Mitch's Blog 7.0

Winter of 2007-08 Musings

2008-03-21T19:22:00.010-05:00

Yesterday at 48 minutes past midnight, CDT, for the first time in six months, the sun aligned itself with the equator. This marked, of course, the vernal equinox and the end of winter in the northern hemisphere. Even so, meteorological winter, the winter that meteorologists use to reckon average winter temperatures, precipitation, and other variables, came to a close on the first of March after beginning on the first of December.

So the three months that cover meteorological winter were exceptionally cold this year in the Upper Midwest, weren’t they? Well, yes, perhaps, when you view them in terms of a decadal perspective, but, no, not really, when you compare them against all winters of the past century.

The reason for this is that the winter of 2007-08, while colder than average in the Upper Midwest, wasn’t really that cold compared to how cold many winters in the past have been. Instead, it most likely felt unusually cold this past winter because the last time a winter had been so cold was seven years ago in 2000-01 and because the intervening six winters during that seven year gap were not only warmer than average, but, with only a couple of exceptions, much warmer than average.

Let’s concentrate on Minnesota a bit. The average 2007-08 winter temperature was 9.9°F, or 1.8°F below the 1896-2008 average. It was 38th coldest winter in Minnesota on record, which starts during the winter of 1895-96. The last winter that had a comparable average temperature was, like I mentioned, 2000-01, which had an average temperature of 8.8°F. February 2008, coming in at 3.3°F below the 1896-2008 average, had the largest departure from average (December and January were 2.1°F below average and 0.6°F above average, respectively).

Going to Brainerd now, the preliminary average winter 2007-08 temperature was 10.3°F. I must use the word preliminary because that is the average temperature from the automated observation station at the Brainerd Lakes Regional Airport. For my Climate of Brainerd website, all (recent) data come from the cooperative weather observer station operated by Brainerd Public Utilities near the Mississippi River on the north end of town. Unfortunately, unlike the automated station at the airport, data from this station are not made public until a few months after they’re recorded. As a result, I must use data from the airport right now to determine the average winter temperature.

The difference between what’s recorded at the airport what what’s recorded near the river isn’t usually that large, so some comparisons can still be made with the airport’s measurements in hand.

10.3°F is about 1°F below the 1898-2007 average winter temperature and, as you’ve heard before, would make it the coldest average since the winter of 2000-01. December 2007 at the airport was colder than average, January 2008 was right near average, and February 2008 was colder than average. Interestingly, the coldest temperature recorded at the airport during winter was only -24°F on January 24, February 19, and February 21. On average, Brainerd records 3 or 4 temperatures of -30°F or lower during winter, and actually, if the coldest that the cooperative station got during winter also ends up being -24°F, that would be the sixth warmest “lowest temperature recorded during the winter” on record. This little tidbit leads credence to the thought that what dragged this past winter down temperature-wise were not the daily minimum temperatures seen during the outbreaks of arctic air, but the below-average daily maximum temperatures associated with the cold air intrusions.

I have the space, but unfortunately not the time, to discuss precipitation patterns during the past winter. With that in mind, let me just say that winter was much drier than average in Minnesota and North Dakota but much wetter than average in the rest of the Upper Midwest. Still, thanks to two significant snowstorms during the first week of December that blanketed the region with roughly 8 to 15 inches of snow, most of central and northern Minnesota and eastern North Dakota maintained an extensive snow pack throughout the winter months for the first time in years. If you enjoyed the colder temperatures of this past winter, you should be exceptionally thankful for the timing and precipitation that fell from these early-December storms. If these storms had not provided the snow that they did when they did, it’s doubtful that winter temperatures would have been as cold as they were. A basic concept discussed in meteorology classes (and one that I was tested on just last week in ATSC 310 – Introduction to Weather Forecasting) is that of how a deep snow pack can affect temperatures. Snow, being white, not only does an efficient job of reradiating solar radiation into space, but also emits infrared energy and acts as an insulator that prevents heat stored in soil from reaching the air. This, coupled with the fact that it takes energy to either melt or sublimate snow, means that unless some other factor is at play, an area with a good snow cover will by and large be colder than one with little or no snow cover. Furthermore, the newer the snow is, the better it is at preventing temperatures from warming too much. The temperature differences between a snow covered area and an area with no snow cover that are both being impacted by the same air mass can sometimes be dramatic – the snow covered area could be at 28°F while the area with just bare ground could be reading 48°F. One of the first things to look at if you want cold temperatures is how much snow is on the ground and how new it is.

What was the most likely culprit in making the winter of 2007-08 turn out as it did? La Niña. Not since the winter of 2000-01 (hey, haven’t I mentioned these two years before?) has La Niña been as strong. Although it’s the weak La Niñas that seem to have a stronger tendency to bring colder than average temperatures to the Upper Midwest, almost all winters in the region influenced by La Niña have featured average to colder than average temperatures. Precipitation patterns during a La Niña are more variable, however. It’ll be interesting to see how La Niña, which remains quite strong, affects the weather pattern during the rest of March, April, and perhaps even May. There is a pretty good correlation between a strong La Niña event and a colder than average spring in the Upper Midwest.

Now to some pictures – first are a few figures related to the weather discussion of this post and second are some of my favorite pictures taken here at UND during the past winter. Real quickly, let me just say that Grand Forks also had a cold, dry winter. The average temperature was 4.9°F, which is coincidently 4.9°F below the 30-year normal. The coldest temperature was -33°F on February 20; this temperature also set a new daily record low at Grand Forks International Airport. Click here to view The Weather Channel’s local forecast from that morning.

Statewide average winter temperature ranks (from the National Climactic Data Center's 3-month National Climate Summary)

Statewide average winter precipitation ranks (from the National Climactic Data Center's 3-month National Climate Summary)

Bar graph showing average winter temperatures in Minnesota since the winter of 1895-96 (from the National Climactic Data Center's Minnesota climate summaries)

As is usual, Minnesota's average winter temperature was the coldest among the lower 48 states; North Dakota's was the second coldest, which is also common (from the National Climactic Data Center's U.S. Climate at a Glance)

Second Avenue North on a snowy December evening at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks

Thick hoarfrost covered all vegetation outdoors on a pleasant January afternoon in Grand Forks, North Dakota

Trees covered in thick hoarfrost make walking along this path in Grand Forks, North Dakota especially wonderful on a January afternoon

Trees covered in thick hoarfrost line University Avenue at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks on a nice January morning.

This was one of those days at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks where bundling up from head to toe was an absolute necessity. When this photo was taken, the temperature was -14°F and the wind was blowing from the northwest at 27 mph, producing a wind chill of -44°F.

At a temperature of -32°F (-36°C), water vapor tends to stay in the atmosphere for a while. Such was the case around the UND heating plant about an hour after sunrise. What isn't immediately evident in this picture, taken on the coldest morning of the 2007-08 winter, was that the wind chill was an incredible -54°F (-48°C).

A ominous cloud of steam rises above the UND heating plant amid an ambient temperature of -19°F (-28°C) on one of the coldest days of the 2007-08 winter.

7th Annual Top 10 Super Bowl Commercials

2008-02-03T22:03:00.000-06:00

Here's a tradition I'll hold on to. Although I can't say it's the 7th consecutive year that I've posted a list of what I believe to be the top 10 commercials shown during the Super Bowl (I skipped out on doing this in 2005 for some reason), this is the 7th year that I've put together a list.

Hopefully you're able to play all of the commercials. Otherwise, if you caught the Super Bowl, you'll just have play the commercial from memory.

10. Bud Light - "Wheel Suck"

9. Audi - "Horsehead"

8. Bridgestone - "Unexpected Obstacles"

7. Cars.com - "Witch Doctor"

6. Coca-Cola - "It's Mine"

5. Bridgestone - "Scream"

4. Bud Light - "Wind & Cheese Party"

3. Bud Light - "Jackie Moon"

2. Tide to Go - "Interview"

1. Planters - "Unibrow Girl"

Another Birthday

2007-12-23T11:07:00.000-06:00

Today is the sixth birthday of my blog. For your enjoyment, I’ve posted two appropriate pictures. One depicts a Hot Wheels® themed cake and the other is a coloring page, courtesy of "Lil’ Fingers," that you can print off and fill in with whatever color(s) you want. I’d recommend using some yellow.

Something I hope to accomplish during my current break from school is to get my Flickr photo page populated with pictures I’ve taken over the last two years or so. That’s right, I’m now placing my photos on Flickr. Thanks to Yahoo taking the site over and merging it into its family of services, getting an account set up there back in October was quick and easy. There were some problems that I saw with Flickr about a year or so ago when I was looking around for a good place to store and share my photos online, but, for the most part, they all seem to have subsided when I took another look at the site in October, so that's why I decided to host my photos there.

As I type this, I have a little over 100 photos on Flickr, but only two "sets" – one from my trip to see the Canadian Pacific Railway's Holiday Train last week in west-central Minnesota and another from an extensive mini-vacation in northeastern North Dakota in October. Hopefully, within the next week or two, I will have placed a couple hundred more photos into my account. I don’t believe any of the photos will be “new,” or ones that I haven’t yet shared here on the blog, but I just thought I’d let you know the address of the website (http://www.flickr.com/photos/mwahlsten) where you’ll be able to view all of my photos in the foreseeable future.

A Beltated Update

2007-11-12T21:13:00.000-06:00

I suppose it’s time for an extremely overdue update. I was actually thinking of taking the blog down, partly due to diminishing interest, but I’ve decided to leave it up – for now. Its sixth birthday is approaching, and it does make me proud to know that I’ve been regularly (depending on your definition of the word, of course) contributing for that long of a time period. Most people hadn’t even heard of the word blog when I began this in 2001; look how far society has evolved since then!

Really, not much has happened in my life since the last time I wrote anything of significance. I started my third year at UND in the middle of August and have been kept consistently busy with classes and assignments since then, even though my schedule is not necessarily that crowded. My major (chemistry) and minors (German and atmospheric sciences) remain the same as last year. As long as some possible scheduling conflicts work themselves out, I should be able to enroll in German 408 (Second Semester German IV) this upcoming spring semester. This is the final course I need to fulfill requirements for a minor in German, so hopefully I’ll be able to take it and officially say that I have a minor in German upon the successful completion of the course’s final on May 7, 2008.

If you’ve tried accessing the blog through mitchsblog.com recently, you will have noticed that it’s not working. I’m not quite sure what the problem is, but it likely has something to do with my domain name registrar. The solution to the problem may involve spending some money. Nevertheless, I’m going to try my best to get it fixed.

Finally, I wanted to say something about gloomy news that came out of Brainerd last week when area voters handily rejected a school district levy referendum. As a result, the district will now have to make $5.5 million worth of budget cuts for the next school year. These cuts will be comprehensive and deep, affecting students at every grade level and at every school in the district. Some of the proposals include laying off between 60-100 teachers, eliminating a huge variety of academic and athletic programs, and closing two elementary schools (to my sorrow, one of the two closed will likely be Lincoln, the one I attended). It greatly disappoints me to think of all that will be lost when the 2008-09 school year begins next September. However, even with that said, and despite the fact that I sent in a supportive absentee ballot, I can see to a certain degree why more voters of the Brainerd School District disapproved of the referendum than approved. Although the reasons for the failed referendum in Brainerd likely cannot be transposed to explain the results in other cities that held levy referendums, it should be noted that of the 99 school districts in Minnesota that had a referendum on the ballot, a majority – 67 – got their referendums passed either completely (61 districts) or partially (6 districts asked more than one question as part of their referendum). 32 districts saw complete failure, including Brainerd, Crosby-Ironton, Wadena-Deer Creek, Milaca, and Princeton.

The full results of all referendums asked in 2007 across the state can be found by clicking here and accessing a PDF put together by the Minnesota School Boards Association. Note that only five districts (Frazee-Vergas, Granada-Huntley-East Chain, Jackson County Central, Norman County East, and Windom) asked for a larger per-pupil increase in tax revenue funding than Brainerd. The referendums in all five of these districts passed.

2007 Vacation: Day 10 Summary

2007-08-06T22:41:00.000-05:00

Day 10 Summary
Hallock, Minnesota to Brainerd, Minnesota

The final day of my 2007 vacation began in Hallock, in Minnesota's far northwestern corner. Although the city only has 1,196 residents, it nevertheless is one of the most important cities in its locale in Minnesota. One of the reasons for this is undoubtedly because it is the county seat of Kittson County.

I don’t know what it is, but I really like the northwestern corner of Minnesota. It’s a unique part of the state due to its connectedness with Canada. Ecologically speaking, the region is also quite unique, since it lies within Minnesota’s only example of a tallgrass aspen parklands system. As such, the scenery can be described as being a transition zone between tallgrass prairie and aspen forest. There really is no other place in Minnesota that looks exactly the same.

Kittson County is one of the only counties in Minnesota that has no natural lakes. The sole lake in the county, Lake Bronson, was created in the 1930s when a dam was built along South Branch of the Two Rivers.

As it turned out, Lake Bronson was one of the tourist attractions I saw in the region. The lake, and the mixed tallgrass prairie/aspen forest landscape that surrounds it, are on display at the beautiful Lake Bronson State Park. All in all, I think I ended up spending a good couple of hours wandering around the park. Not only is there good scenery to see, but also some historic buildings that date back to the park’s construction by WPA and CCC crews during the Great Depression.

The trek back home to Brainerd started in earnest once I left the park. Although there are many ways to get to Brainerd from the city of Lake Bronson – adjacent to the park – I chose the one that would bring me through Grand Forks. I wanted to check out the city to ensure, I suppose you could say, that everything still appeared the same as when I left in May. For the most part, it did.

As the drive from the park to Grand Forks and Grand Forks to Brainerd was largely uneventful, and covered no territory that I haven’t already more or less thoroughly covered on here, I’ll just keep things short and say I made it home sometime around 7 in the evening. And with that, my superb 2007 vacation came to an end.

Pictures:

The first fourteen pictures were taken in Lake Bronson State Park

These three pelicans were looking for lunch in the lake

An example of tallgrasss prairie within the park

at trail marker #9 along the park's interpretive trail

There were a lot of butterflies flying around in the prairie

This depression was caused by a soil mining operation that was once located here

Another example of tallgrass paririe

There were a lot of these purple flowers within the prairie - I don't know what these are called, but I believe they are an invasive species

So purple!

The water tower/observation tower

The view looking south from the tower

The view looking north from the tower - here's an example of an aspen forest within the park

Even on a Tuesday morning, there were people enjoying the beach along Lake Bronson

Another view of Lake Bronson

Nobody was canoing on the lake at the time

Scenery on a country road near Hawley

Videos:

Along the Shore of Lake Bronson

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgsP30mUoqk

2007 Vacation: Day 9 Summary

2007-08-05T13:31:00.000-05:00

Day 9 Summary
Brandon, Manitoba to Hallock, Minnesota

Brandon's tourism slogan, “you belong in Brandon,” closely matched my feelings regarding the southwestern Manitoba city. In general, I found the city inhabited by 41,511 to be an exceptionally nice place to visit. It wasn’t that there were an abundance of tourist attractions, rather, it was just one of those cities that gave me good feelings.

One of the reasons for that might have been due to all the similarities I saw between Brandon and Grand Forks. Both cities are roughly the same size, both are situated in fertile river valleys, and both are significant centers of commerce and industry within their respective regions. Both cities actually have public universities within their boundaries as well, though Brandon University is quite a bit smaller than the University of North Dakota.

Besides stopping in at Safeway to get some exotic varities of potato chips, one of the chief places I visited in Brandon was the Riverbank Discovery Centre and adjacent hiking trails. The center provided some tourist information for the city of Brandon, while the trails wound around the Assinboine River and neighboring wetlands. There were even informative interpretive signs around a good portion of the trail network going through the wetlands.

At slightly past noon, I had to leave Brandon. I exited town heading east on the Trans-Can, which took me through some of the most agriculturally-developed land in Canada. Field after field of various crops could be seen alongside the road as it continued pressing deeper into the fertile, flat Red River Valley.

One of the more scenic sights along the way were the fields of canola. Though I had seen them since southwestern Saskatchewan, they seemed to become much more numerous as I traveled through southern Manitoba. These fields’ distinctive appearance made the landscape appear as if somebody took an airbrush and lightly painted it a school-bus yellow. It was quite striking, actually.

The biggest city in the 133 miles between Brandon and Winnipeg is Portage la Prairie (known locally as just "Portage"). This city of 12,748 is one of the leading centers of strawberry and potato production in North America. In fact, the J.R. Simplot Company opened an enormous potato processing plant there in 2003 to produce French fries for customers throughout Canada and the United States.

Portage la Prairie is also one of the most significant railroad centers in Canada, since it is situated along both the Canadian Pacific and Canadian National lines that run, more or less, across the country. Dozens of trains pass through Portage la Prairie on any given day.

Since I had already visited Winnipeg for a few days last October, I decided to detour around the city to get to the border. The first detour was Manitoba Highway 13 south from Newton to Roland, followed by Manitoba Highway 23 east from Roland to Morris. The scenery along these roads wasn’t anything spectacular, but I did get to see some more of those old grain elevators that I enjoy.

From Morris, it’s a quick 25 mile drive on Manitoba Highway 75 to the border and the Emerson, MB/Pembina, ND crossing. As was the case 4 days earlier in Montana, I made it across the border with little incident.

After taking a quick look around the historic city of Pembina, it was time to get on the road – predominantly U.S. Highway 75 – and travel 21 miles south to Hallock, one of the largest cities in extreme northwestern Minnesota.

Pictures:

These purple flowers were all over the wetlands next to the Assiniboine River in Brandon

There were also hundreds of these frogs in the wetlands

The Assiniboine River

Another view of the Assiniboine River

Feeding geese near the river

This "fuzzy" grass was growing in many places throughout the wetlands

(from left to right) The flag of Canada, Manitoba, city of Brandon, Ducks Unlimited Canada

A canola field near Portage la Prairie

The grain elevator near Kane

The grain elevator near Lowe Farm (or "Lowe F rm")

Red River Valley scenery near Morris

The Red River near Pembina - that's Minnesota on the other side; the Canadian border is about 2 miles up ahead

Scenery near Hallock along U.S. Highway 75

Videos:

No videos related to day 9

2007 Vacation: Day 8 Summary

2007-08-04T22:29:00.000-05:00

Day 8 Summary
Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan to Brandon, Manitoba

Day 8 of my vacation started off on a beautiful note in the lovely city of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. The weather was sunny and pleasant as I looked around at one of the things the city of 31,132 is known for: its many intricate downtown murals. It really does seem like there’s one around every corner in the city’s historic downtown.

