemptive purpose. I do enough stupid things that aren’t useful, so this is a refreshing change.

The NGS has a nice web page on the program, which may be found here. I’ve wasted enough of your time so far so I won’t rehash it all (you’re welcome!!) other than mentioning a few tips.

First, while you can submit data on a NGS webpage, there is a more powerful way. DSWorld  is a downloadable program written under NGS contract that runs on your computer and will automatically submit your data, reports and pictures to the NGS. I will concede there is something of a learning curve to it but it’s worth it. It also helps you to properly label and size any benchmark pictures you submit, as being Feds, the NGS is understandably picky about this stuff.

The NGS has a data explorer tool which can be used to find benchmarks all over the country. That may be found here. Once you find a benchmark, you can click on it and bring up its data sheet (with enough data to choke a horse, here is a typical example). If it hasn’t been visited in a long while, or there aren’t any pictures, then get off your ass and get out there!

There is also another, possibly more interesting benchmark locating tool, found here. This tool shows the benchmarks that the NGS is planning to use in generating their new geoid model in 2022 (which is why I rambled on so much on the topic). And the leveling station runs become pretty obvious.

The colorings show the areas where their data is good (green) and where it’s not so good (red). And they’d really, really like some good measurements in those red areas. Stupidly, this smells like a challenge to me and I’m looking to turn some red and yellow areas green.

Generally, the way you’d work this is first find benchmarks that might be accessible to you and of some interest to you (i.e., trip worthy). Once you picked out a few, download their data sheets and head to the field. The data sheets always have written descriptions as to how to find the benchmarks, which may or may not be accurate. Snipe hunt time. When/if you find the object of your quest, note the benchmark’s condition, take an accurate GPS reading and pictures following the NGS’s arcane guidelines. Submit via DSWorld. If you didn’t do something stupid and hose it up, your additions will be incorporated into the benchmark’s permanent record. In a manner, you will go down in history. A legacy of geekiness.

The three videos listed on the left menu of the main GPS on Benchmarks page will be of great help if you want to mess around with this program. They are a little bit long, but the 2015 video is probably the best in terms of understanding the program.

Now while that is a great program, I’m not known for leaving things well enough alone. There is another program called OPUS-Share in which you submit actual raw GPS survey data to the NGS and if it passes their quality control criteria, becomes the new location of an established benchmark. This is intended for surveyors and not normal folks. But I am anything but normal.

To participate in OPUS-Share a mapping grade GPS unit isn’t good enough (sigh). You need survey-grade GPS equipment (thanks eBay!!), know how to survey (thanks CSULB!!), and take a measurement of at least four hours (thanks me and the patience I don’t have!!). But it’s really, really cool. With halfway decent GPS satellite views I’ve been able to get measurements of well within a centimeter. This, as far as I’m concerned, is scary, voodoo science. But very, very satisfying. Your mileage may vary.

A typical setup for gathering OPUS-Share data. Come back in four hours.

As your reward (?) for making it this far, here is an example of one of the OPUS-Share submissions I did. And, oh why not, here’s another one. Fun, but definitely not for normal folks. Stick with reporting via consumer and cell phone GPSs, along with pics, and it will be easy.