Bismarck-Mandan will never forget: Global War on Terror Memorial (service today at 2pm)

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By now you’re likely to have seen the signs declaring the location of the state’s Global War On Terrorism memorial. It’s just off Memorial Highway, adjacent to the entrance of the Fraine Barracks complex (named after late Brigadier General John H. Fraine). In fact, it’s just a stone’s throw away from the Liberty Memorial Bridge.

This beautiful memorial stands prominently to help ensure that we remember what’s at stake in this 21st century war. It’s a memorial to North Dakota military personnel who perished during the Global War on Terrorism. In fact, it was dedicated this very day last year.

I was especially pleased to see the term “GLOBAL WAR ON TERRORISM” on this monument because so many pusillanimous liberal multi-culturalist apologists, in their suicidal quest to love our enemies and hate our nation and its allies, have abhorred this term since its inception. Our current President, for example, has ordered that the term not be used in the federal government. North Dakotans, however, see it for what it is.


All gave some. Some gave all. Some names are about to be added here…
 

At 2pm today there will be a service honoring three more fallen North Dakota soldiers. The Patriot Guard Riders will be in attendance. Sadly I cannot be among them today as I have a freelance job scheduled all day. Afterward I’ll still try to find time to stop by and ponder their sacrifice. You may wish to spend a little time this September 11th to do the same.

Cold War Mancation Part Four: Cavalier Air Station

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Heading east on highway 5, you can see this giant concrete cube (with a slanted north side) from the road long before you’re near it. Then the road drops down a hill and you can’t see this thing at all, since the Cavalier Air Station (at times named Cavalier Air Force Station) is surrounded by trees. I found out the hard way that this site is very much active and there’s a young man with a firearm at the front gate. I wasn’t getting in for pictures here. That’s okay…as you can tell by the awful light in this shot, sunlight was scarce anyway and it was time to set up the campsite.

After a beautiful stay in lovely Icelandic State Park overnight, we managed to get some really nice light in order to feature the PAR array. I’m told that this thing can spot an object the size of a basketball coming over the North Pole! Wild.

This PAR system is also part of the larger Stanley Mickelson Safeguard Complex, which included the now abandoned Nekoma facility I posted about earlier. It had its missiles removed long ago, but this giant array still watches the northern skies. I could tell you more about this site, but probably not without ripping off David Novak’s site, www.srmsc.org. He’s got all kinds of links and photos of these facilities and how they served. Please visit this site!

I haven’t exhausted the Cold War Mancation photo series yet…stay tuned.

Here’s why my truck is so muddy

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I chose to cap my last vacation day with a sunset photo, something I didn’t think I’d get today. After yesterday’s soaker I figured we were in for more of the same, and I was okay with that. I spent much of Labor Day inside the Garage Majal working on motorcycles and motorcycle related tasks, organizing, cleaning tools, and that sort of thing. Since today was a beautiful day, I spent it working in the yard, and then set off in search of a great sunset vantage point.

This is the view from a minimum-maintenance road east of Crown Butte. There’s a pond in the little valley on this road. It’s a fantastic place to chill and happens to be a perfect sunset viewing spot in the middle of summer. Well, we’re not in the middle of summer anymore. I had to venture down the road a little further since the sun sets further south nowadays. Yesterday brought a lot of rain, so the road was composed of gooey mud in spots.

The mud and swelled pond, which actually covered the road in one spot, didn’t stop me from finding my photo. I made good use of my 31 inch tires, four wheel drive, and wiper blades! It was worth it.

In order to have photos free of power lines, I did have to do some hiking to keep them out of the camera’s view. While waiting for the sunset to progress, I looked up and took some interesting angles of the power lines and towers. It’s always creepy when standing under high voltage lines and hearing them crackle overhead.

The clouds’ shadows were busy in the east, making for some interesting shadows toward Mandan. Since they cover so much sky, they appear to converge on the horizon. That makes them look almost like rays of darkness emanating from a single point on the horizon, but that’s an illusion caused by perspective.