Although I didn’t see it, the downtown murals are topped as a tourist attraction by The Tunnels of Moose Jaw. Just as the name suggests, this attraction consists of a series of tunnels built underneath the city over a century ago. The tunnels represent one facet of Moose Jaw’s unsavory past, since they were once used as hideouts by smugglers and criminals, including the legendary Al Capone.

One of the reasons I didn’t have the chance to see the tunnels was because I wanted to see some things in Regina, a mere 47 miles to the east of Moose Jaw.

I caught my first glimpse Saskatchewan’s capital and second most populous city when I noticed Regina’s skyline appear suddenly on the horizon as I was traveling through farmland on the city’s western edge. The odd contrast in scenery was made possible due to Regina’s lack of suburbs. The city of 179,246 is pretty isolated amid the prairie.

One of Regina’s claims to fame is that it’s where all members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) go through basic training. While the training grounds are largely off limits to civilians, the public is welcome at the northern end of the grounds, where the recently-completed RCMP Heritage Centre is located. I put this site at the top on my list of things to see while in Regina.

The center was put together extremely well. It offered a thorough, informative look into the past, present, and future of the RCMP. There was even a nice gift store with some RCMP swag. All in all, I’d highly recommend anybody visiting Regina to check the place out.

The next place in Regina I wanted to see was the vast Wascana Centre alongside Wascana Lake near the city’s center. This 3000 acre site in the heart of the city provides Reginians a place to enjoy all sorts of activities, including visiting museums, art galleries, walking, running, biking, or even kayaking on the lake that offers a nice view of the city’s skyline.

Although I didn’t have much time to visit all the center has to offer, I did make it to the Waterfowl Park, which is a 576 acre marshland home to all sorts of waterfowl, including Canadian Geese, mallard ducks, swans, and pelicans. I had a great time walking through and getting the chance to closely interact with all the birds.

Another place close to Wascana Centre is the ornate provincial capitol and a small, but dignified, veterans’ memorial across the street from it. Even the capitol grounds were being used at the time for recreation, as a group of people were playing Frisbee next to the building in the nice Sunday weather.

After spending more time in Regina than I probably should have, it was time to get back on the Trans-Can and head east. Since it was getting late in the afternoon, and crossing the border between Saskatchewan and Manitoba also meant losing an hour in crossing the Central Standard Time Zone and Central Daylight Time Zone, I had to hustle through the 224 miles between Regina and Brandon without doing much stopping.

It wasn’t a big loss, though, since there wasn’t all that much to see. The road passes through numerous small towns, some of which still have their classic Saskatchewan Wheat Pool grain elevators. I’m not exactly sure why, but I really enjoyed spotting these “prairie skyscrapers” as I traveled through Saskatchewan and Manitoba. They just seemed to have more character than grain elevators in the United States. It’s unfortunate that more and more are being decommissioned and removed.

It was after 8 PM when I finally approached Brandon, the second largest city in Manitoba and my destination for the day.

Pictures:

Downtown Moose Jaw

A street scene in Regina

The following five pictures were taken in the Waterfowl Park at the Wascana Centre

The Regina skyline as seen from Wascana Lake

The Saskatchewan capitol building is opposite the skyline on Wascana Lake

The following four pictures were taken at the veterans memorial across the street from the capitol

Her Majesty the Queen was here in 2005 when ground was broken for the memorial

The World War II monument

World War I monument

Just a few of the many names on the walls of the World War I monument

The following three pictures are of the Saskatchewan capitol building

The flag of Saskatchewan, Canada, and the United Kingdom

The majestic grain elevator in Whitewood

Scenery near the Saskatchewan-Manitoba border

Low-Grade Camcorder Pictures:

One of the murials in downtown Moose Jaw

Welcome to Manitoba

Videos:

At the Wascana Waterfowl Park in Regina

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVmbxwoCwEI

Richardton's Ground Squirrel

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8S_y1UXF_24

2007 Vacation: Day 7 Summary

2007-08-03T22:10:00.000-05:00

Day 7 Summary
Medicine Hat, Alberta to Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan

I started day 7 of my vacation in Medicine Hat, Alberta. With the population of 56,997, the city, known locally as “The Hat” is the most populous in southeastern Alberta and without a doubt the center of commerce and industry in the region.

In case you were curious (I know I was), the name is derived from saamis, a Blackfoot word referring to the eagle tail feather headdress worn by medicine men – a “medicine hat.” The site where the city was founded had been a well-known meeting spot for Blackfoot, Cree, and Assiniboine nations for generations, thanks to its location in a gently sloping valley with converging waterways and hardy native cottonwood trees that attracted migratory bison herds.

Though the city was pretty quiet on a Saturday morning, I did get to see a few tourist attractions. One was the downtown Riverside Veterans' Memorial Park – which may or may not have been laden with drug dealers – and the other was “Saamis Teepee,” the world’s largest teepee. Standing over 20 stories tall, it was designed for the 1988 winter Olympics in Calgary as a symbol of Canada's Aboriginal heritage. For reasons unknown to me, it was moved to Medicine Hat in 1991.

After visiting those two attractions, as well as buying some Canadian souvenirs in a downtown shop, it was time to head east on the Trans-Canada Highway, referred to as Highway 1 in Alberta (and Saskatchewan and Manitoba).

I wasn’t on the Trans-Can for very long, however, before I turned off to take a little detour south to the Cypress Hills Interprovincial Park. This was one of the chief attractions I wanted to see in Canada. It’s quite a unique place in a few ways. First, it’s Canada’s only interprovincial park (since it located within both Alberta and Saskatchewan), and second, it has a unique geological history. The entire region escaped being glaciated during the last ice age. As a result, it has an appearance quite different from the surrounding countryside, and is actually also much higher in elevation than the surrounding countryside. The park's highest point, 4,816 feet above sea level, is the highest point in Canada in the nearly 2,000 miles between the Rocky Mountains and the Labrador Peninsula.

Although some of the park’s most popular activities include camping and fishing, I chose the tamer activity of merely enjoying the scenery from the half-paved, half-gravel road that meanders through the park. The drive was quite a leisurely one through the hills and jack pine forests (jack pine is usually called cyprès in Canadian French) that make up the park.

The road through the park ended in Saskatchewan about 22 miles east of where it started in Alberta. The park’s boundaries also ended at this point, as the road descended the Cypress Hills and entered a relatively flat, barren landscape peppered with wheat farms.

After touring the park, I got on Saskatchewan Highway 271 to travel about 28 miles north to Maple Creek, the most significant city in far southwestern Saskatchewan (population 2,270). From Maple Creek, the Trans-Can, which I needed to get back on to get to Moose Jaw, was still about 6 miles away. Eventually, I reached the desired highway and began taking it farther east.

The 187 miles between Maple Creek and Moose Jaw are pretty lonely. Other than small, agriculturally-significant towns with 1,000 or fewer inhabitants spaced every 10 or so miles apart, the biggest city along this stretch of roadway is Swift Current. The city of 14,946 is located roughly halfway between Medicine Hat and Moose Jaw.

Though I didn’t get to see that much, Swift Current seemed like a nice prairie community. Of utmost importance to me, it was big enough to sustain a Tim Hortons.

Scenery-wise, the landscape was transforming the farther east I went. From west to east, it became flatter, less arid, and dotted with an increasing number of farms. By the time I was ready to call it a day in Moose Jaw, the scenery started resembling that of the central Great Plains.

Pictures:

A downtown stoplight in Medicine Hat - Alberta prefers using horizontal stoplights

A statue in Medicine Hat's Riverside Veterans' Memorial Park dedicated to local World War I veterans

The following thirteen pictures were taken in the Cypress Hills Interprovicial Park

Elkwater Lake near the town of the same name

The welcome to Alberta sign also welcomed visitors to the park...

...The Saskatchewan welcome sign, however, was rather dull in comparasion

The welcome to Alberta sign that hikers on the Trans-Canada Trail see

There was a lot of cattle on the road weaving through the park

This is the scenery only a few miles away from the Cypress Hills - it's quite a dramatic difference between the hills and the surrounding countryside

Scenery near Herbert

Saskatchewan isn't called "land of living skies" for nothing - the skies were alive with continually changing clouds on the days I visited

The landscape is much flatter the closer you get to Moose Jaw

Video:

Scenic Overlook at Cypress Hills Interprovicial Park in Alberta

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnQNhXsRcv4

2007 Vacation: Day 6 Summary

2007-08-02T17:09:00.000-05:00

Day 6 Summary
Great Falls, Montana to Medicine Hat, Alberta

Slightly to my surprise, the city of Great Falls ended up being quite a pleasant place to visit. With a population of 56,690, it’s an anomaly in a region dotted with towns of less than 1,000 people.

Great Falls got its name due to its proximity to five daunting waterfalls on the Missouri River. While the waterfalls were an obstacle for the Lewis & Clark Expedition and early river explorers to navigate around, today they provide an abundance of hydroelectric power. In fact, Great Falls is known as “The Electric City” because of all the hydroelectric dams located close by.

Three of the dams and waterfalls are on display on the northeast side of town in the small, but picturesque, Giant Springs State Park. Besides some scenic overlooks showcasing the Missouri River, waterfalls, and dams, the park also contains one of the largest natural, cold water springs in the world, a state trout hatchery, and the Roe River, which qualifies – in the Guiness Book of World Records, anyway – as the shortest river in the world. It flows a mere 58 feet from the springs to the Missouri River.

I found the park to be a very worthwhile place to visit. Also worthwhile to see is the fairly new Lewis & Clark National Historic Trail Interpretive Center operated by the USDA Forest Service right next to the state park. The center interprets the story of the expedition from its beginning to end.

After looking around the park and interpretive center (where I found a nice book about the Yellowstone River), it was time to leave Great Falls and head north. There was a still a long drive to the day’s final destination of Medicine Hat, Alberta. Plus, I had to get through customs at some point.

There aren’t really any side roads in the area, so the lonely Interstate 15 was the only viable road to take to travel the 118 miles between Great Falls and the Canadian border.

For the most part, the 118 miles was filled with a lot of vast, barren fields. Every so often, the road passed alongside small towns recognizable as such for miles away thanks to a towering grain elevator or two. Conrad and Shelby, 60 and 85 miles north of Great Falls, respectively, were two of the most significant cities along the way. Still, those cities only had a couple thousand people; this area of Montana is incredibly sparsely populated.

For the most part, the landscape consisted of gentle, rolling hills. One exception to this was about 8 miles south of Shelby, where the road enters the deep valley of the Marias River. The river has a bit of an interesting history. It was explored in 1807 by the Lewis & Clark Expedition after some men on the expedition mistook it for the main branch of the Missouri. Eventually, after finding the waterfalls of the Missouri near Great Falls, the expedition realized it had made a wrong turn. Meriwether Lewis then named the newly-discovered tributary of the Missouri after his cousin, Maria Wood.

Interstate 15 became exceedingly lifeless near the town of Sunburst, 8 miles south of the border. There wasn’t much in the way of traffic except for a few semi trucks and vehicles with Alberta license plates. It’s a far cry from the scene encountered at the interstate’s southern terminus in San Diego.

The road finally reaches the border at the twin cities of Sweetgrass, Montana and Coutts, Alberta. Customs took about 10 minutes to get through (mostly because only one booth was open for all non-truckload traffic), but I ultimately made it into Alberta with little hassle.

The biggest change on the other side of the border was that all the signs were in metric. In terms of scenery, the Albertan landscape looked like the one I had gotten used to seeing in Montana.

From Coutts, it was about 24 miles to the small town of Warner, where I diverged from Alberta Highway 4 (which I had been on since the border) to Alberta Highway 36. This highway ran for a lonely 37 miles to Taber, where it intersected Alberta Highway 3. In order to get to Medicine Hat, I had to travel east down this road for about 72 miles.

The road between Taber and Medicine Hat passed through some small towns with interesting names – Purple Springs, Grassy Lake, Bow Island, and, my favorite, Seven Persons – but didn’t offer much in the way of distinctive scenery. To keep things short, I’ll just mention that I made it into my destination of Medicine Hat slightly after 6 PM.

Pictures:

The first thirteen photos were taken in Giant Springs State Park near Great Falls

The site from which this picture was taken is called the Rainbow Falls Overlook

Rainbow Falls

A view of the dam at Rainbow Falls

Looking south toward the city of Great Falls

One of the ponds at the trout hatchery - these fish, which are much larger than the ones ordinarily released into the water, are the only ones the public is allowed access to

This is the smallest river in the world

Another view of the smallest river in the world shows the point where it empties into the Missouri River

The Missouri River

A few canoeists were out on the Missouri River

One more view of the Missouri River

This is what gave the state park its name - these are the "giant springs"

Another view of the gushing water in the springs

A view of the Missouri River closer to the main part of Great Falls

There were a lot of Canadian geese lounging around on the river's shore

The scenery along Interstate 15 near Shelby

The eastbound Empire Builder leaving Shelby following a five minute station stop

Interstate 15 near Sunburst, about 9 miles south of the border - notice that there are absolutely no vehicles on the interstate at this point

The following three pictures were taken from a recreation area on a reservoir near Warner in southern Alberta

Southeastern Alberta scenery

Video:

Canadian Geese along the Missouri River in Great Falls

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVsKZ8wTSaQ

2007 Vacation: Day 5 Summary

2007-08-01T16:58:00.000-05:00

Day 5 Summary
Billings, Montana to Great Falls, Montana

Day 5 of my 2007 vacation involved covering some territory I’d never traveled in before, so there’ll be no need to link to something I wrote last year.

The day started off in Billings by first going to visitors' center to get some electricity, since I had forgotten to recharge the battery on my camera. Oops. After successfully getting the battery charged, it was off to downtown Billings and the Western Heritage Center.

The museum, housed in Billings’ former public library, houses several different exhibits relating to the history of Billings. As luck would have it, 2007 is the 125th anniversary of the founding of Billings, so there were all sorts of special artifacts on display. There was even a theater presentation from KTVQ, Billings’ CBS affiliate, of video clips chronicling significant events in the city’s history.

After taking a look around the museum, I made it up to the rimrocks on the northern edge of Billings. The rimrocks are essentially steep cliffs that line the Yellowstone River Valley in which Billings is located. By taking one of two routes from downtown Billings, you can get on top of the rimrocks and look out on the entire city. It’s actually quite an amazing view.

After looking around at Billings for a bit, I got on Montana Highway 3 to head north. The landscape was definitely quite different than the one I had witnessed in the Yellowstone River Valley the previous day. Fertile, forested land alongside the river was replaced with a hilly, arid landscape dotted here and there with ranches or wheat farms.

The countryside was like that through the town of Broadview and for about 40 miles north of Billings. Then, in the town of Lavina and near the turn for U.S. Highway 12, the road entered another lush valley, this time the one of the Musselshell River.

As I traveled Highway 12 for the 45 miles between Lavina and Harlowton, the nearby river made it appear as if I was traveling through an entirely different state. The surroundings were very green, and there were trees everywhere.

I traveled through another abrupt change in scenery north of Harlowton, however, as I got off of Highway 12 to begin traveling north on U.S. Highway 191.

About 17 miles north of Harlowton, the road passes through Judith Gap, which is both a small town and geological feature. The town didn’t have much to see, but the geological feature was pretty neat. It’s just a big, flat gap, discovered during the Lewis & Clark Expedition, between the Little Belt Mountains to the west and the Big Snowy Mountains to the east. These mountains, rather mediocre by Rocky Mountain standards, would be the only ones I would get close to during my 2007 vacation.

Near the town of Moore, the road stops going straight, and motorists must turn either right or left. Turning right brings you back east to Glendive, while turning left brings you to Great Falls. Since my destination was the latter, turning left was the correct way to go.

The road west of Moore provides some more striking glimpses of the Little Belt Mountains as it winds its way through a flat, barren, treeless landscape near their northern slopes. The road also passes through some dying small towns – Hobson, Moccasin, Stanford, and Geyser – as it continues toward Great Falls.

For about 12 miles between the towns of Raynesford and Armington, the road dives into a deep, narrow valley. The road and paralleling railroad tracks both hug the valley’s walls in what ended up being one of the most scenic portions of the drive between Billings and Great Falls.

The road ascended the valley near Armington, and continued its journey through what’s referred to as the Judith Basin. It’s a barren, listless area starved for moisture by being so close to the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains.

In due course, Great Falls – the third largest city in Montana with a population of 56,690 – appeared out of nowhere. It was in this oasis of north-central Montana that I spent the night.

Pictures:

The first six pictures were taken from on top of the rimrocks in Billings. Unfortunately, I visited this site in the late morning, so the lighting wasn't ideal.

These two doves were walking back and forth, undoubtedly checking out the view below

It's amazing how dramatic the scenery contrasts here - while the city of Billings below is lush and green, cacti are able to grow on top of the rimrocks

The Little Belt Mountains can be seen of in the distance near Broadview

The roadway near Lavina

Downtown Harlowton

The Harlowton depot along with some railroad artifacts

About to pass through the Judith Gap

The Big Snowy Mountains near Judith Gap

Some plateaus that belong to the Little Belt Mountains

There were a number of steep cliffs like this near Raynesford

MDOT doesn't want you to climb the rocks

A southbound train is about to enter Raynesford

Some typical scenery between Raynesford and Armington

Video:

At the Rimrocks in Billings

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjxU11gdZBU

2007 Vacation: Day 4 Summary

2007-07-31T23:24:00.000-05:00

Day 4 Summary
Glendive, Montana to Billings, Montana

The fourth day of my 2007 vacation closely matched the fourth day of my 2006 vacation, so it’ll be best if I keep this entry short and provide a link to last year’s day 4 report.

One thing different about the trip from Glendive to Billings this year was that I found more pieces of the old U.S. Highway 10 to travel on. This kept me off of Interstate 94 and allowed me to see a few neat things, such as a couple historical markers near Terry. One marked the spot where the Powder River flows into the Yellowstone River, while another discussed the local region – its economy, geology, and history – and even contained a tiny pioneer cemetery where some unidentified remains are buried.

