Week 9, Theme A3 – Nature

Here we are communing with “Nature”.  Earlier this year we decided to do a “Road Trip” during Thanksgiving, so we made reservations at one of Florida’s beautiful state parks.  Road trip #5 has brought us to Three Rivers State Park in Sneads, northwest of Tallahassee.  We are camped on Lake Seminole, an Army Corps of Engineers water management project built in 1947.  The Jim Woodruff Dam was built at the confluence of the Flint and Chattahoochee Rivers creating the lake. Below the dam, the waters become the Apalachicola River and flow to the Gulf of Mexico.  Hence the name of the state park.

 

Week 8, Theme 21 – Industrial

Continuing with my attempt to post images from our travels this year, I decided that I would meet the challenge for “Industrial”  with these photos from the “20 Mule Team Borax” plant located in the outskirts of the town of Boron in the Mojave Desert of California.

This particular open-pit mine is 900 feet deep and 1.75 miles by 2 miles.  The borate is hauled from the bottom of the mine in huge trucks costing over $1 million dollars each that can carry up to 240 tons of material.

This operation mines about three million tons of ore to produce one million tons of refined products each year.  This refined product can be found in fiberglass, wood preservatives and ceramics; heat-resistant glass used in the space shuttle tiles, flat screen TV’s and laptop computers; motor oil, fertilizers and many more applications including the world famous laundry and household cleaning product 20 Mule Team Borax.

(Remember a click on the image will enlarge it.)

The Processing Plant

The Mine

A replica of the 20 mule team wagon train used to haul the minerals from the Death Valley, CA mine to the nearest railroad in Mojave, CA.  This method of transportation was only used for 5 years.

The modern method of hauling the minerals to the processing plant.