Then it was over. I’d positioned myself so that the sun met the horizon in this crook of the butte’s silhouette. I was fortunate enough to have some dramatic clouds in just the right place, and I fine tuned the shot by positioning myself in relation to the butte. I could actually make a very big difference just by walking away from the truck in one direction or the other. The sky turned gold, the clouds turned dark, and then the show began to fade. Before it got too dark I whipped around and braved the mud and water one last time, then pointed the truck homeward once I was back on firm, dry ground.

Career politician Earl Pomeroy makes a big deal out of Rick Berg’s “26 YEARS” as part-time state legislator

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I’m on vacation and got too long a nap, so I was up late with some spare time. I thought I’d put some observations on the hapless Pomeroy campaign into video for y’all. Enjoy. If you don’t see playback controls above, move your cursor over the image and they’ll appear at the bottom.

It’s been a rough week for Earl Pomeroy. First his campaign gets caught trying to have an NDSU College Republicans display removed, which they have to hastily deny.

Then it comes out that Pomeroy’s campaign has a stalker following Berg around and videotaping him. It’s turned out to be pretty fun in that people can talk into the camera and finally feel as if they’re getting a chance to talk to Earl Pomeroy, who isn’t showing his face in public at all.

Really. Check it out, go to Pomeroy’s site and click Upcoming Events. It says, “There is nothing I enjoy more about campaigning than getting around North Dakota to meet with the folks that I represent.” Well, it’s turning out to be a repeat of last year’s August without a single open meeting between Earl Pomeroy and his constituents.

Pomeroy’s been losing in the polls for months, consecutively, and all he has left is to get the labor unions and national Democrat donors to start running ads to scare the elderly and farmers. You can always expect the Democrats to pull out the decades-old ploy of how the Republican will take away their Social Security. What’s hilarious is that Pomeroy’s trying to imply that someone who’s been in political office for a shorter time is the career politician. Really, Earl? Keep ’em coming.

(Is it any wonder that the New York Times says his campaign needs “political triage” at this point?)

Major General C. Emerson Murry laid to rest at the Veterans’ Memorial Cemetery

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If you were unable to attend the Memorial Day services at the Veterans’ Memorial Cemetery this year, you missed the stirring words of C. Emerson Murry, former Major General of the ND National Guard. He was the keynote speaker of the event, and a very memorable one at that.

The words that struck me the most from his keynote address are best paraphrased as follows: “To be born free is an accident. To live free is a responsibility. To die free is an absolute obligation.” That made me set my camera in the grass and hastily type it into my phone so I wouldn’t forget it. Maj Gen Murry fulfilled that obligation, and it’s due to such men and women of our armed forces that we enjoy the freedoms we take for granted.

You ought to take the time to read about the life of this remarkable man by clicking here.

Cold War Mancation, Part Three: the tower formerly known as OMEGA

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Actually the second stop on what we later termed “the Cold War Mancation™” was here: NCTAMS LANT DET LaMoure. Leave it to the military to throw more acronyms at something than you can shake a 1,200 foot stick at. This is that 1,200 foot stick, by the way.

As this sign indicates, the alphabet soup above stands for Naval Computer and Telecommunications Area, Master Station Atlantic…DETachment LaMoure. This is as close as you’ll probably ever get to it, too. It’s surrounded by signage typical of a national security site, and a guy on duty here assured me that civilians are definitely NOT allowed access.

This tower used to be part of the OMEGA Radionavigation system. This was a worldwide navigation system for aircraft which was begun in the 1960s and 1970s. It operated at a very low frequency, around 14kHz. Compare that with the beginning of your AM radio dial, which starts at 530kHz, and you’ll see how low that is. One of the first things you may notice about this tower is the odd attachments on the guy wires. They look like insulators, and I think I know why…more on that in a second.