Both historical markers were set against the backdrop of the Terry Badlands – rocky, brown-colored hills that contrast nicely with the lushness of the Yellowstone River Valley, in which the interstate and small towns between Glendive and Billings are predominantly located. Though these badlands aren’t as impressive as their counterparts about 40 miles away near Glendive in Makoshika State Park, they are nevertheless neat to look at.

Near Tusler, or 8 miles northeast of Mile City, I found a nice recreation site next to the Yellowstone River. The site offered the opportunity to enjoy all sorts of activities, including fly fishing in the shallow river, picnicking at one of the nearby picnic tables, or walking down a paved path following a raging creek that flows into the river. You could even try your hand at hunting for the famed agates that line the Yellowstone River shore.

A couple of the largest remnants of old highway still intact are between Forsyth and Hysham and Custer and Huntley. Both stretches turned out to be very worthwhile to travel down. In fact, if you ask me, they are more scenic than the corresponding portions of interstate in the area. The old highway travels up and down hills lining the valley’s wall, while the interstate travels down primarily flat terrain.

I did see that Pompey’s Pillar National Monument near the town of the same name had changed a bit in the last year. The visitor’s center, which was still under construction last year, appeared to be all complete, and there was now an official entrance gate complete with a staffed ticket booth.

Other than that, not much had changed in the area, including the city of Billings. It was in that city that I spent the night.

Pictures:

Interstate 94 southwest of Glendive

Along the old U.S. Highway 10 - this bridge crosses the Powder River, near the spot where it empties into the Yellowstone River

There's a marker near the confluence of the Powder and Yellowstone Rivers

The following eight pictures were taken near the historic site to the southwest of Terry

You don't usually associate cacti with Montana, but they do show up in some places in the eastern portion of the state

The pioneer cemetery where some unknown remains are located

One of the gravestones - its only marking is the year 1878

The design on the fence lining the cemetery shows the animals which were important to pioneers in the area

The Yellowstone River near the Tulser Recreation Site - notice the cattle standing in the water?

The creek at the Tusler Recreation Area

The following five pictures were taken near Hathaway from an Interstate 94 rest area that overlooks the Yellowstone River and its adjoining valley

These pelicans were big enough, and flying low enough, to make shadows on the water below - it was a pretty neat effect

A westbound empty coal train curves of the Yellowstone River Valley

The Rosebud County courthouse in Forsyth is one of the biggest architectural masterpieces of eastern Montana - too bad it's hard to get a good picture of it and that the lighting was bad at the time I visited

A little bit of downtown Forsyth

F is for Forsyth - almost all towns in this part of Montana have their first letter prominently displayed on a nearby hill

Videos:

The Terry Badlands

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YUiPlXu0xM

Along the Yellowstone River near Tusler

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CklRo9kZZOI

2007 Vacation: Day 3 Summary

2007-07-30T15:43:00.000-05:00

Day 3 Summary
Dickinson, North Dakota to Glendive, Montana

Once again, day 3 of my 2007 vacation was similar to day 3 of my 2006 vacation, so I’ll direct you to the report I wrote last year.

One difference between 2006 and 2007 was the amount of time I spent looking around Dickinson. This year, I visited the Dickinson Dam on the west end of town as well as the campus of Dickinson State University.

The dam was located very near to the reservoir I visited in Dickinson last year, so the scenery was largely the same. Still, I once more enjoyed being near a lake – even if it was man-made – in the largely lake-free southwestern corner of North Dakota.

I don’t know what made me want to check out DSU, but I saw a sign along Villard Street (the old Highway 10) in Dickinson pointing toward it, luring me there. The campus turned out to be quite a nice place containing beautiful, old buildings as well as a fairly significant green space. My favorite site, however, turned out to be the International Flag Plaza and Walk of Pride next to the Student Center. The fairly new site consisted of a brick walkway, lined with memorial bricks purchased by alumni and friends of the university, as well as over a couple dozen flagpoles containing flags from all over the world. As a nearby plaque described, there is a flag displayed for each country that an international student at DSU comes from. As it turned out, I chose a good day to see all the flags, since there was a fairly significant breeze causing them to flap around.

After seeing DSU, it was time to head west toward the badlands around Theodore Roosevelt National Park. The scenery was just as great as last year in this area.

Something I found interesting was how empty the tourist trap town of Medora appeared to be when I passed through this year. Sure, there were still people buying knick-knacks in the shops or walking around the city’s streets, but, as tourist traps go, it wasn’t all that crowded. Perhaps it was just because I visited on a Tuesday; weekends probably see a lot of people on day trips to the area.

The drive from Medora to Glendive hadn’t changed much from 2006, so, once again, see last year's report. The oasis of Glendive served as the place where day 3 of my vacation came to an end.

Pictures:

The Dickinson Dam

Some interesting rocks near the dam

The following eight pictures were taken on the campus of Dickinson State University

Australia

Jamaica, Republic of Macedonia, Nepal (left to right)

DSU's Student Center

DSU's King Pavilion

The entrance to DSU

The following four pictures were taken on the road in the badlands east of Medora

Beware of cattle

The Medora post office

No trip out here woul dbe complete without making a stop to see the view at the Painted Canyon Visitors Center right off of Interstate 94

A coal train going to Superior, WI ascends the grueling hill east of Medora

The Yellowstone County courthouse in Beach, ND

The landscape north of Beach and about a mile east of the Montana/North Dakota border

One of the most prominent natural landmarks near Beach is Sentinel Butte, which stands at an elevation of 3430 feet above sea level

One of the first billboards eastbound travelers along Interstate 94 see upon arriving in North Dakota is this one for Medora, which is about 25 miles straight ahead

Video:

At the Dickinson Dam

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cR5p-zZ94ig

2007 Vacation: Day 2 Summary

2007-07-29T00:44:00.000-05:00

Day 2 Summary
Bismarck, North Dakota to Dickinson, North Dakota

Although there were a few differences, the second day of my 2007 vacation resembled the second day of my 2006 vacation. As a consequence, I’ll direct you to the day 2 report of my 2006 vacation and only point out the differences between 2006 and 2007 in this report.

One of the biggest differences was the route taken to get to Dickinson from Bismarck. In 2006, the route was pretty straightforward: I traveled along what’s left of the precursor to Interstate 94, the now-decommissioned U.S. Highway 10. This year, however, I yearned a bit beforehand to deviate from this path and visit the Beulah and Hazen areas. These two cities lie within the heart of the vast lignite coal fields of North Dakota and, as a result, contain numerous coal-fired power plants and related industries that, quite often, employ fresh blood from UND’s School of Engineering and Mines.

To get to this area from Bismarck, I decided to first take ND Highway 25 from just west of Mandan to Center, an aptly named city of 678 located in both the center of its county and state.

Although there’s a lot of North Dakota that is extremely rural, the area to the north and west of Mandan seems to be even more so. The hilly, treeless land around Center is better suited for coal mining than farming, meaning that not much settlement has ever occurred. In fact, Center is actually the last remaining city in its county (Oliver), which has a total population of only 2,065.

From Center, I got on ND Highway 48. A little more than 9 miles north of town, the highway ends at an intersection with ND Highway 200A and crosses the border of Mercer County, which also happens to be the border between the Central and Mountain Time Zones.

As the cities of Hazen and Beulah were located still farther to the west, I got on ND Highway 200A heading west. The barren, hilly landscape that I had traveled through since Mandan briefly gave way to a lush, cottonwood-laden landscape as the road traveled close to the Missouri River.

The change in landscape was short-lived, however, as the roadway exited the Missouri River Valley a little west of Stanton. Once more, the chief scenery consisted of barren hills and the stacks from close by coal-fired power plants.

West of Stanton, the next city on highway 200A is Hazen. This community of 2,457 is one of the largest in central North Dakota and, along with Beulah – a mere 10 miles away – makes up a 5,609 person “metropolitan area” that is the center of commerce and industry in the region.

Although I didn’t see any notable tourist attractions in Hazen while I was planning this vacation, I saw some signs pointing to the Riverside City Park while in town. I didn’t know what sort of park this might be, but I figured it might be a good idea to check it out.

The park ended up being in a secluded area nearly a mile south of town. Nevertheless, it turned up being an excellent tourist attraction for me, since it included an interesting and informative tree walk. Somewhere along the line – I believe I read that it was in 2000 – the Arbor Day Foundation donated a few dozen trees for public display. What’s more, every tree contains a placard describing what type of tree it is. I think I spent a good half hour, or maybe more, walking around the park, looking around at all the unique trees. It was a very enjoyable experience that I think would have been even more so had the trees appeared to be in better condition. Sadly, many of them appeared to be in rough health; the biggest problems were leafless branches and leaves being eaten by hungry insects. Hopefully the city of Hazen doesn’t let the collection worsen any further, as it really is a distinctive tourist attraction.

Before going to Beulah, I took a little detour and went to the Freedom Mine and Great Plains Synfuels Plant. The former is one of the largest coal mines in the area, while the latter is a large coal gasification plant – coal from the nearby mine is brought there and chemically converted to natural gas.

Since I didn’t know what, if anything, I’d be able to see of either the mine or the plant beforehand, it was nice to find a scenic overlook on a hill right across from the gasification plant. The overlook provided not just a good view of that place, but also of the coal mine as well as surrounding countryside. In addition, it had a huge scoop, presumably from one of the machines that once worked hard to scrape coal out of the strip mine.

After seeing the mine and plant, Beulah was next stop. The city is set in the deep Knife River Valley, so if you come in from the north (like I did), you start off relatively high in elevation and keep descending and descending until you finally reach the downtown part of the city.

From Beulah, it was off to ND Highway 49 to Glen Ullin, 30 miles south. While scenic, the landscape on this road was void of pretty much any signs of inhabitation. There was another coal mine or two, but that was about all.

Once in Glen Ullin, I got on the old U.S. Highway 10 to head toward Dickinson. The weather forecast had earlier mentioned the possibility of severe weather later in the afternoon, and by the time I got to Hebron, this forecast was appearing more and more accurate. Though the sky had gotten dark and more ominous while I was still in Beulah, it was very dark in Hebron. I waited around town until the inevitable storm blew past, which ended up happening with relative ease. The only thing Hebron got was a few sprinkles of rain and a few flashes of lightning; the worse part of the storm passed to the south, where it spawned a brief tornado warning.

As that storm continued moving eastward, the sky to the west started clearing. Eventually, the sky cleared enough to let the sun come out and dramatically light up the storm clouds pushing to the east.

As luck would have it, the sun came out right about at the time when I reached the hill north of Gladstone with the “Geese in Flight” metal sculpture advertising the nearby “Enchanted Highway.” The scenes from the hill were absolutely beautiful lit up the way that they were (check out the pictures below).

The sun was only present for a short while, though, as another storm fired up to the west and once again made the sky cloudy. Incredibly, this storm started moving right toward Gladstone and the hill I was on. I got to see nearly everything: the storm develop from out of thin air, grow in intensity, and finally pass directly overhead, bringing a torrential downpour, a little bit of lightening, and gusty winds.

The storm was well below severe thresholds, however, and only lasted a couple of minutes. Nevertheless, it provided a pretty neat experience. The sun even came out, once more, after the storm passed and brought with it a short-lived rainbow.

After enjoying the scenery from the hill for just a while longer, it was time to go the 11 miles to Dickinson to end the second day of my vacation.

Pictures:

The first nine photos were taken in Menoken, the small town east of Bismarck that the railroad has almost always called Burleigh

Menoken has a small school, still in use for grades K-8. Enrollment has dropped in recent years, however, as parents now have the option to send their children to the schools in Bismarck for more than just high school.

The Menoken School sign

Behind the school is a small pond

There were a lot of geese swimming in the pond

One of the many gophers(?) that were roaming around the school grounds

Fargo St. in Menoken

The tracks in Menoken, with the Burleigh station sign prominent in the background

An abandoned farm building to the east of Menoken

The Menoken Post Office was one of the only places still open for business in the city's "downtown"

An eastboudn train goes across the Missouri River in Bismarck

Boating on the Missouri

This recently-placed sculpture was on display in the park next to the Missouri River in Bismarck

Some scenery on the road to Center

Some more scenery near Center

Der Imbiss Bar & Grill in Center

The Center water tower is on top of a small hill on the city's east side

At The Missouri River Valley near Stanton

An example of one of the placards next to each of the trees in Hazen's Riverside Park

A buckeye growing on an Ohio Buckeye tree in Hazen's Riverside Park

The following five pictures are from the scenic overlook near Beulah

After the first storm passed when I was near Hebron, the second storm started firing up to the west

The remnants of the first storm I saw

The following ten pictures were taken from the hill with the "Geese in Flight" sculpture. You can see the storm clouds from the first storm illuminated by the sun, the second storm coming in and blocking the sun, the second storm building in intensity and pushing westward, and, finally, the sun coming out once again after the second storm's passage.

Videos:

An overview of the scenic overlook near Beulah

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfahZ8vcRvY

An overview of the hill near the "Geese in Flight" Enchanted Highway Sculpture

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDvxrEzYTF4

An somewhat of a timelapse video of the thunderstorm passing overhead at the "Geese in Flight" sculpture

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jfv9Tx3hbNc

2007 Vacation: Day 1 Summary

2007-07-27T12:52:00.000-05:00

Day 1 Summary
Brainerd, Minnesota to Bismarck, North Dakota

The first day of my 2007 vacation found me following a route I’d already followed twice before – Brainerd, Minnesota to Bismarck, North Dakota all in one day. I actually decided to do this on purpose, since I had wanted to venture once more through North Dakota. I’ve really developed an affinity for the countryside that surrounds Interstate 94 as it meanders 352 miles through the Peace Garden State.

Because the path I took this year between Brainerd and Bismarck closely resembles the one I took last year, it’s probably best to direct you to the report I wrote last year around this time. There really isn’t that much that I would add to that report, and I think it makes more sense to include a link to it rather than writing the same thing over again.

With that out of the way, it’s still worth noting that even though my report may not have changed from last year, my photos and video from this portion of the trip are all new. It’d actually be pretty hard to go out to this region year after year and not continually find new and interesting subjects to photograph.

Pictures:

A westbound empty coal train descends the "peak" of the Alta Ridge east of Valley City, ND

The same train pictured above going across the big bridge over the Sheyenne River in Valley City, ND

The train once more, this time making a stop in Berea, ND to pick up a locomotive

The landscape near Berea, ND along with some spooky clouds

Even spookier clouds just east Sanborn, ND - those white specks in the water are geese

The following four photos were taken near the Crystal Springs Waterfowl Production Area about 43 miles west of Jamestown near the city of Crystal Springs. The area is accessible from a rest area along the westbound lanes of Interstate 94.

Was this picture taken in Burleigh, ND or Menoken, ND? It's Burleigh if you ask the railroad, but Menoken if you ask local residents or consult a road map. The dual names have existed since 1891, when the Northern Pacific Railroad decided too many places on its lines began with the letter M and renamed its Menoken station Burleigh (after the name of the county the town lines in). The townspeople weren't impressed, however, and continue to stick with the name Menoken.

The Menoken, ND post office

I returned to Menoken/Burleigh the following day, so look for more photos from there in the next entry

Videos:

An overview of the Crystal Springs Waterfowl Production Area

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oKQDcmrZwU

Back from Vacation

2007-07-18T22:57:00.000-05:00

I thought I’d just write a quick note on here to mention that I just returned home from another 10-day vacation. This year’s vacation included some territory I’d traveled in just one year ago, some territory I’d never traveled in before, and an entirely different country (Canada).

Hopefully and with some luck, I’ll have reports – including pictures and videos – posted on here soon. Keep checking back for more!

Flood of '97 Series: Conclusion

2007-06-11T03:43:00.001-05:00

Well, I know it’s late, but at least I’ve gotten it posted. I wanted to have some sort of conclusion to the series of entries I made earlier this spring relating to the flood of 1997. This may not be quite the conclusion I wanted to write, but at least it’s something.

While there were plenty of hardships along the way to recovery, in general, the 10 years since the flood have proceeded quite well for the Red River Valley. Few outward signs of the flood’s destruction remain, and, even though it might have been reasonable to assume that there would be a bit of an exodus of local citizens following the devastation, this has by and large not been the case. The number of people living within close proximity to the Red River is likely the same as, if not higher than, the number of people living within close proximity before the flood. However, even so, there were many residences that were torn down because the federal government deemed that they were too close to the river and too prone to flooding in record flood events like the one of 1997.

Grand Forks, which arguably had the most out of any city to lose following the flood, has rebounded particularly well. After staying rather steady following the flood, the city’s population is now higher than what it was in 1997. New construction – of houses and businesses alike – continues at a rapid pace within the city, with projects being announced seemingly all the time.

Two of the most noticeable projects completed after the flood are the multimillion dollar Alerus Center and Ralph Engelstad Arena. The former is the largest indoor arena and convention center between Minneapolis and Seattle, while the latter is often described as one of the best arenas in the world and is home, of course, to UND’s men’s and women’s hockey teams. Even though the Alerus Center was conceived before the flood, and the Ralph Engelstad Arena probably would have been built regardless, both structures have helped outwardly signify that Grand Forks continues to progress forward following the flood.

Downtown Grand Forks, the heavily flooded, burned, and bruised portion of the city, has also sprung back to life. There has been a recent push to make the downtown area the central hub of Grand Forks by creating more green space, establishing more diverse businesses, and creating more housing space. Even the portion of downtown most seriously destroyed by fire has been rebuilt and transformed into a popular condominium development.

Although there’s no guarantee that the future won’t bring a similar-sized flood of the same magnitude as the one in 1997, the past 10 years have been spent ensuring that the effects of such a flood are as minor as possible. As previously mentioned, many homes and businesses in areas likely to go underwater in a major flood have been demolished or moved since 1997. Additionally, government officials have dictated that no new structures will be placed in these areas.

Many cities throughout the Red River Valley have refined their protection against major flooding by building better dikes and floodwalls that can withstand flooding as bad as or worse than that seen in 1997. The cities of Grand Forks and East Grand Forks received major federal and state funds to build a series of walls and dikes along the river. Grand Forks’ flood protection, which was just recently completed and dedicated as a part of the 10-year anniversary commemorations this past spring, protects the city from a river crest 2 feet higher than 1997’s crest.

