PART 3: THE DESCENT OFF THE PLATEAU, AND A "PS" ON THE OUTCOME OF THE WORK
It was toward the end of our adventure that we hit several places we were lucky to get through.
This canyon was interesting because in its bottom a water line led from a spring to a water tank. We asked and were later told this was water for use by a potential coal mine once slated for the area, but the project fell through with the collapse of the power plant project it was associated with:
To get out of this canyon we had to enter a stream-bed that was very trying for our monster car.
Once in the stream bed we inched along one rock at a time with much hope for the wheels not sinking too deep into the very soft sediments between the rocks. This stream bed was once we had to cross several times.
One of the traverses of this same stream-bed is where we experienced our 'strictly-one-way' traverse: we saw the potential problem of having both bumpers on the ground and all four wheels in the air not touching the deeper stream-bed below if we entered the stream bed slowly. So we gunned it and bounced hard into the bed with the front bumper hitting the other side hard but bumping itself up because of the forward momentum. Amazingly the rear tire caught and gained traction and we crawled up very slowly and kept moving! Miraculous! The side we came from was higher than the side we bumped up onto, so there was no way to do this trick in the other direction.
It was while worrying over making it into, through, and out of one of the stream-bed traverses that I smelled gas and discovered a serious gas leak on the gas line entering the carburetor. Drip-drip every other seconf od so. Maybe that explained the seemingly rapid use of gas the last hour?
Now we doubly knew we did not have a chance to make it back the way we came: that one really tricky traverse of the deep stream-bed and now, not enough gas!
In addition, we now had to worry both about running out of gas, and worse, about the top of the engine catching on fire.
This started our version of 'white-knuckle time.' No more photos, no more samples (the top of the plateau was our main sampling target area anyway).
We did not stop again until we were down on level ground, saw we still had a tiny bit of gas, and could see the highway. Only then did we have enough confidence to stop and take these shots to show the place we had just descended from:
To our chagrin, we had to go all the way into Page, Arizona, for services and had to pass by Glen Canyon City (it now is called Big Water, and it now has a very nice motel, the Cowboy Motel, says the Internet).
Once at our motel for the night, Audrey broke out in a great smile for this photo! I remember it well! Too bad it is too dark for you to see it.
Next morning an old-fashioned "service-station" replaced the leaking fuel line for very little money, we filled up there and made it home in very good time, all on wonderfully well-paved highways! We petted Chrissy fondly once we got home, and had her air-cleaner cleaned out and the oil changed as a reward for bringing us through our adventure safely.
POST-SCRIPT
What was the outcome of this work? This report:
I provided the photo, of course, and was co-author of the chapter with the solubility calculations:
The outcome summary is given on this page.
It says there would a be a substantial increase of mercury, and a minor increase of cadmium. These were not good outcomes.
By the time the report was published, the project had already been canceled. Our results were just one point among many points that suggested to the power companies working with Southern California Edison on this project that a power plant in this particular location would present unique environmental problems that would not be easy to mitigate.
Air pollution, heavy metals deposition, the need for substantial roads to bring out the coal, the need to mine coal underground to preserve the landscape, and the lack of reliable and copious water supplies for mining and power-generation combined to make this project unattractive. Perhaps in a future time when there is true clean-coal burning technology that captures the ash and its heavy metals, and even emitted carbon dioxide, and if there are great safety and environmental-impact improvements in underground coal mining, the project can be reconsidered. That is a lot of "ifs."
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