One other feature is the “top hat” of guy wires attached to the top of the tower. I believe some of the guy wires on this “umbrella type” tower become part of the array. I think that has a lot to do with the additional care to insulate the wires. If they’re not insulated, they can affect the capacitative load of the tower, making it very hard to tune. This may be even more difficult with VLF (very low frequency) signals, I’m not sure.

Depending on who you ask, there were only eight or nine OMEGA towers functioning around the world when GPS stuck a fork in it. The only other one in the USA was/is in Hawaii. These towers were no longer needed for navigation, since GPS assumed that responsibility. Instead of the Coast Guard operating this facility, the Navy now runs operations here.

So what does this tower do now? It still sends VLF frequencies, but it’s used to guide submarines now at I think 150kHz. Some of the other former Omega towers were destroyed when we started switching to GPS, this one was fortunate enough to survive and serve our nation’s submarine fleet.

In a way, it’s sad that this facility has been retasked. The Omega Inn in LaMoure? Renamed. Omega Cafe? Couldn’t find it. There is an Omega Cinema in the mall, however, and a listing for an “Omega room” on the mall directory board. Since the term “Omega” no longer applies, I suppose that’s to be expected.

Here’s some background information about NCTAMS. (Link)

I’ve also added this place to my Google Maps, too. Click here for an aerial view. (This has been fixed.)

Never fear, there’s more Cold War Mancation™ coming soon!

Cold War Mancation Part Two: Nekoma Missile Base (UPDATED)

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This giant pyramid is about the last thing you’d expect to find out in the middle of the North Dakota prairie… yet here it sits. It’s part of the defunct Stanley R Mickelsen Complex, part of the Safeguard anti-ballistic missle program.

The pyramid is the most striking feature of this complex, which operated for about four months before being closed. It housed the Missile Site Radar (MSR) with circular antennae on all four sides of the pyramid. This phased-array radar allowed tracking of incoming ballistic missiles as well as control of the ABMs.

Sadly, this structure has seen better days. The inside is flooded and the equipment has been removed. The outside is beginning to show its age as well. Can you imagine the power needed to operate these huge arrays?

That’s what these giant structures are for. Among the more confusing of the site’s many protuberances, these are actually the intakes and exhausts for six absolutely monstrous engines, used to spin generators capable of powering the facility.

Without an aircraft I can’t give you a photo of this that does it justice. It’s the missile field, which at one time contained both Spartan and Sprint anti-ballistic missiles. The Spartans were designed for long-range interception, and in case of failure the Sprints would be deployed. Both used nuclear blasts to knock out an incoming warhead, which due to EMP concerns really isn’t practical. One cool thing is that the Sprint missiles went from zero to Mach TEN in five seconds. How do I strap one of those to my Suzuki?

This base was built in the 1970s, operated for a matter of weeks, and was then shut down. The town was all set for the boom of having a military base next door, and then suddenly it all evaporated on them. Here’s a must-read article about the impact of this base’s construction and subsequent closure on the little town of Nekoma.

The Library of Congress has a small collection of photos from the site’s construction available online. A really nice aerial photo of the facility is available on Wikipedia and I think may come from the LoC collection.

Here’s a link to a Google Map I’m working on with various photo sites marked for your enjoyment. This link will allow you to view the site from above via satellite. This gives a good idea of what the missile fields look like.

Many more mundane buildings still inhabit this facility, although the base housing has been moved away. Various shops, administrative buildings, the security station, the chapel, and other such buildings are still maintained on site in case the Army chooses to return.

WARNING * (Don’t say you haven’t been warned) * WARNING

This base, while abandoned for purposes of the Safeguard program, is still a US Army facility and protected government property. YOU MAY NOT ENTER THIS PROPERTY WITHOUT PERMISSION. PERIOD. I don’t know what the punishment is for trespassing on a site like this, but I don’t recommend it. You can get really great views from the road on the south side. While doing so you’ll see signs indicating that this still belongs to the Army. Take them at their word.