The increased protection serves to illustrate the point that people of the Red River Valley are committed not to let the threat of flooding drive them away from their cherished homes and communities. Though it’s impossible to completely tame the Red River so that it won’t cause any more major flooding in the future, proper planning and awareness of the river’s devastating power will continue to lessen the chances of having such a destructive flood happen again.

Videos related to this entry:
The following two videos are montages of video taken during and after the flood. The first comes from KMSP-TV and the second from KARE-TV.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCaLWJiYpu4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4eXN9JY03c

Sources used in writing this entry:
Beyond the Flood. Videocassette. Minnesota Broadcasters Association, 1997.

Flood of '97 Series: Reopenings

2007-05-07T14:52:00.000-05:00

The first half of May in 1997 was characterized by the sights, sounds, and oftentimes, smells of flood-recovery efforts. Those whose homes had been damaged were kept busy by the stressful task of sorting through damaged belongings and discarding everything that could not salvaged. In most cases, anything that touched the floodwaters could safely be called unsalvageable.

Preliminary estimates revealed the extent to which homes were damaged within the valley. In Grand Forks, 16,000 homes were officially declared damaged; in East Grand Forks, the number was 2,500 homes. Elsewhere, there were 600 damaged homes in Breckenridge and between 200 and 300 in Ada. Estimates for the total cost of all structures damaged were running well into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Although the Red River had been quick to rise to bring about devastating flooding, it was taking its time to recede. By the second week of May, the flood was 1997 was still technically occurring, as all gauges along the Red River were continuing to report levels above flood stage. It wouldn’t be until May 17 that the Red would drop below flood stage at its headwaters in Wahpeton/Breckenridge. For Grand Forks and East Grand Forks, the Red didn’t drop below flood stage until May 19 – nearly a full month after it crested at 54.33 feet.

Still, even at levels above flood stage, the river was manageable at this time, and communities, large and small, that had frantically built earthen and ring dikes in the days before flooding struck were busy taking them down. Grand Forks’ temporary dikes, which were blocking streets and disrupting traffic patterns in some cases, began coming down on May 5. Elsewhere, county roads that had been cut through in order to prevent overland flooding from taking over houses and communities were slowly being repaired.

May 8 turned into a significant day for UND, since it was the day that what had been called the “virtual university” was shut down and the actual university officially reopened. Although not all staff returned to their jobs on this first day, the reopening symbolized that UND had successfully endured the flood.

Preparing residence halls to house flood-victims and relief workers continued to be a high priority for university officials, who announced on May 8 how they would apportion the available rooms. Summer session students would be housed in Selke and Noren Halls, UND employees and their families would get Brannon, McVey, and West Halls, displaced residents would be assigned to Fulton, Johnstone, and Smith Halls, relief workers and trades people to Squires Hall, and FEMA and Small Business Administration employees to Swanson Hall. Bek, Hancock and Walsh halls, still needing repairs from flood damage, would be held as backup facilities and used only if all other space filled up. “Opening day” for occupancy was set as May 10.

FEMA was instrumental in the behind-the-scenes work of getting the residence halls open to flood victims. The government agency had already announced that it would compensate the university all costs involved in providing the emergency housing, and, in turn, set up a system so that all flood victims could get the housing at no cost.

As important as May 8 was, May 12 was even more important, since it marked the start of the summer session at UND. The complete, on-time, beginning of classes, which seemed nearly unfeasible at the time it was announced during the height of flooding ended up taking place without much of a hitch. Enrollment for the summer session totaled 2,852 students – down from the previous year’s number of 3,382, but better than the earlier projection of a 30 percent decline.

Grand Forks and East Grand Forks were finally fully connected once more on May 13 after the Sorlie Bridge on DeMers Avenue reopened. The Point Bridge, another of the three bridges spanning the Red River between the two cities, reopened for traffic on May 11.

With the May 12 announcement that water within the city of Grand Forks was once more safe to drink, the city was well on its way to recovery. Just how long the recovery process would take, however, was unknown.

Check back around May 15 for a “conclusion” to this series.

Pictures related to this entry:

Sources used in writing this entry:
Orvik, Jan, and Dick Larson. The Return of Lake Agassiz: the University of North Dakota and the Flood of 1997. Grand Forks, ND: University of North Dakota, 1998.

Staff of the [Fargo] Forum, comp. Fighting Back: the Blizzards and Flood in the Red River Valley, 1996-97. Fargo, ND: Forum Communications Company, 1997.

Staff of the Grand Forks Herald and Knight-Ridder Newspapers, comp. Come Hell and High Water: the Incredible Story of the 1997 Red River Flood. Grand Forks, ND: Grand Forks Herald, 1997.

April Pictures

2007-05-02T22:45:00.000-05:00

I wanted to take some time now and post something not entirely related to the flood of 1997 - pictures that I took during the past month. As you may notice, all of these photos are posted at the recently-created Picasa Web Albums over at Google. Although I'm not completely sold on this service yet, it does provide something I've been looking for: a place to publicly and easily share my photos. Imageshack, which I have been using to host my pictures, recently launched an image sharing service, but, so far, I haven't been impressed. The servers there are often slow, and it appears impossible to group photos into individual albums. Plus, it should go without saying that Google's service makes it much easier to search for photos that others have uploaded. With any luck, I'll be working on my photo galleries at Google during the next few weeks, so that soon you'll be able to go to http://picasaweb.google.com/mw1125 and view photos that I've taken.

April 3, 2007: The month of April started off on a particularly cold, wintry side throughout much of the Upper Midwest. While not unheard of, the cold was still unusual for the month of April, and was even accompanied with a storm that dumped nearly a foot of snow in some areas of central and northern Minnesota. The Grand Forks area missed the worst of the storm, but still picked up nearly an inch of snow and enjoyed scenes of blowing snow reminiscent of, perhaps, December 3 rather than April 3.

Though the coulee had just become ice-free a few days prior, it froze up once again on April 3 after more than a day of below-freezing temperatures. The new ice was very smooth thanks to the strong winds pushing at the water while it was freezing.

In this photo, you can see streaks of blowing snow being pushed down the sidewalk in the 30 mph winds.

Bundling up was a necessity at the time - the temperature was 14°F, and, with a wind blowing at 28 mph, the wind chill was -6°F. This was probably one of the coldest April days I've ever experienced.

April 4, 2007: After the snowstorm, high pressure settled in, and the following day was relatively clear. Early in the evening, I slowly walked behind Twamley Hall (the administrative building at UND) to see if I could get pictures of the huge flock of robins I had noticed hanging around a few nearby trees a few days earlier. The robins were a bit aprehensive of me at first, but eventually they started coming closer so that they could get some sips from a puddle created by melting snow.

This one here was doing his best to convince me that he wasn't the one who dropped the butt into the puddle. I wasn't buying it, though.

I don't know what kind of birds these are, but they were also sitting in the same trees the robins were.

The coulee was still frozen, as the temperature on April 4 did not make it above 25°F for the entire day. At 7 pm, the temperature was 21°F and the wind chill 6°F. The February-like temperatures made it strange to still be light out so late in the day.

April 14, 2007: With temperatures settling into a more seasonal pattern by the middle of the month, I went out to take a few pictures of the coulee at UND. My intention was to compare these pictures with those taken in roughly the same areas 10 years prior during the major flood. I never got around to doing that, but it's still interesting to note how drastically different the pictures would have turned out if I would have taken them April 14, 1997.

This is the western side of Smith Hall. 10 years ago on roughly this date, water would have been approaching the top of the dike protecting the hall and volunteers would be busy stacking sandbags on top of it.

Another view of the west side of Smith Hall. Once again, the coulee ran right up to the basement of the hall, almost submerging it completely.

This is the Fox Memorial Bridge going over the coulee. During the worst of the flood, the water came up to the top of the black railing.

The Adelphi Fountain stand next to the coulee. Water came up nearly to the spot where I stood to take this picture.

April 20, 2007: Like all other universities around the country, UND mourned the victims of the Virginia Tech shootings. On what was declared the National Day of Mourning, a Virginia Tech display unexpectedly (to me, anyway) showed up in one of the most highly trafficked areas of campus.

I don't know if the original intent was to have people post messages on the display, but here's one that somebody wrote. I think this is the only one that ever appeared on the outdoor display, as there was an "official" poster-type of board available in the student union for people to send condolences and well-wishes. That board ended up being completely full of dozens, maybe hundreds, of messages from different people.

While out taking pictures, everything just lined up perfectly to get this shot. A small hole that allowed the sun to peek through suddenly appeared in the sky while I was near the flag next to Twamley Hall. Even more fortunate was that the wind at the time was relatively strong and blowing from such a direction so as to illuminate the flag perfectly head-on. In addition, the sky behind the flag looked ominous thanks to the sun reflecting off the clouds, and the flag itself was at half-mast out of respect to victims of the Virginia Tech tragedy. All in all, this was probably one of the most beautiful, short-lived scenes I've ever witnessed.

Just to add it as a side note, the flag was ironically ripped right off the pole a few hours later during a windstorm/thunderstorm that rolled through the area with winds topping 60 mph.

April 25, 2007: The Virginia Tech display ended up staying in place for one week. Later on the 25th, a Thursday, some fresh flowers were laid at its base. I intended to wait for the sun to come out on Friday morning so that I could get some pictures, but, by then, the display was gone, and the flowers were placed near the eagle monument.

Flood of '97 Series: "Mucking Out"

2007-04-30T15:41:00.000-05:00

“Mucking out” became the new buzzword in the Red River Valley as victims of the flooding began returning to their muddy, barely recognizable houses. By this time, the worst of the floodwater had gone into Manitoba, where it was besieging the small, francophone community of Sainte-Agathe.

South of the border, communities along the Red River and its tributaries north of Grand Forks were slowly recovering from what the flood had done there. With the exception of the tiny town of Robbin, Minnesota, there was, thankfully, no instance of an entire community going under water in this area. Even so, there were quite a few individual homes, businesses, and churches that did succumb to flooding. What turned out being the greatest legacy of the flood of 1997 in this region, however, is the number of people forced to relocate as a result of living on land too susceptible to flooding or in the way of proposed dikes, levees, and diversion channels intended to protect the small towns in the area. To read more about this region and its connection to the flood of 1997, see the related links below.

Throughout Grand Forks at this time, residents were returning to homes that were entirely different from the ones they had left nearly two weeks earlier. Though many would be restorable with a lot of hard work, some were nothing more than a heap of wreckage. In particular, homes that had sustained floodwaters up to their roofs in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Grand Forks and The Point and Sherlock Park neighborhoods of East Grand Forks were the worst off. In these areas, the homes would be unsalvageable; all residents could do was rummage through the debris for any small treasures that could be saved.

Even for those fortunate enough to be living in the western half of Grand Forks and be unaffected by the floodwaters, there remained a sense of discomfort. Electrical, water, and sewer systems were still nonexistent in Grand Forks on April 30. Though the water system (as well as the emergency room in the city’s hospital) was restored on May 2, it would still be many more days before residents had dependable electricity in their homes. Nighttime curfews remained in effect, with officials asking all people who had decided to move back into their homes not to go anywhere after dark.

Getting rid of flood-damaged material accelerated after May 1 when residents in flood-stricken areas of Grand Forks and East Grand Forks began trudging down into their still-wet basements and emerged with armfuls of debris that would then be piled onto increasingly taller heaps on lawns, sidewalks, berms, and city streets. After it was discovered that out-of-towners were ruthlessly coming and taking flood-damaged appliances so that they could resell them later, angry homeowners began spray-painting messages on the items or “customizing” them with several bashes from a baseball bat (also known as “flood therapy”).

The recollections of several UND students from Grand Forks upon returning to their hometown are recounted in the book published by UND following the flood:

“I was not prepared to see the cars that were sitting on lawns because they had floated there in the flood. I did not expect to see houses off their foundations, with water lines left by the flood next to the roof. I was also not prepared for the smell. The hardest thing that I had to deal with upon returning was having no water. I did not like having no showers and using outhouses.”

“When we arrived, I never expected to see what I saw. Driving over the bridge on Gateway Drive, I saw a living room recliner hanging on the side of the bridge, children’s toys littering the streets, and household items scattered everywhere. Reaching our home, I was absolutely horrified because everything I owned was ruined. I eventually managed to salvage a few things from my room, like a few dirty, curled-up pictures and a couple of special letters, which were now crinkled, smeared, and brown. It was then I realized everything I now owned fit into a shoe box.”

“When I entered Grand Forks, I immediately covered my nose because the stench was so strong and crude. It took a while to get used to it. I didn’t really know what to expect to see, maybe a few puddles of water. What I did see was garbage lying all over. Empty sandbags were scattered on the sides of roads, some furniture pieces in people’s yards, and porta-potties on every street corner.”

At UND during this time, students living in the residence halls east of the English Coulee were asked to get their belongings beginning May 1. It remained vital to clean the residence halls up as quickly as possible, since UND was committed to doing what it could to permit flood victims to have temporary housing over the summer. One of the problems standing in the way of this, however, was the extensive damage that had taken place in the lower levels of the Bek, Hancock, Johnstone, Smith, Squires, and Swanson Residence Halls. In order to hasten the clean-up efforts, FEMA formally approached the university to provide beds for up to 1,000 evacuees and assist with clean-up costs for all the residence halls.

The campus was slowly returning to normal, even as new problems continued to be discovered. One of these dealt with the underground steam system on campus. Once it was restarted, large “geysers” of steam began spraying out of the ground, signifying that the insulation on the pipes transferring the steam had disintegrated during the flood.

The first contracts were awarded for flood clean-up, and work quickly began on thoroughly drying out all buildings on campus. Any material that had gotten wet in the flood was removed at once; walls and floors were power-washed, scrubbed, bleached, scraped, disinfected, and washed again. In the end, attacking any potential problems caused by mold or other microorganisms saved the university an untold amount of money. As others in Grand Forks would find out, the longer a flood-damaged building was left to stand after the flood, the greater the problems stemming from mold and other contamination became.

President Kendell Baker in the first few days of May announced that the University would officially reopen on Thursday, May 8. As scheduled, the following Monday, May 12, would mark the first day of the 1997 summer semester.

Check back around May 5 for the next installment in this series.

Links related to this entry:
Click here to read about the changes that have taken place in the Red River Valley north of Grand Forks in the 10 years since the flood (registration may be required).

Something I haven't really covered is the anger many in the Red River Valley felt toward the National Weather Service, and its faulty predictions, in the weeks immediately following the flood. Click here to read an article describing how the National Weather Service has changed how it predicts major flooding events in the wake of the Flood of 1997 (registration may be required).

Videos related to this entry:
After being forced out of their homes in the Grand Forks/East Grand Forks area nearly two weeks earlier, there remained many flood victims scattered around the region on April 30.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9wQZDC7GkI

A profile of Grand Forks' mayor Pat Owens, whose commendable leadership during the devastating flooding and subsequent recovery of her city has been praised as being one of the reasons Grand Forks has rebounded so well 10 years after the flood.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xEotT6v4PA

On May 2, the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Grand Forks remains lifeless and utterly devastated. This report, narrated as only KARE 11's Ken Speake could, was one of the most memorable following the flood.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8bC5lf1o7Q

Pictures related to this entry:

Sources used in writing this entry:
Beyond the Flood. Videocassette. Minnesota Broadcasters Association, 1997.

Orvik, Jan, and Dick Larson. The Return of Lake Agassiz: the University of North Dakota and the Flood of 1997. Grand Forks, ND: University of North Dakota, 1998.

Staff of the [Fargo] Forum, comp. Fighting Back: the Blizzards and Flood in the Red River Valley, 1996-97. Fargo, ND: Forum Communications Company, 1997.

Staff of the Grand Forks Herald and Knight-Ridder Newspapers, comp. Come Hell and High Water: the Incredible Story of the 1997 Red River Flood. Grand Forks, ND: Grand Forks Herald, 1997.

Flood of '97 Series: An Angel gives a Gift

2007-04-27T14:37:00.000-05:00

After being separated for 10 days, the cities of Grand Forks and East Grand Forks were linked together once again on April 28 when the Kennedy Bridge crossing the Red River on U.S. Highway 2 reopened. This unexpectedly turned into a momentous event after numerous residents decided to get in their vehicles and wait for their chance just to be one of the first to cross the newly-opened bridge.

The bridge reopening was a piece of good news among the all the grim at the time. The Red River was continuing to drop, and, consequently, more and more residents of Grand Forks and East Grand Forks were being allowed back into their homes. However, with electricity still severed, water and sewer systems still down, and water still trapped in the basements of the homes in many of the neighborhoods being opened up, residents were only allowed to come back during the daytime hours; they had to return to their temporary homes after dark. What many residents came back to were homes that were, at best, cold and desolate and, at worst, barely recognizable. Although many wanted to assess their damages and begin the long cleanup process right away, this was made complicated by the water remaining in basements. In order to prevent basement walls from collapsing, both Grand Forks and East Grand Forks city officials cautioned against being too quick to pump any water out.

The first rough estimate of property damage in Grand Forks and East Grand Forks came in on April 26, and it was pegged at $775 million. What could not be calculated, however, were the costs resulting in the residents’ loss of family treasures and confidence in themselves and their future.

The spirits of local residents were lifted greatly on April 29, though, when a miraculous gift from an “angel” was announced. A woman who did not wish to be identified pledged to donate $15 million to Grand Forks and East Grand Forks, allowing each household in the two cities to receive $2,000. Only after news media tracked down ownership of the airplane she used to survey flood damage in the area was the incredible philanthropist identified as Joan Kroc, a Minnesota native and widow of McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc. She had been in the area working anonymously with the many relief agencies in the area assisting flood victims.

Elsewhere around the Red River Valley at this time, Interstate 29 was slowly being opened between Fargo and the U.S.-Canada border. The stretch from Grand Forks to Fargo, which had been closed for 16 days, reopened on April 27. This was a relief to many motorists who were getting increasingly frustrated with the worsening conditions on the back road that was being used as a detour between the two cities.

After cresting at 54.94 feet in Pembina, ND and St. Vincent, MN on April 26, the Red River was also falling there, meaning that the flood of 1997 was over for people living south of the border. Although this was the highest crest ever seen in the cities of Pembina and St. Vincent, major damages were avoided thanks to the diligent efforts in raising dikes as well as higher crest predictions that ended up not materializing.

Work continued at UND to bring the campus back to a resemblance of normal. Power systems, which had been completely shut off before major flooding occurred, were drying out and being brought back online. Making the decision to turn off electricity before water entered buildings ended up being one of the wisest things done at UND, since electrical equipment that is shut off before getting wet needs only to be completely dried out before being turned back on. On the other hand, electrical equipment that is left on while wet usually needs to be replaced completely and at a great cost.

All residence halls behind Wilkerson Hall were officially opened up on April 29 so that students could retrieve their belongings. Enough resident assistants had returned to allow the check-out process to run smoothly.

Inspections of campus buildings inevitably revealed new, unexpected damages during this time. Elevators, which are normally programmed to go to the lowest level in a building when power to them is shut off, were flooded in many places. Sewer systems, sidewalks, and the electrical, steam, and telecommunications tunnels underneath the campus also showed significant damages.

Check back around April 30 for the next installment in this series.

Videos related to this entry:
An "angel" comes to help the citizens of Grand Forks and East Grand Forks in the form of $2,000 checks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFpDgHOAFDw

Pictures related to this entry:

Sources used in writing this entry:
Beyond the Flood. Videocassette. Minnesota Broadcasters Association, 1997.

Orvik, Jan, and Dick Larson. The Return of Lake Agassiz: the University of North Dakota and the Flood of 1997. Grand Forks, ND: University of North Dakota, 1998.

Staff of the [Fargo] Forum, comp. Fighting Back: the Blizzards and Flood in the Red River Valley, 1996-97. Fargo, ND: Forum Communications Company, 1997.

Staff of the Grand Forks Herald and Knight-Ridder Newspapers, comp. Come Hell and High Water: the Incredible Story of the 1997 Red River Flood. Grand Forks, ND: Grand Forks Herald, 1997.

Flood of '97 Series: Cleanup Begins

2007-04-25T14:11:00.000-05:00

By April 25, the flood of 1997 was slowly coming to an end south of the United States-Canada border. The worst of the floodwater was coming into Pembina, North Dakota and St. Vincent, Minnesota – two cities just slightly south of the border. Though residents of both cities had to wage the same sort of battles as had been waged upstream in places such as Grand Forks, Fargo, and Wahpeton, they were largely spared the same fate as had befallen the cities of Grand Forks and East Grand Forks. One of the reasons for this was that the Red River spread out farther and became wider as it flowed north of Grand Forks. Although this meant more land – mostly farmfields – went underwater, it also meant that the water flowed slower and with less force. This allowed dikes, including the plywood one defending the city of Drayton, North Dakota, to be slightly more effective. Another saving grace for the residents north of Grand Forks was their ability to see the major destruction upstream and better prepare themselves for the water’s onslaught.

Perhaps nobody was more acutely aware of the water’s potentially devastating effects than those living along the Red River in Manitoba. For days, people there had been tuned to Grand Forks’ local television station, WDAZ-TV, wondering what the water was going to do once it got to their communities. In the end, about 2,500 homes in Manitoba were destroyed, with 100 eventually being demolished altogether. Even so, only one community, Sainte-Agathe, was completely submerged by water during what was known as the “flood of the century” and what had prompted one of the largest mass evacuations in the history of Manitoba. In Manitoba’s capital and most populous city, Winnipeg, flooding ended up being minimal thanks in large part to a diversion channel built after a destructive flood there nearly a half century earlier as well as a massive earthen dike constructed just days before the worst of the floodwater reached the area. Had these two things not been in place to protect the city, the majority of Winnipeg might have gone under, and well over 500,000 Winnipeggers might have had their homes damaged or destroyed.

In Grand Forks at this time, the Red River still remained very high, above the 50 foot mark. Nevertheless, the water was clearly receding, and some houses that had been sitting in water a few days before were now dry on the outside. This allowed the National Guard on April 24 to let some people back into the city for a few hours to check on the condition of their homes. Others would be allowed back in as the water continued to fall and their safety could be assured.

Newt Gingrich, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, visited Grand Forks and East Grand Forks on April 25. He got a look at the damage firsthand and reaffirmed President Clinton’s pledge of 3 days earlier to get aid from the federal government into the region as quickly as possible.

Fargo was slowly returning to normal. On April 25, city crews began taking down the emergency earthen dike built south of town as well as some of the earthen dikes built on downtown streets. By April 26, the Red River dropped below 36 feet, signaling that the worst of the floodwater had left. The flood had damaged 86 homes in Fargo and 41 homes in Moorhead.

At UND during this time, the “virtual university” was virtually a reality. The deans for each of the colleges on campus had been set up with a “virtual office” consisting of a chair, table, and telephone. Email access was restored on April 24.

The UND call center continued to be flooded with nearly 2,500 calls a day. Of course, there were a lot of very similar questions, and in order to deal with this, University Relations made fact sheets and news releases covering the most frequently asked questions. This information was then posted on UND’s website or placed in newspapers wherever evacuees had scattered throughout the region.

One frequent question dealt with housing. With so many people in the area unsure if they would have a house to come back to, many wanted to know what sort of temporary housing UND could provide. With the knowledge that the university could use its residence halls to house flood victims during the summer, officials made it a top priority to get Brannon Hall cleaned as quickly as possible so that it could be the first residence hall made available for disaster housing.

But in order to get the residence halls open for temporary housing, flood damage had to be cleaned up, the buildings had to be safe to live in, and, perhaps most importantly at first, students’ belongings had to be taken out. Because of this, all residence halls west of the coulee – West, McVey, Brannon, Selke, and Noren – were opened on April 25 for students to check-out. With the sewer system still down and few housing staff on hand, conditions were less than ideal. Nevertheless, about 15 to 20 students moved out on April 25, with more continuing to do so during the next couple days.

The payroll run, a normally routine operation for UND, was carried out under extraordinary conditions on April 25. UND’s mainframe computer generates payroll not only for employees of UND, but for employees at all the other higher education institutes in North Dakota. This became a problem because, after flooding threatened all buildings at UND, the mainframe was disassembled and taken to NDSU in Fargo. Therefore, in order to run the payroll, technicians had to recover databases and restore software systems at this remote location. Although they very came close to not making it, UND Payroll staff members were able to enter every available timeslip and payroll revision by Friday (the 25th), making payday came on time for all those employed at one of the 11 campuses in the North Dakota University System.

Check back around April 27 for the next installment in this series.

Links related to this entry:
Click here to read an article that appeared in Tuesday's Grand Forks Herald describing the plywood wall keeping the town of Drayton, North Dakota dry during this time in 1997 (registration may be required).

Videos related to this entry:
The 10 o'clock KARE 11 news from April 25 shows recovery efforts getting underway in Grand Forks and Newt Gingrich visiting the region.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSuNj0FKyHQ

A report on the journalists diligently working to get information to flood victims scattered throughout the region - including the use of maps to give callers an idea of possible flood damage around their homes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GV9txNXx8qE

Pictures related to this entry:

Sources used in writing this entry:
Orvik, Jan, and Dick Larson. The Return of Lake Agassiz: the University of North Dakota and the Flood of 1997. Grand Forks, ND: University of North Dakota, 1998.

Staff of the [Fargo] Forum, comp. Fighting Back: the Blizzards and Flood in the Red River Valley, 1996-97. Fargo, ND: Forum Communications Company, 1997.

Staff of the Grand Forks Herald and Knight-Ridder Newspapers, comp. Come Hell and High Water: the Incredible Story of the 1997 Red River Flood. Grand Forks, ND: Grand Forks Herald, 1997.

Flood of '97 Series: "Turning the Corner"

2007-04-23T19:15:00.000-05:00

April 23 bought more good news to the cities of Grand Forks and East Grand Forks. Although many houses nearest to the river still had water up to their rooftops, in other places of the city, it was quite apparent that the floodwater was receding. The Red River, at the moment one of the widest rivers in North America, was finally reverting back to its tamer, narrower self.

The cities of Grand Forks and East Grand Forks continued to be virtually empty, and it appeared that they would be that way for at least a few more days. Those living in areas left relatively dry would be able to come back to their homes the soonest, but those living in the areas entirely inundated would have to wait much longer – a couple of weeks in some cases.

Everybody who evacuated seemed to have one question – “how deep was the water in my part of town?” To try to answer this, KCNN Radio, which had become one of the most important providers of news during the flood, sifted through videotape footage and other reports to put together a map of Grand Forks and East Grand Forks that showed how deep the water had gotten in the different parts of the cities. All one needed to do was call into the station, give his or her address, and somebody at a phone bank would look at the map and estimate how high the water had been. People reacted differently to the news, with some relieved that water had not gotten as high as they had feared and others finally beginning to get a sense of how much post-flood cleanup would be required once they were allowed back into their home.

As the river continued to fall, the sewer system in the city of Grand Forks was slowly brought back online. By the end of the day, 16 of 36 lift stations in the city were working. At the Grand Forks Air Base, the number of evacuees still there had decreased to 600, with more and more people finding temporary housing elsewhere.

Media attention continued to be focused on Grand Forks and East Grand Forks as Elizabeth Dole, President of the American Red Cross, came to town. She toured flooded areas with North Dakota First Lady Nancy Shafer and Grand Forks Mayor Pat Owens.

At UND on April 23, recovery efforts increased. After making an inspection of nearly all the university’s buildings the day before, Plant Services officials put together a color-coded campus map that indicated which buildings had sustained flood damage and the extent to which damage occurred. This map became important because it gave university officials a good idea of which buildings would likely be ready for use during the summer semester, which was still expected to begin as scheduled on May 12.

The phone bank that was an essential part of UND’s “virtual university” became operational on this day, and incoming phone calls numbered into the thousands. It took a team of 20 staff working rotating shifts to ensure the call center ran smoothly.

For the first time since the university canceled the remainder of the spring semester, all of the academic deans got together. One of their first priorities was to contact each person scheduled to teach in the summer and find out if he or she would be able to beginning on the 12th. There ended up being only one faculty member who was unable to.

One of the happiest moments on campus came in the evening when Food Service employees provided the first “Red Tag Dinner,” as they would later come to be known, to university officials with “red tags” – tags that identified them as being associated with the university. Even though the menu was limited to whatever was in storage in the Food Services Building, the dinners provided those camped out at the university some of their first hot meals in days.

Water continued to recede downstream in Fargo on this day as well. Cleanup of the Oak Grove Lutheran School and surrounding neighborhood began with help from faculty and students from Hillcrest Lutheran Academy in Fergus Falls. The town of Ada also intensified its cleanup efforts after it was reported that most of the town’s 1,700 residents had returned.

Check back on April 25 for the next installment in this series.

Pictures related to this entry:
Here is one of those maps that shows the extent of flood damage in Grand Forks and East Grand Forks.

Sources used in writing this entry:
Orvik, Jan, and Dick Larson. The Return of Lake Agassiz: the University of North Dakota and the Flood of 1997. Grand Forks, ND: University of North Dakota, 1998.

Staff of the [Fargo] Forum, comp. Fighting Back: the Blizzards and Flood in the Red River Valley, 1996-97. Fargo, ND: Forum Communications Company, 1997.

Staff of the Grand Forks Herald and Knight-Ridder Newspapers, comp. Come Hell and High Water: the Incredible Story of the 1997 Red River Flood. Grand Forks, ND: Grand Forks Herald, 1997.

Varley, Jane. Flood Stage and Rising. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2005.

Flood of '97 Series: President Clinton Visits

2007-04-22T20:58:00.000-05:00

This Grand Forks Herald article recalling the events of April 22, 1997 was put together by staff writer Mike Brue.

On the day a U.S. president came to Greater Grand Forks, the Red River's record flood crest did, too.

The path to disaster was ending.

Bill Clinton's visit brought more national and international attention to the series of disasters that pummeled Grand Forks, East Grand Forks and the Red River valley.

The river's historic peak at the official downtown gauge was 54.35 feet, more than 26 feet above flood stage and about 5 feet higher than 1979's record. Because floodwaters were expected to hover near crest levels for several days, few people paid close attention to the exact river level.

The flooding behemoth already spoke devastating volumes, and continued to do so loud enough to prompt the presidential visit.

Air Force One brought Bill Clinton to Grand Forks Air Force Base, where he and other federal disaster officials would tour the great Flood of 1997 firsthand, offer encouragement and bring news about expanded disaster assistance.

"You bring us hope," added Grand Forks Mayor Pat Owens, showing some emotion.

Shortly after his arrival, Clinton and other officials boarded helicopters to get a better look at the disaster. From the air, they saw virtually all of East Grand Forks and roughly three-quarters of Grand Forks in or under water. They flew over the remains of 11 downtown buildings damaged or destroyed in a weekend fire. They viewed a massive landscape of water, spread miles wide and stretched far in to the north and south horizons.

They looked, and they said little.
Back in an Air Force base 3-Bay Hanger, standing before about 3,000 people, many of them flood evacuees, Clinton took center stage, a group of federal, North Dakota, Minnesota and Air Force dignitaries and an enormous American flag behind him.

Among the dignitaries: East Grand Forks Mayor Lynn Stauss, wearing a jacket with big "USA" letters, and Owens "wearing the heart and soul of my community," she told the president.

"Welcome to Water World Mr. President," a sign said.

A large spotlight overhead fizzled, then popped loudly. People flinched. Pause. Clinton, looking up, pointed to the source of the commotion.

"Well," he said, "we've had a fire, a flood, a blizzard I think we can handle this."

Laughter. Relief.

Clinton talked about TV images of sandbagging during a blizzard, about having never seen a series of disasters hit one area like this. "You don't have to be ashamed if you're heartbroken," he said.

He told of authorizing the Federal Emergency Management Agency to reimburse 100 percent of local governments' flood expenses, rather than the usual 75 percent. He said he was asking Congress for $448 million in Midwest disaster relief, $200 million more than first requested.

The president then alluded to the faith and spirit of the region's people: "Water cannot wash that away, fire cannot burn that away, and a blizzard cannot freeze that away," he said.

By mid-afternoon, the president was gone.

From the air, Clinton could not see the details in two cities of a past life stopped in time by high water.

"Sandbaggers needed," a sign read. "Please report to the Civic Center."

A billboard advertising the Shrine Circus April 25-27 in Grand Forks. Dogs barking inside homes. The glow from a TV screen visible through a window.

River currents ignored the reds, yellows and greens of working traffic signals. Basketball hoops peaked above floodwaters.

"It's like the Twilight Zone," said Cheryl Westfall, a police 911 supervisor, as she passed through a north side neighborhood with other police personnel.

Downtown, every street was Canal Street. A wrecking ball occasionally knocked down the remains of burned buildings. Boats and huge National Guard trucks provided traffic and transportation.

A rubber raft outside the County Courthouse was the only sign of a document rescue inside. Nearby, with help from the National Guard, local law enforcement revisited the flooded police department building. Police retrieved supplies and computer equipment to bring back to the U.S. Army Reserve Center west of town, which served as a temporary police station.

"It's Vietnam all over again," said Mike Flannery, a war veteran-turned-police officer. "Hueys in the air. You eat what you can when you can. . . .Camouflage all over."

Evacuations continued in areas that were supposed to have been cleared. A U.S. Coast Guard boat came to a Sixth Avenue North home, where a white towel hung from the door. "I just decided it was no use," said the resident, holed up for three days with his bird and fish. "I thought I could wait it out. I couldn't."

Still, no reports of lives lost to flooding in the two cities.

Evacuees were scattered across communities from Devils Lake to Duluth, from Minneapolis to Minot, from Watford City, N.D., to Winnipeg.

One example: Larimore, N.D., pop. 1,500, suddenly about 2,000 people larger, with about 100 Grand Forks students already enrolled at school and about 30 residents of Grand Forks' Tufte Manor residing in the school gym.

At Mayville, N.D., about 900 Grand Forks evacuees were welcomed guests. "You visit people. You go for walks. When you see and talk to all of the people here from Grand Forks, you still feel like a part of Grand Forks," evacuee Darryl Tunseth said. "But (the flood) is always in the back of your mind. You're always in limbo, wondering what's going on."

Mayville State University canceled the rest of spring classes on this day; its dormitories helped shelter evacuees. The college's latest newsletter, "The High Ground News," offered pertinent information, including helpful phone numbers and things to do.

"We joined together as a community to fight the flood," said Rick Cornell, another Grand Forks evacuee at Mayville. "I hope we do the same to rebuild."

The Flood of '97 was far from over. Downstream cities and towns and surrounding rural residents still faced flood battles. Many people upstream still dealt with high water, or at least faced what was gained and lost.

But for Grand Forks and East Grand Forks, on a day a president visited and the Red quit rising, amid widespread shock, heartbreaking loss and historic evacuation, the earliest signs of recovery were showing.
-------------------------
Although he only stayed a short while, President Clinton’s stop in Grand Forks and East Grand Forks proved to be just the sort of thing that the cities needed to lift their spirits. Many residents felt comforted to know that people far away in Washington D.C. were willing to look after the cities of Grand Forks and East Grand Forks.

At UND on April 22, the general consensus was that the university was “holding its own.” At the 9 AM flood recovery meeting, President Kendell Baker continued to outline the steps that would be taken to build the “virtual university” that would be in place until all UND departments could be operating as normal. The plans called for this “virtual university” to be fully operational by April 28.

Talk also began to center around how UND could help in recovery efforts of Grand Forks and East Grand Forks. It was generally agreed that the university’s greatest asset would probably be its residence halls; they could turned into temporary housing for flood victims. With this in mind, a task force was created to develop plans to get the halls opened as soon as possible. Although a few had taken in water in their basements, the main problem at first was the fact that students had left most of their personal belongings in their rooms after the call went out to evacuate. UND would need to get the residence halls open as quickly as possible in order for students to come back and retrieve their possessions.

Elsewhere on campus, Plant Services officials began going into buildings to assess damage. With a volunteer cameraman from the UND television center, LeRoy Sondrol, head of Plant Services, led a small group into three heavily damaged buildings – the medical school, Smith Hall, and the USDA Nutrition Research Center. Although the latter building is operated and maintained by the USDA, Denise Schaefer, the animal caretaker at the center, asked to see the inside of the building. So the group went inside.