I wish I’d taken photos of some of the other buildings in the area, including the chapel with the Christmas decorations still hanging in the window. If I find myself in the area again, I’ll be more thorough.

(UPDATE) I came across this website today, srmsc.org. It’s got a ton of information about the entire Mickelsen Complex and its function. Check it out!

Friday geometry

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There are a lot of places in North Dakota which, sadly, I’ve never visited. One objective of my recent photo vacation, since dubbed the Cold War Vacation, was to rectify that. So here we are, at the Valley City railroad trestle bridge. If memory serves me correctly, this is North Dakota’s longest bridge. Since I’m sure it’s been photographed to death, I thought I’d try for some unique angles to show off its geometry.

 

 

Not a lot of words today, just some fun shapes and lines compliments of one of North Dakota’s many interesting sights. I’m still just scratching the surface of the Cold War Vacation photos, but more are on the way very shortly. Have a great weekend!

Cold War Mancation, Part One (updated)

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As I mentinoed before, I took a little photo vacation last weekend with one of my closest friends. It was a trip dubbed the “Cold War Vacation” due to the nature of many of our stops. One of them was to the Ronald Reagan Minuteman Missile Historic Site, north of Cooperstown. I’d been there before, he had not. This was a great opportunity for both of us, as I have a new camera this time.

You can see more about the topside part of this historic site by reading my previous post about this facility. This time I’m just going to focus on the two capsules down below. This is the doorway to the hardened equipment building, a capsule-shaped bunker with a blast door weighing around twelve tons if I recall correctly. One guy can move it.

Generators, pumps, filters, the works. Everything required to keep things functioning down below…all hung on a suspended platform stabilized by giant gas shock absorbers.

Next we have the launch control capsule, with its own puny little 8 ton door. The doors on these capsules are only as large as is required to get equipment in and out. Unlike the front door of the capsule at the Minuteman I national historic site in South Dakota, this one is not painted with anything witty. I got to peek behind here and check this time, a luxury I didn’t have during my first trip.

The last crew to serve down here marked the occasion on their way out. My understanding of the Latin at the bottom is something along the lines of “in the care of eagles.” Those holes are where the giant pins of the blast door interface to secure the capsule.

Inside the capsule are the facilities to accommodate the crew, communicate with topside and command, and of course launch the missiles. There’s a potty even smaller than the one in your average camper as well as a single bunk.

One of two stations manned by the missileers during a shift. Notice that the chair is secured to the floor on rails, as well as the five point harness used to keep the operator in his seat in case of an anticipated attack. The men and women serving in these capsules need to be able to launch their missiles, and being knocked out of their chair would impede that.

Here’s where the shift commander would sit. I appreciate the scenery adorning the wall on the upper right, I bet it broke up the monotony a little bit. Obviously there’s no window seat!

Here’s where the serious stuff happens. Each station has one of these, where the infamous “keys” would be inserted and turned simultaneously. Funny thing about those keys…

“DO NOT DUPLICATE.” Seriously. I found this so hilarious, that a key capable of launching a nuclear weapon would have the same stamping as the key to my dorm room! Even though it should go without saying, these keys bear the warning. If you look at the toothed head of the key as well as the really interesting shape of the end and cut grooves, it’s obvious that Ace Hardware probably isn’t going to have a blank for this anyway.

On the way out of the capsule you get a look at what I’m told is dubbed “the Norwegian snowflake.” The list on the right is from the crews as they each served their last shift with this missile wing before decommission.

This site is amazing. You can get more information and listen to some relevant podcasts by clicking here for the State Historical Society’s page. If you visit, tell them you heard about the site here. I got to hang out for a while and chat with some of the staff and the site director (a former missileer and narrator of one of the SHS podcasts). It was a real treat. There’s plenty more I haven’t even described here, so you’ve got plenty of surprises awaiting.

Update: Announced yesterday was the news that this site has won an award: click here for more information.