What they found was startling. There was about a foot and a half of water covering the ground floor, and electricity was still on in the entire building. What’s more, there was smoke coming from the mechanical/boiler room. The early makings of an electrical fire, like the kind that eventually bought down 11 buildings in downtown Grand Forks 3 days earlier were apparent. In desperation, the group quickly left the building, and Sondrol got on a cell phone to summon the fire department and get NSP (now Xcel Energy) to turn off the power right away. Luckily, the power was cut in time. However, had nobody gone in to inspect the building, a very damaging fire easily could have occurred.

More inspections during the day revealed even more damage. The lower levels of the Memorial Union, Swanson Hall (a residence hall), and Wilkerson Hall all were completely filled with water. Lesser amounts of water, in the 1-2 foot range, could be found in the basements of Montgomery, Walsh, Squires, Bek, Leonard, Robertson-Sayre, and Corwin-Larimore Halls as well as the Era Bell Thompson and Native American Centers.

Good news could be found on campus, however. University officials residing in their new “homes” at the Plant Services building were treated to a hot lunch of scalloped potatoes and ham. They had also received one portable kitchen, with two more on the way. Even so, it was hard for many of the employees to not know how their own houses within the community had fared. The book published by UND after the flood describes how, at the end of a long day’s work, many would get on the phone and dial up their home phone numbers. If the call went through, the phone lines in the house had stayed dry. A busy signal, on the other hand, meant that water was in the house and the phone lines had been compromised.

Check back tomorrow for the next installment in this series.

Links related to this entry:
Click here to read a transcript of President Clinton's speech.

Videos related to this entry:
President Clinton visits Grand Forks and East Grand Forks

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVJAWLteBto

A report on the Grand Forks Herald during the flood. Despite losing its building first to floodwaters and then to fire, the newspaper never missed an issue. Free copies were delivered daily to flood victims throughout the area so that they could get flood-related news from a local perspective.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LClb3CsJ3G8

This is the video shot on the UND campus on April 22. As stated in the beginning, the original intent of this video was to get emergency relief funding from the North Dakota State Board of Higher Education.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YCS8W2VirQ

The first 9 or so minutes of the KARE 11 10 o'clock news from April 22, 1997

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gI33--nneyM

Pictures related to this entry:

Sources used in writing this entry:
Beyond the Flood. Videocassette. Minnesota Broadcasters Association, 1997.

Orvik, Jan, and Dick Larson. The Return of Lake Agassiz: the University of North Dakota and the Flood of 1997. Grand Forks, ND: University of North Dakota, 1998.

Flood of '97 Series: The Red Finally Crests in Grand Forks

2007-04-21T14:14:00.000-05:00

This Grand Forks Herald article recalling the events of April 21, 1997 was put together by staff writer Mike Brue.

It was a Monday, the start of the work week, 10 years ago today.

Business, though, was anything but usual in Grand Forks and East Grand Forks, epicenter of the dramatic Red River Valley flood and fire, and the site of what some authorities called an urban disaster displacement on a scale then unmatched in American history.

Cranes moved into flooded downtown Grand Forks to knock some walls down on buildings damaged by the dramatic weekend fire. “It doesn't seem real,” Deputy Fire Chief Pete O'Neill told reporters. “You want to wake up from some dream.”

Finally, the Red River seemed about to crest. That, in turn, slowed the spread of floodwater across the nearly level urban landscape. It reached 54.11 feet, more than 5 feet above the 1979 record crest.

Again on this day, flood tours gave emergency officials, government leaders and news media first-hand looks at the damage in mandatory evacuation areas. As much as several dozen feet deep in places, floodwaters from the Red and Red Lake rivers spread a quilt of raw sewage, fuel and debris for several miles beyond the dikes that failed to contain it. Homes, garages, businesses, vehicles and signs stood in water, or sometimes under it.

“You'll probably hit (cars) before you see them,” DNR conservation officer Tom Campbell said during a boat ride Sunday over some East Grand Forks' streets.

Rep. Collin Peterson of Minnesota's 7th District was one of the boat passengers who ducked under telephone and power lines en route to sights of homes tipped off their foundations. “I went to Breckenridge (Saturday), and I thought that was bad,” he said. “But this is unbelievable.”

On this Monday, Peterson added, “The normal disaster relief is not going to work.”

Greater Grand Forks leaders learned that President Bill Clinton would come to Grand Forks Air Force Base on Tuesday to hear their concerns and tour the area in a helicopter. In Washington, Federal Emergency Management Agency director James Lee Witt and other White House officials joined members of Congress to discuss Red River Valley federal aid needs.

Increasingly, flood victims sought out FEMA's toll-free number to register for disaster assistance. But few calls came from Greater Grand Forks proper, though U S West workers so far successfully kept their water-surrounded downtown service center - and the area's dial tone, 911 and other government circuits - in working order.

About 85 percent of Grand Forks' population of 52,000 had evacuated, either by mandate or voluntarily. Only about 250 of East Grand Forks' nearly 9,000 residents remained.

“What I'm afraid of,” said the Rev. William Sherman of Grand Forks' flooded St. Michael's Catholic Church, “is that once reality sets in, there will be anguish and anxiety.”

On this day, Greater Grand Forks' public schools and the East Side's parochial Sacred Heart School canceled the remainder of their school years for teachers, staff and some 12,000 displaced students. Officials said all but one of the schools within the two city limits had some type of flood damage.

Grand Forks County Commissioners met in Larimore, about 30 miles west of Grand Forks, to begin moving the base for county services, primarily into the town's Masonic Temple.

A few businesses remained open on the flood-free edges of Greater Grand Forks, including a couple of hotels, the temporary quarters for officials from two cities and many emergency personnel.

“There's nothing to come back to now,” said East Grand Forks Mayor Lynn Stauss, who helped set up a temporary City Hall at the Comfort Inn on U.S. Highway 2. “We have to, basically, rebuild our community.”

The National Guard and other agencies still fought floodwaters at the East Side's water treatment plant, police station, cellular communications tower and other essential areas.

In west Grand Forks, at a camouflaged tanker parked near the Ramada Inn, remaining residents filled jugs with fresh water from 2,000-gallon tanks, dubbed “water buffaloes.” The tanks contained water from the Turtle River and area reservoirs, purified for three hours with heavy chlorination by the Guard's reverse-osmosis water purification unit.

On Grand Forks' southwest side, 10 postal workers - about 75 fewer than normal - sorted mail for shipment to northeast North Dakota post offices. Walk-up mail service was planned to start within a day or two at Grand Forks Air Force Base, home to more than 3,000 evacuees, and Crookston, where more than 4,000 evacuees either registered or sought shelter. “We're not accepting any change of address for evacuees yet,” a Fargo postal official said.

Evacuees had spread to shelters set up by communities throughout the region, or they accepted one of thousands of offers from complete strangers who opened up their homes out of compassion and a feeling of helplessness.

Fargo and Moorhead was a detour-obstructed destination for thousands, despite those cities' own recent fierce flood battles. “We got out with very little. Not even a suitcase,” said Jean Haus, who left their 24th Avenue South home near the river. She and her daughter, Judy, went to the Fargo Target to take advantage of a 20-percent discount for evacuees.

New elevated crest forecasts on this day added to the stress of residents in downstream Red River towns Pembina and Drayton, N.D., and nearby rural residents north of Greater Grand Forks. The National Weather Service's revisions for crests, expected within two to four days, leapfrogged one or more feet over the cities' urgent dike preparations.

But closer to Grand Forks, Oslo, Minn.,'s 31-year-old clay ring dike was holding. Floodwaters prevented virtually all but National Guard travel in and out of town, but farmer/volunteer firefighter Orin Knutson and farmhand Riley Farder brought two crates of mail from the Alvarado, Minn., post office, one day after hauling in a 10-day supply of groceries.

Said Gary Durand, head of Marshall County's emergency services: “They're like a sovereign nation or something.”
-------------------------
Most activity at UND on April 21 began to center around flood recovery efforts. At one of the twice-daily staff meetings, plans were drawn up to start a phone bank that UND students (and their parents), staff, faculty could call into and receive answers to any questions they might have. Additionally, the university was committed to using the latest in technology to create a “virtual university” that would be capable to performing the university’s core functions until it could operate as normal. President Kendell Baker called on employees temporarily moved to the Plant Services building to create a “University of the 21st Century.”

There remained some serious flooding problems on campus on April 21, though. Floodwaters were out of control inside the miles and miles of underground steam, water, and telecommunications tunnels on campus, and this water was still threatening to enter buildings and cause them to flood from within.

University Avenue was essentially a river through most of the eastern half of the campus with water overtaking the basements of the many fraternities and sororities that line the street. Also affected by water on the eastern end of the university were the USDA Human Nutrition Center, the [old] Ralph Engelstad Arena, and Memorial Stadium, where the Astroturf of the football field could be seen flooding on top of a foot of water.

Later in the day, after a prolonged effort to stave off flooding, several buildings at the Energy and Envrionmental Research Center (EERC) also succumbed to the water.

Farther to the west, Wilkerson Hall now had water pushing up to its entrance and a submerged lower level. Selke and Noren Halls, two residence halls behind Wilkerson, also had water coming into their basements.

During the day, word had spread that the downtown fire was likely electrical in nature, caused by not shutting off power to buildings before they flooded. This was a serious concern for UND officials, as they realized that the electricity was still on in most buildings on campus. A frantic effort then began to go into all buildings and make sure power was turned off. By evening, electricity was off in most places, with the exception of the USDA Research Center. For a couple of reasons – the most important being that nobody at UND could get in contact with the operator of the building, the USDA – electricity at this building was not shut off.

Personnel at UND Flight Operations worked hard on April 21 giving helicopter rides for university, state, and local leaders. These rides provided the leaders with some of their first views of the extent of damage to Grand Forks and East Grand Forks.

UND also began providing much-needed workspace for the hundreds of journalists that had come to Grand Forks from all parts of the country. The university’s Television Center, housed in the newly-completed Ryan Hall on the far western end of campus, was made available for use by national media outlets, including NBC and CNN.

However, perhaps the most significant event of April 21 was President Baker’s early-evening announcement that UND’s summer session would be held as scheduled beginning on May 12. Although many thought the president had “gone nuts,” he stood firm and said he was committed to do everything he could to have the university open in time, to prove that UND was not going to let the flood of 1997 wash it away.

Check back tomorrow for the next installment in this series.

Videos related to this entry:
Aerial views on April 21, 1997 show the "devastation beyond belief in Grand Forks and East Grand Forks"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-ZEFa4qpGg

Watch as the Emergency Animal Rescue Service rescues stranded pets in Grand Forks

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irZb_YTBoRI

WCCO-TV reports on what life is like for the thousands of flood evacuees living at the Grand Forks Air Force Base

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHimGvYYvHY

The first seven or so minutes of the KARE 11 10 o'clock news from April 21, 1997

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZ649tcY6_E

Pictures related to this entry:

Sources used in writing this entry:
Beyond the Flood. Videocassette. Minnesota Broadcasters Association, 1997.

Floodwatch '97. Videocassette. WDAY Television News, 1997.

Orvik, Jan, and Dick Larson. The Return of Lake Agassiz: the University of North Dakota and the Flood of 1997. Grand Forks, ND: University of North Dakota, 1998.

Flood of '97 Series: The Grand Cities Empty Out

2007-04-20T12:39:00.000-05:00

This Grand Forks Herald article recalling the events of April 19, 1997 was put together by staff writer Mike Brue.

Floodwaters covered most of Greater Grand Forks 10 years ago today, just as one smoldering city ran out of water.

It was a Sunday, and thanks to television and print images, a captive nation and even international audiences was seeing the breadth of disaster that struck the 60,000 residents of Grand Forks and East Grand Forks.

"It's even worse than you could imagine," said Joe Simon, working with Grand Forks emergency operations. "We're getting the hell beat out of us by the river."

Stunned area residents struggled to believe their own eyes, while the innocent questions of children gave them pause.

"Mom," Sharon Fox Bogen's 3-year-old son asked while watching TV, "is that our town?"

Fox Borgen, a lay minister, and her husband, the Rev. Phil Bogen, fought floodwaters at their Central Plains Court home, but ended up evacuating and staying with friends. On this morning, she preached at Evanger Lutheran Church in rural Grand Forks to a congregation that included other flood victims. "Jesus is our strong dike, one that will never give way," Fox Bogen said, her voice at times breaking. "One that can protect us and deliver us from evil."

In Grand Forks, it seemed as though the only visible smile was on a water tower and both were empty. The city's water supply dried up. The water treatment plant on downtown's southern edge was inoperable and surrounded by floodwaters. Running water might be at least three weeks away, City Engineer Ken Vein said.

Without water, even many remaining residents on dry ground chose to leave. By day's end, the city's estimate of evacuees numbered at least 37,000 of its 52,000 residents.

In East Grand Forks, where floodwaters from the Red and Red Lake rivers reportedly touched almost the entire city, at least 95 percent of its more than 8,000 residents were gone by Sunday night, Mayor Lynn Stauss said.

Daylight revealed the damage downtown from a fire that began Saturday afternoon in the flooded Security Building. The morning-after televised images seemed war-like. Firefighters, forced to battle flames in bone-chilling floodwaters well beyond midnight, acknowledged that damage could have been even worse.

The Security Building's burned-out brown brick shell left a lasting impression as it towered over brown water. Ten other buildings, scattered over four city blocks, were in similar ruins or severely damaged. The victims included First National Bank, First Financial Center, Griggs Landing bar, Bonzer's Sandwich Pub and the Formal Affair shop.

Fire also destroyed the [Grand Forks] Herald's annex building, which housed the newsroom, finance and circulation offices and the paper's library, with its decades of newspaper clippings and photos. "I care less about my house than I do about those archives," said Jenelle Stadstad, the paper's library manager. "My stuff can be replaced, but all of our history is gone."

The newspaper left its Saturday home at UND and moved into the Manvel, N.D., public school. With the Herald's pressroom flooded, the St. Paul Pioneer Press printed the Herald's Sunday edition and would handle Monday's, too.

At UND, spring semester was cancelled Saturday, leaving the university facing a growing flood concern. Red River backwater into the English Coulee moved into the campus from the north. Like some other still-dry neighborhoods, UND was in the path of a slow, relentless spread of water pushing up through storm sewers.

As administrators planned how to rescue flood-vulnerable books, records and other documents, Toby Baker, wife of President Kendall Baker, issued a plea on local radio for remaining students, faculty and staff to "save our university." The first of about 200 volunteers began arriving within minutes, setting off a daylong race to beat floodwaters.

South of DeMers Avenue, workers continued using heavy machinery to build a dike around United Hospital and the rest of Medical Park. Many hospital patients were evacuated Saturday, and all rehabilitation hospital patients and Valley Eldercare Center residents were moved to other regional locations.

With the city out of running water, and with its own staff reduced, United Hospital evacuated remaining critical care patients by helicopter and emergency vehicles to larger regional hospitals. The evacuations were done by 7 p.m.

Grand Forks' last open grocery store, Hugo's on 32nd Avenue South, closed late on this morning as water threatened the building and stressed shoppers made final purchases. Said employee Rick Hogan, "You always see these disasters somewhere else."

With the memory of downtown fire evacuations fresh, Grand Forks announced plans for a street-by-street search in evacuation zones. Mayor Pat Owens declared a 24-hour curfew in those zones. She noted that no deaths had been reported.

"What makes a community a place to live is not the buildings or anything else in that community," she said during a news conference that aired live on TV and radio. "It's the people the spirit and the faith that are in those people. . . . Walk away from those homes. Walk away from those buildings. We will rebuild, and we will be stronger, and we will be in it together." Her words were applauded.

Owens later noted, "I hope people will have a lot of patience."

A shelter at Grand Forks Air Force Base held about 3,000 people. Shelters at Thompson and Mayville, N.D., and Crookston continued to take in refugees or at least help provide basic items, such as clothes, food and toiletries. Some evacuees were parents separated from children, or separated spouses. Phones rang constantly as families searched for loved ones.

Flood fight preparations escalated downstream, especially at Pembina and Drayton, N.D., where Red River towns had been alarmed, even frightened, by images coming out of Greater Grand Forks. At Manvel, sandbag operations supported rural residents dealing with record floodwaters, while farmers battled to save livestock..

By 9 p.m. in Greater Grand Forks, the Red reached 53.9 feet about 26 feet above flood stage. And it was still rising.

The article includes information from Herald and wire service reports.
-------------------------
By April 20, the scope of the disaster in Grand Forks and East Grand Forks had become painfully clear. Grand Forks had become the scenes of some of the worst flooding ever to befall an American city, and the engorged Red River of the North had become the largest river by volume in all of North America.

On the UND campus, the reality had set in that flooding, and subsequent damage, was now unavoidable. Floodwaters were approaching too quickly, from too many directions, and there just wasn’t enough time or resources on hand to halt water from overtaking buildings. What could be done, however, was lessen the flood’s impact on campus.

To that end, President Kendell Baker quickly assembled a team on April 20 to come up with a list of facilities and collections that were either most threatened or most valuable to the university. The list this team came up with reflected the different roles of the university and included

The science journals, microfiche, and microfilm collections in the basement of the Chester Fritz Library
Holdings in the lower level of the Thormodsgard Law Library
Pieces in the University’s art collection at the Hughes Fine Arts Center
Theatre Arts’ collection of costumes the kept in the basement of the Burtness Theater
Library materials and Student Health service records in the lower level of O’Kelly Hall
A power transformer near the Hughes Fine Arts Center that had made UND one of the last places in Grand Forks still with electricity
Telecommunication equipment in the basement of Merrifield and Carnegie Halls

It was then up to the volunteers alluded to in the article above to make sure these “jewels” of the university could be protected as best as possible.

Elsewhere on campus, the situation the School of Medicine had been described as “gruesome,” with Larry Zitzow, Associate Director of Plant Services, recalling the building being “filled to three and one-half feet with sewage. With sewage, yep. The smell was unbelievable! It was so brand new, everything in there, all the instrumentation and lab equipment. It was just something you couldn’t believe. Then, with the different levels in there, some places were even deeper. It was something else!”

Most buildings on campus were completely devoid of people by this point, but there were a few exceptions. One was in the university’s science buildings, where a handful of people (often instructors or UND Plant Services personnel) volunteered to baby-sit electrical generators providing electricity to crucial experiments, research projects, and laboratory animals. The university was committed to saving as much of this irreplaceable work as possible.

Another place where people could be found was on the far western side of campus, the part not at threat of going underwater. All administrative offices had been moved to the Plant Services Building, which, upon addition of mattresses on the second floor and porta-potties outside, was also transformed into a home for many of the administrators still there. Others would find temporary lodging 7 miles to the south in the Thompson Public School.

Even though there was still a present threat of flooding, UND officials started to take a look beyond the flood by starting twice-daily meetings on April 20 that would assess plans for the future. UND, like much of Grand Forks, was already beginning to look down the arduous path of flood recovery.

Check back tomorrow for the next installment in this series.

Videos related to this entry:
KSTP-TV tags along with U.S. Air Force Personnel as they go through the flooded streets of Grand Forks looking for people who haven't heeded the orders to evacuate
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q70QCMSla34

WCCO-TV tags along with the U.S. Coast Guard as its personnel rescue a man from flooded Grand Forks

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6bUOLqaXT4

With the foresight that this flood was going to have an enormous impact on the Red River Valley, I pushed the record button on my VCR on the evening of April 20, 1997 to capture the 10 o'clock KARE 11 news. Here's the first 8 or so minutes of my recording.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYU9AoC7LpQ

Here's another 6 or so minutes of the KARE 11 10 o'clock news from April 20, 1997

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55H4_-kjdhc

Pictures related to this entry:

Sources used in writing this entry:
Beyond the Flood. Videocassette. Minnesota Broadcasters Association, 1997.

Orvik, Jan, and Dick Larson. The Return of Lake Agassiz: the University of North Dakota and the Flood of 1997. Grand Forks, ND: University of North Dakota, 1998.

Flood of '97 Series: When It Couldn't Get Any Worse...

2007-04-19T12:40:00.000-05:00

This Grand Forks Herald article recalling the events of April 19, 1997 was put together by staff writer Mike Brue.

Grand Forks and East Grand Forks in the early morning dark were on the verge of flood defeat to the Red and Red Lake rivers.

At a Grand Forks news conference, with North Dakota Gov. Ed Schafer at her side, a weary [Grand Forks] Mayor Pat Owens announced further evacuations in the eastern part of the city and urged the city's remaining residents to leave.

At his own flooding home on James Avenue in East Grand Forks, a tired Mayor Lynn Stauss realized his city's defeat between midnight and 1 a.m. as he listened to one sandbagger after another describe lost flood battles. "They were in every part of town," Stauss recalled later on this day. "They all seemed to lose it at the same time."

Then the Kennedy Memorial Bridge [on U.S. Highway 2], the bridge that leaders in both cities vowed to do everything possible to keep open, was closed to traffic.

The Red had passed 52 feet. Determined pockets of homes and neighborhoods fought the rivers into the overnight, but the organized volunteer efforts by the cities ended.

By about 1 a.m., Valley Golf Course and the Griggs Park and Sherlock Park neighborhoods in East Grand Forks were taking water as dikes failed. Murky brown water rose into the second stories of some homes and spread into other East Grand Forks neighborhoods, ultimately claiming downtown about 4 a.m.

East Grand Forks' Point neighborhood, flooding since Friday afternoon, was isolated, with the Murray Bridge closed and earthen dikes or floodwaters blocking other routes out.

In Grand Forks, the Red's strong flood currents continued to pass through the Lincoln Drive neighborhood. That area, surrounded on three sides by dikes, already had filled like a basin up to the river's flood level and homes' roofs.

For several miles south, flooding claimed homes in other low-lying neighborhoods.

From the north, Red River backwater continued to worsen flooding on the English Coulee.

Floodwaters backed up through storm sewers, sometimes bursting open sewer caps, steadily moved westward through the eastern part of Grand Forks….Water overwhelmed streets, yards, vehicles, basements and sometimes first floors. Even the city's Emergency Operations Center in the police building downtown was forced out to UND.

Water moved into the heart of downtown, driving out mailroom and pressroom employees of the Grand Forks Herald shortly before 2:30 a.m. About 90 minutes later, rescuers evacuated senior residents through floodwater and floating lobby furniture from the nearby Ryan House.

By dawn, downtown had a layer of floodwater about 4 feet deep.

In many neighborhoods, startled residents awoke to find their homes or apartments surrounded by floodwater. By noon, floodwater reached almost all of East Grand Forks, and roughly half of Grand Forks, where mandatory evacuation areas now covered about three-quarters of the city.

Military and civilian rescuers used helicopters, boats and trucks to evacuate about 3,000 residents stuck on the Point. In both cities, Guard vehicles and boats brought people to dry drop-off sites, where they were taken by bus to shelters in Grand Forks Air Force Base and Crookston, which had just battled back Red Lake River floodwaters.

"We're all saying, 'How did we get spared in this?'" said Kathy Umlauf, a Crookston city employee helping out the evacuation effort. "We think we've been spared to help." More than 4,000 East Grand Forks evacuees checked through Crookston by late night; at one point, about 800 planned to stay.

"I don't ever want to go back there," said Roger LeBlanc, East Grand Forks, after he, his 5-year-old daughter and his girlfriend evacuated their home. "You work that long and hard, and then you lose it all." He turned away to wipe away a tear.

In late morning, UND President Kendall Baker announced that the remainder of spring semester was canceled. As if waiting for that cue, hundreds of students left dorms and other housing within minutes, getting in vehicles and joining lines of cars leaving Grand Forks.

"I'm done, graduated just like that," said Chris Borgan, a UND senior, as he filled his tank at a bustling convenience store to leave town.

Workers built a dike around the Medical Park complex in Grand Forks, while helicopters evacuated patients. Across Columbia Road, evacuees nearly emptied the shelves at Hugo's supermarket. "We had a line, honest to God, that wrapped around the store," said store manager Dave Borseth.

In the late afternoon, people throughout Grand Forks and East Grand Forks began to notice dark smoke coming from downtown. A new drama unfolded.

About 4:15 p.m., smoke was reported coming from downtown's pink brick Security Building on the 100 block of North Third Street. The smoke shortly turned into flames. And throughout downtown, some people remained in second-floor apartments, defying the city's evacuation order.

City firefighters' efforts to stem the fire were thwarted by floodwaters, now more than 4 feet deep. It stalled their diesel engine pumper and slowed other trucks trying to reach the scene. To fill hoses, firefighters had to pump floodwaters.

Firefighters' struggles to make any headway were distracted by the need to hasten evacuations. They worked with the National Guard and others to get people to safety.

"The firemen pounded on the door and were telling me to leave," said Rex Sorgatz, a UND student who planned to wait out the flood in his apartment at 111 N. Third St. Outside, Sorgatz saw the Security Building fire as he was hustled to a boat.

Once evacuations finished, a U.S. Forest Service plane began its drops of bright-red chemical retardant on the fire. Helicopters dipped large buckets into the flooded Red, then returned to drop water on the fire, spreading northward on the 100 block of North Third Street.

"Everything on that block...is in trouble," Deputy Fire Chief Pete O'Neill said.

The fire eventually leapfrogged toward DeMers Avenue to buildings on several other blocks.

In East Grand Forks, where there was no power, Stauss ordered remaining city residents to evacuate. By 7 p.m., he said, about 90 percent had. Another city official said later that about 200 people refused to leave.

"I'm the first mayor to lose a town, that's how devastating it is," Stauss said in response to one question. But his city's police station and water treatment plant remained successfully protected by a last-minute sandbagging effort.

By 8 p.m., flooding covered about three-quarters of Grand Forks. The city was "piecemealing" neighborhood evacuation orders, police said, because they didn't want to overrun the region's shelters.

As midnight approached, the Red had reached just beyond 53 feet. Against block upon block of dark, silent neighborhoods, the downtown sky glowed.

The article includes material from Herald and wire reports.
-------------------------

April 19, 1997 became the darkest day in the history of Grand Forks and arguably the entire state of North Dakota. Incomprehensible devastation could be seen throughout the entire city of East Grand Forks and over half of Grand Forks. The biggest blow, however, came in the afternoon when fire broke out in Grand Forks’ proud downtown. It’s the pictures of the burning downtown buildings surrounded by 4 to 6 feet deep floodwaters that catapulted the flood of 1997 to national attention, and it’s also what would come to represent the lowest low of the flood. If there’s just one thing that earned the Grand Forks Herald its Pulitzer Prize following the flood of 1997, it’s the pictures that its photographers took of the fires. The same fires that were tragically destroying the Herald’s very own building that housed over a hundred years of archives and records.

The events unfolding in Grand Forks were the biggest news of April 19, even though residents in Fargo were still battling floodwaters there. Still, the situation was beginning to look better, as city officials were able to build the emergency dike to the south of town. In addition, officials in Cass County were able to alleviate some of the threat from overland flooding by tearing out a large chuck of County Road 81 south of the city and effectively creating a channel for the waters to flow through.

As stated earlier, UND called off classes for the remainder of the spring semester on this day and urged all students to evacuate immediately. As to how final grades would be assigned for the spring semester, students could either take the grade they had received up to April 19 or take an “incomplete.”

The need to get all faculty, staff, and students out of Grand Forks took precedence over trying to save any threatened buildings. As a result, the ongoing effort to save Smith Hall from going underwater was ended in the early morning hours. The decision to leave the dike was tremendously difficult, with the director of Plant Services, LeRoy Sondrol, recalling, “I think that was maybe the lowest time…that I went through. When you knew people wanted to keep going, and you knew no matter how hard you tried that you were going to lose it. To tell people to retreat from the dikes when they wanted to keep going. You just literally had to go face-to-face with people and say, ‘This is it. We’ve got to quit.’”

The dike that so many had works weeks on gave way later during the day, sending water rushing into the cafeteria and laundry rooms that occupied the basement of Smith Hall.

Elsewhere on campus, the English Coulee had risen higher than expected, and floodwater was coming in from the north, south, and east. Other problems were also cropping up. The sewer system in Grand Forks was now completely filled with rushing floodwater, meaning that it was apt to back up in buildings left dry from the outside. In other words, buildings could begin flooding from the inside. Such a thing happened in the UND Medical School; by day’s end, floodwater and raw sewage had filled up the basement.

The same scene also played out in the tunnel between Selke Hall and Wilkerson Hall. UND officials at one point tried to build a sandbag dike inside the tunnel, but it was no use. The lower level of Wilkerson Hall by days end had also gone underwater.

The Energy & Environmental Research Center (EERC) and the steam plant were two other buildings that succumbed to flooding on this day.

Because all buildings with basements were now in danger of getting flooded, UND officials had to work frantically to assess how they could salvage the most in the shortest amount of time. It had now become a foregone conclusion that it would be impossible to halt flooding on campus.

One of the first things protected was the university’s mainframe computer in the basement of Upson II. The university’s Technical Support Specialist, along with officials from IBM, completely powered everything down and transported the most critical and expensive equipment to the third floor of Upson II. Other components were later taken to Fargo.

Check back tomorrow for the next installment in this series.

Videos related to this entry:
Devestation in Grand Forks. WCCO-TV's Don Shelby narrates this report, one of the most memorable during the worst of the flood.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iJUgddua-g

More destruction abounded in East Grand Forks

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5FRcF0UpSo

"The beginning of the end in Grand Forks." A report chronicling the time during the fire in downtown Grand Forks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wcXMg_qdEU

Pictures related to this entry:

Sources used in writing this entry:
Beyond the Flood. Videocassette. Minnesota Broadcasters Association, 1997.

Floodwatch '97. Videocassette. WDAY Television News, 1997.

Orvik, Jan, and Dick Larson. The Return of Lake Agassiz: the University of North Dakota and the Flood of 1997. Grand Forks, ND: University of North Dakota, 1998.

Staff of the [Fargo] Forum, comp. Fighting Back: the Blizzards and Flood in the Red River Valley, 1996-97. Fargo, ND: Forum Communications Company, 1997.

Staff of the Grand Forks Herald and Knight-Ridder Newspapers, comp. Come Hell and High Water: the Incredible Story of the 1997 Red River Flood. Grand Forks, ND: Grand Forks Herald, 1997.

Flood of '97 Series: The Day Flooding Became Unstopable

2007-04-18T12:33:00.000-05:00

This Grand Forks Herald article recalling the events of April 18, 1997 was put together by staff writer Mike Brue.

As [April 18] began, the Red River flood climbed past 51 feet high - more than 2 feet beyond 1979's flood of 20th-century record. Its rise showed little sign of slowing. The National Weather Service, which adjusted crest forecasts upward all week, revised it again by late morning: 53 feet, either late on this day or [April 19].

The week started with Grand Forks and East Grand Forks having built their dikes up to about 52 feet, 3 feet above the estimated 49-foot crest. When the estimates kept moving up, the communities tried to keep distance between the river and dike tops. They couldn't.

On this morning, Grand Forks City Engineer Ken Vein warned residents that overland flooding could affect virtually all of the city if dikes failed.

Hours earlier, boils were discovered in the Lincoln dikes. Soon, Mayor Pat Owens ordered evacuation of the low-lying Lincoln neighborhood, setting off the first of multiple siren wails heard in the two cities this day. The sun had not yet risen.

A morning dike breach near Belmont Road and Lincoln Drive allowed floodwaters to roll into the Lincoln neighborhood from the southwest. Then, after spotters reported a Lincoln dike break around 2 p.m., the rising Red poured in waterfall fashion over a lengthy stretch of dike near Lanark Avenue. By 4 p.m., Lincoln floodwaters were the same height as the river. The damage: about 300 homes, some to the roofs.

In East Grand Forks, sirens sounded minutes after noon as people suddenly rushed from homes and yards along Folson Court. Floodwaters breaking through dikes damaged about two dozen homes. A new dike effort prevented further damage.

But about 3:30 p.m., an East Grand Forks dike broke southeast of the Louis Murray Bridge over the Red Lake River. About 9 feet of floodwater surged through, rocking the bridge and slowly overtaking the Point neighborhood. Sirens followed about 4:20 p.m., as the city called for evacuations from the Point and downtown. The bridge closed to all but emergency vehicles.

“Make up your mind,” Mayor Lynn Stauss told people living south of Crestwood School. “For your own safety, I have to say you should leave tonight.”

Point residents quickly were surrounded; an earthen dike blocked Bygland Road, and Red floodwaters backed up into the Hartsville Coulee south of town claimed the last exit. Suddenly, helicopters and high-riding emergency vehicles were the only ways out.

Flood fights continued into the night. About 11 p.m., a dike north of the Kennedy Bridge on U.S. Highway 2 gave way, allowing water to pour into the near-empty Sherlock Park neighborhood of East Grand Forks.

In Grand Forks, [Mayor Pat] Owens also had ordered early morning evacuations of the Riverside and Central neighborhoods. More than 100 residents of Valley Memorial Home-Almonte were moved to Valley Eldercare, United Hospital and Kelly Elementary School.

People moved out of the low-lying Belmont Road neighborhood between 13th and 17th avenues south. Long sandbag volunteer lines were seen at several locations, including the bike path on North Third Street. Neighborhood dike work continued at Belmont Coulee, where water was backing up from the Red; at Rolling Hills Circle and at many other locations.

Some homeowners in evacuated areas used city-issued passes to return, get some more belongings and look at a life they might be leaving behind. “This might be it,” Renae Arends said after returning to her home. “I might not have a house to come back to.”

The English Coulee was flooding into the Boyd Drive and Sixth Avenue North areas by afternoon. The Red backed into the coulee from the north, a predicament not prevented by the new coulee flood diversion west of town.

Many reporters covering the flood for national media outlets quickly turned Grand Forks' [Mayor Pat] Owens into the primary face and voice of the flood fight. Some of the interviews she gave aired live. “Say a lot of prayers for us,” Owens told a Canadian reporter in late morning.

After 5 p.m., more Grand Forks sirens. The Riverside dike was leaking and possibly ready to give way. A secondary dike was built as a secondary line of defense. Another secondary dike was built on Belmont Road; nearby, the city urged residents of Olson Drive, Elmwood Drive and 27th Avenue South to spend the night elsewhere because of dike dangers.

At 8 p.m., the weather service revised the crest again: 54 feet, sometime Saturday night. Before 9 p.m., the Central Park neighborhood and some south downtown businesses were told to evacuate as floodwaters pushed up into the streets through storm sewers.
By 10 p.m, some areas south of downtown's railroad tracks were too flooded to leave by vehicle, prompting some evacuations in a city dump truck and National Guard humvees. The city's Emergency Operations Center moved from the water-threatened police building to UND.

More than 3,000 people - perhaps a lot more - already had evacuated in Grand Forks alone, officials estimated. Some stayed at shelters established in the new National Guard Armory and Red River High School; Grand Forks Air Force Base awaited more evacuees.

“Absolutely do not sleep in your basements anywhere in Grand Forks tonight,” Emergency Operations director Jim Campbell cautioned remaining residents.

As midnight neared, the Red approached 53 feet [and a dike in East Grand Forks near the Kennedy Bridge gave way, severing the last link between Grand Forks and East Grand Forks and the only way out for residents living in the Sherlock Park neighborhood of East Grand Forks.]

The article includes material from Herald and wire service reports.

----------------------------------
Chaos abounded on April 18, and not just in the Grand Forks/East Grand Forks area. In Fargo, city officials saw what was going on 70 miles to the north in Grand Forks and ordered an emergency dike be put together on the south side of town. The consequence of not building the dike, Fargo’s mayor warned, would be that the entire city of Fargo could go under water.

Nevertheless, some parts of the Fargo/Moorhead area were already under water. After the dike broke in the Oak Grove neighborhood in east Fargo the day before, virtually all residents in that area had left. The situation was only slightly better in the Oak Port Township north of Moorhead, as some houses there were still dry.

At UND on April 18, classes were once again canceled, with all faculty, staff, and students asked to come to the Memorial Union to volunteer in the desperate attempt to save whatever homes and buildings could in parts of Grand Forks quickly going under water. Only three people were on hand in the university’s administrative building, Twamley Hall; everyone else left to volunteer or had been evacuated from their homes.

Students were on hand to help throughout the day in Grand Forks. In the book put out by UND after the flood, one student recalled, “We were sandbagging a family’s home. The dike was already four feet high. We were standing on crates so we were out of the water. Unfortunately, the water was rising as fast as we were passing bags. We worked for two hours when, all of a sudden, the sirens went off and the National Guard came. Everyone ignored the Guardsmen and continued to work for a while, but soon we realized we had lost….As I walked down the neighborhood, I watched people stand on their decks looking at their homes and neighbors. When I turned around, the house we had tried to save was slowly filling up with water. I started to cry…It was like you had become family in the time you worked to save someone’s home.”

By evening, the most threatened structure on the UND campus was Smith Hall. Students – along with President of the university, Kendall Baker – were on the western, coulee, side of the building frantically raising the clay and sandbag dike. Nobody knew how long, or even if, the dike would protect the entire basement of the residence hall from becoming submerged.

As the night wore on, President Baker received a call that would profoundly affect the university. At the other end was UND Plant Services notifying him that the Grand Forks water plant was in danger of going down. With that news, there was little alternative but to close the university for the remainder of the spring semester. A public announcement of that grave reality would be made the following morning.

April 19 would go down as being the darkest day in Grand Forks’ history, and really the history of the entire state of North Dakota. Check back tomorrow for an entry pertaining to this catastrophic day.

Links related to this entry:
Click here to read an account of what it was like to try to save Smith Hall during the evening of April 18 as well as of the phone call that would later shut down the university for the rest of the semester (PDF).

Pictures related to this entry:

Videos related to this entry:
Seeing the devastating flooding taking place 70 miles to the north in Grand Forks, ND, officials in Fargo, ND announced dramatic plans on April 18, 1997 to quickly build a dike to protect the entire city from being inundated.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PxY6zYfFJY

Residents around the Fargo, ND/Moorhead, MN area on April 18 continued to battle the floodwater coming close to their homes. After a lot of hard work, many still lost the battle.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1BjiyovTsI

Panic and confusion set in as the floodwaters spread through Grand Forks

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-bjNOtBepI

Sources used in writing this entry:
Beyond the Flood. Videocassette. Minnesota Broadcasters Association, 1997.

Floodwatch '97. Videocassette. WDAY Television News, 1997.

Orvik, Jan, and Dick Larson. The Return of Lake Agassiz: the University of North Dakota and the Flood of 1997. Grand Forks, ND: University of North Dakota, 1998.

Flood of '97 Series: Desperation on the Dikes

2007-04-17T20:03:00.000-05:00

Writing these summaries for each day of the flood has been taking more time than I have at the moment, so, starting tomorrow, I’ll be posting very similar articles from the Grand Forks Herald. That will allow me to concentrate more on getting pictures, links, and videos posted. In addition, it should allow me to get the entries posted earlier in the morning.

Needless to say, as the next few days went down as being the worst of the worst during the Flood of 1997, I will still be doing a little writing by making my own personal additions to the Grand Forks Herald articles as I see necessary.

There have been and will continue to be quite a few flood commemoration ceremonies during the week in Grand Forks and East Grand Forks that I may cover in some way on the blog. I haven’t decided how best to do it yet, however.

With that said, here is what happened April 17, 1997

April 17 provided the first indications in Grand Forks and East Grand Forks that the fight to save some parts of the communities from being inundated was being quickly lost.

Back to Grand Forks in a bit, but first, the Fargo/Moorhead area was suffering through problems of its own. Water from overland flooding was rushing into the city essentially from all sides, adding to an already stressful situation being brought on by the unrelenting rise of the Red River. Just after midnight on April 17, the Red in Fargo/Moorhead surpassed its all-time record high mark of 39.1 feet recorded in 1897. All at once, it had become officially safe to say that nobody alive had ever seen the river so high in the Fargo/Moorhead area before.

Later in the day, tragedy struck. Out of the blue, an earthen and sandbag dike protecting homes along South Terrace Drive in Fargo's east side just couldn’t take the water’s immense pressure pushing on it anymore. It broke. The water rushed in, mercilessly flooding a neighborhood that hundreds of residents and volunteers had spent days, nights, weeks, trying to protect.

25 homes in the Oak Grove neighborhood, as well as the entire campus of Oak Grove Lutheran High School succumbed to the flood’s water. There was nothing that dejected residents and volunteers could do but walk away and pray that no more houses would be engulfed.

Unfortunately, that more houses would be lost due to flooding was turning out to be an ever realer possibility. Fifty square miles of water was coming in from overland flooding to the southern end of Fargo, and city officials were coming to the realization that this water could cause the entire city of Fargo to go under. Not willing to take any chances, city officials mulled the idea of quickly building an emergency earthen dike on the southern end of Fargo and West Fargo. They would announce the plan to the public the following day.

Back to Grand Forks and East Grand Forks, the mood in the cities was turning from optimism to utter concern. Sandbagging continued at a frantic pace, but the river was rising just too quickly, and the water pushing on the dikes was just too strong.

During the afternoon, multiple cracks began appearing in one of the dikes protecting the Lincoln Park neighborhood in Grand Forks and the Griggs Park and Sherlock Park neighborhoods of East Grand Forks. Residents and volunteers tried hysterically to plug the holes sending water, at some times, shooting 30 feet into the air. Some of the tactics included quickly building secondary dikes to hold back water coming in from the cracks or even pouring a special cement mixture into the holes and then covering them with plastic.

Though the efforts were valiant, the battle could simply not be won with new cracks appearing just as soon as the old ones were repaired.

By mid-afternoon, Grand Forks had reached “phase 3” of its evacuation plan – people living in the neighborhoods closest to the Red River or downtown were “strongly advised” to evacuate as soon as possible. Everyone leaving was told to plug basement drains and shut off gas or power services.

As the afternoon wore into evening, conditions worsened even further in the Lincoln Park neighborhood; emergency sirens had begun sounding, alerting all those living in the neighborhood of the seriousness of the situation. Water was pushing up into the streets through the storm sewers, cracks in the dikes were getting larger, and volunteer sandbaggers were finding it increasingly harder to keep up with the river’s rise.

By nightfall, all those living in the Lincoln Park neighborhood had been evacuated. Still, the effort to save those people’s houses kept on going. Floodlights were brought in and placed along the dikes so that the hordes of volunteers still out there – and still arriving from UND and the rest of Grand Forks – could continue the fight.

By midnight on April 18, the Lincoln Park neighborhood had still been spared major destruction. But what nobody knew was how long the battle against the now all-time record flood level could continue to be waged.

To UND now, April 17 was a tense day. University officials were continuing to look at the level of the water in the English Coulee with bewilderment; it had now come up above the bridge on Campus Road behind the Hughes Fine Arts Center and completely swallowed up the footbridge behind Smith Hall.

Just to be safe, UND Facilities Officials on April 17 made sure to document all hazardous and/or radioactive materials in buildings on campus and move what they could to higher ground as quickly as possible. Throughout the day, a team consisting of a Hazardous Material Coordinator and Radioactive Waste Specialist emptied out chemicals in basements and lower levels of such places as the Medical School, Energy & Environmental Research Center (EERC), and Abbott Hall, home of the Department of Chemistry. In the latter building, however, the volume of materials stored in the basement was so large that the team could only move toxic and water-reactive agents.

Check back tomorrow for the next installment in this series.

Links related to this entry:

Click here to see some photos from around the April 17 timespan.

Click here to read "Oak Grove fetes rebirth," an article appearing in the April 17, 2007 Fargo Forum (registration may be required).

Videos related to this entry:
Water from overland flooding continued to threaten outlaying homes in the Fargo, ND area on April 17, 1997

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNC9dj9ekLI

The dike protecting the Oak Grove neighborhood on the east side of Fargo, ND broke during the day on April 17, 1997, devastating many lives.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFiAWJND2gg

Aerial views from April 17, 1997 show the extent of the flooding around the Fargo, ND and Moorhead, MN areas. Both overland flooding and river flooding was contributing to turn the entire area into one giant lake.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsVxnUOIHMs

Sources used in writing this entry:
Beyond the Flood. Videocassette. Minnesota Broadcasters Association, 1997.

Floodwatch '97. Videocassette. WDAY Television News, 1997.

Orvik, Jan, and Dick Larson. The Return of Lake Agassiz: the University of North Dakota and the Flood of 1997. Grand Forks, ND: University of North Dakota, 1998.

Staff of the [Fargo] Forum, comp. Fighting Back: the Blizzards and Flood in the Red River Valley, 1996-97. Fargo, ND: Forum Communications Company, 1997.

Staff of the Grand Forks Herald and Knight-Ridder Newspapers, comp. Come Hell and High Water: the Incredible Story of the 1997 Red River Flood. Grand Forks, ND: Grand Forks Herald, 1997.

Flood of '97 Series: The Arrival of "The Flood of the Century"

2007-04-16T20:39:00.000-05:00

In Grand Forks, April 16, 1997 would go down in history as the day that the flood of 1997 became the “flood of the century.” The Red River in East Grand Forks started the day at 47.10 feet and ended it at 48.98 feet, the second-highest level in recorded history, and within close range of the record highest 50.20 foot mark of a century earlier in 1897.

Because of the still rapid ascent of the water in the Grand Forks/East Grand Forks area, it was beginning to appear more and more likely that this 50.20 foot level would be surpassed. After leaving the crest prediction stand at 49 feet for two months, and then raising it one foot the day before, the National Weather Service raised the crest prediction once more on April 16 by increasing it to 50.5 feet.

The increased prediction certainly was not good news. However, it didn’t come as that big of a shock either, as residents in both cities had been preparing for weeks for a crest of around 52 feet. In actuality, residents were pretty optimistic at daybreak on April 16 and thought that the exhausting fight to save their homes and cities was going pretty well.

City officials thought otherwise. In both East Grand Forks and Grand Forks, evacuation plans were being thoroughly reviewed, but no mandatory evacuation orders were given. Still, by the evening hours, Grand Forks city officials began seriously discussing the possibility of having to evacuate some residents of low-laying areas within the city.

One of these particularly vulnerable spots was the Lincoln Park neighborhood adjacent to the Red River in the east end of Grand Forks (see map below). There, houses stood precariously close to the river and at a lower elevation than the surroundings. With the water continuing to rise, it was becoming ever clearer that this area might be in trouble. As a precaution, Grand Forks’ mayor Pat Owens told people living in the Lincoln Park neighborhood on the evening of the 16th that they should seriously consider moving out of their homes within the next 24 hours in case a tragedy struck. Residents of the area responded with mixed emotions, but many wanted to stay up until the wee hours of the morning – or until sunrise – continuing to build and patrol the sandbagged dikes that were still sparing them from disaster.

Outside of Grand Forks on the 16th, flooding conditions in the Fargo/Moorhead area continued to be grim. As it had been for days, water was still threatening the Oakport Township north of Moorhead and the Oak Grove neighborhood next to the river in the east end of Fargo. By the end of April 16, the Red River was at 39 feet in Fargo/Moorhead, a mere one-tenth of a foot shy of the all-time record set in 1897.

Flooding was beginning to grip the communities north of Grand Forks. Interstate 29 was shut down between Grand Forks and the Grafton exit, adding 37 miles to the already 80 miles between Grand Forks and Fargo that the road had been barricaded. Officials in Walsh County, ND – north of Grand Forks – urged people living east of the interstate and west of the Red River to evacuate by daybreak.

At UND, anybody who could volunteer with sandbagging within the community was strongly advised to do so. To that end, President Kendall Baker called off class on both April 16 and 17. What nobody knew at that time, though, was that the semester was about to come to an abrupt end…

Check back tomorrow evening for the latest entry in this series.

Pictures related to this entry:

An overview of the Lincoln Park Neighborhood in Grand Forks - this neighborhood will be mentioned often in the coming days

Sources used in writing this entry:
Staff of the [Fargo] Forum, comp. Fighting Back: the Blizzards and Flood in the Red River Valley, 1996-97. Fargo, ND: Forum Communications Company, 1997.

Staff of the Grand Forks Herald and Knight-Ridder Newspapers, comp. Come Hell and High Water: the Incredible Story of the 1997 Red River Flood. Grand Forks, ND: Grand Forks Herald, 1997.

Flood of '97 Series: The River Closes In

2007-04-15T15:05:00.000-05:00

Undoubtedly, the people who suffered the most on April 14 were the residents of Breckenridge, Minnesota. After watching most of their city succumb to water – and then ice – from the nearby Bois de Sioux, Otter Tail, and Red Rivers just a mere week earlier, overland flooding threatened the city once more by April 14. Although not all at once, about 400 homes were evacuated in this second wave of flooding. At one time during the course of April 15, the entire city of Breckenridge was in danger of going under water (see videos below).

Situations weren’t quite as dire in the Fargo/Moorhead area, but they were certainly still tense. After thinking that the Red River there had crested on April 12, the residents there started witnessing the water level rising once again on April 14.

By April 15, the water continued its precarious rise, topping the 38-foot mark and inching ever closer to the record 39.10 foot mark measured a century earlier in 1897. For the most part, the cities of Fargo and Moorhead were in unfamiliar territory; few had ever seen the water that high before, and, because of the unpredictability of the water coming in via overland flooding, it was futile to predict when the river would finally begin receding.

Worst yet, cracks begin developing during the afternoon of April 15 on the earthen dike that the city of Fargo constructed right down the middle of 2nd Street in an attempt to protect the downtown area. Because there were people assigned to continually patrol the dike and be on the lookout for problems, the cracks were quickly identified and repaired, but officials were still concerned. Later in the evening, city officials decided to rapidly build a second earthen dike one block to the west of the original one, in case more cracks showed up.

Conditions north of the Fargo/Moorhead area were not good. Dikes were failing and homes were going under water in the Oakport Township just north of Moorhead. Some residents were forced to evacuate with aid from the U.S. Coast Guard, which had been helping in the region since the floods in Breckenridge/Wahpeton and Ada.

Farther north of the Oakport Township are numerous small towns in Norman County extremely close to the Minnesota side of the Red River. Residents in Hendrum and Perley not only had to put up with the nearly 10-mile wide Red River there, but also strong winds that were eroding earthen dikes and causing whitecaps to appear on the flood water.

The flooding occurring in the southern portion of the Red River Valley was looked at wearily by residents in Grand Forks and East Grand Forks. Residents in the area continued to frantically build dikes and sandbags. By April 14, earthen dikes had shut down quite a few major roads near the river in Grand Forks, and it was becoming increasingly harder for volunteers to even get around within the city.

That became even harder when two of the three bridges that cross the Red River in Grand Forks and East Grand Forks – the Point Bridge and Sorlie Bridge – were closed on April 15. Now, the sole link between the two communities was the Kennedy Bridge on U.S. Highway 2.

Also, on April 15, the National Weather Service increased its crest prediction for Grand Forks and East Grand Forks to 50 feet. Up until this point, it had been 49 feet. But with the river at 46.6 feet on April 15 and enormous amounts of water still to flow north, the National Weather Service thought it increasingly likely that the Red River would crest higher than the 48.81 foot crest in 1979. With the increased crest prediction and worsening conditions in the Fargo/Moorhead area, Grand Forks and East Grand Forks officials began refining the cities’ evacuation plans, in case the unimaginable happened and the cities went under water.

The English Coulee had become UND’s own river by April 15. New dikes were being built on both sides of the coulee to protect Smith Hall, Wilkerson Hall, Gustafson Hall, and electrical transformers near the Chester Fritz Auditorium and Wilkerson Hall. The volunteers helping to construct the dikes were treated to the sounds of UND’s carillon bells playing music. No building on campus had yet to suffer damage, but the coulee’s rising water had forced the closure of a foot bridge behind Smith Hall and a pedestrian underpass under University Avenue. Classes, however, were still being held as normal, even though many students were wondering how long it would be before the university shut down completely.

Check back April 16 for the next installment in this series.

Videos related to this entry:
After suffering through one flood just a week earlier, a second devastating flood strikes Breckenridge, Minnesota (from KSTP-TV, St. Paul)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4JQEhJaAL8

After suffering through one flood just a week earlier, a second devastating flood strikes Breckenridge, Minnesota (from WDAY-TV, Fargo)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPsxytaYO-w

April 15, 1997 was a busy day in the Fargo, North Dakota/Moorhead, Minnesota area. Areas north and south of Moorhead were being surrounded by water, and, worst of all, an earthen dike in the city of Fargo developed cracks, prompting the city to spend all night building a secondary one to try to protect downtown.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vo5qIaNdRw

Pictures related to this entry:

Downtown Fargo during the height of the flooding

The secondary dike built in downtown Fargo after cracks appeared in the first one

Sources used in writing this entry:
Beyond the Flood. Videocassette. Minnesota Broadcasters Association, 1997.

Floodwatch '97. Videocassette. WDAY Television News, 1997.

Orvik, Jan, and Dick Larson. The Return of Lake Agassiz: the University of North Dakota and the Flood of 1997. Grand Forks, ND: University of North Dakota, 1998.

Staff of the [Fargo] Forum, comp. Fighting Back: the Blizzards and Flood in the Red River Valley, 1996-97. Fargo, ND: Forum Communications Company, 1997.

Staff of the Grand Forks Herald and Knight-Ridder Newspapers, comp. Come Hell and High Water: the Incredible Story of the 1997 Red River Flood. Grand Forks, ND: Grand Forks Herald, 1997.

Flood of '97 Series: "Dreaming of Sandbags"

2007-04-11T20:55:00.000-05:00

By April 9, the extent of the damage in Ada, Breckenridge, and Wahpeton was plainly evident. The areas were declared disaster areas, and the flood of 1997, which was only just beginning, was gaining publicity across the country.

With the widespread flooding and scenes of destruction coming out of Breckenridge/Wahpeton and Ada came widespread worry on the part of residents living in other parts of the Red River Valley. All the water that had inundated those communities was very much still on the ground, and, by the natural order of things, all this water was poised to advance northward in the coming days. Many Red River Valley residents spent virtually all of their waking hours during this time piling sandbags. Creating dikes out of the sacks of soil, which itself was sometimes hastily scooped up from wherever it could be found, including city parks, was the only defense that many people had to protect their own homes and the homes of their neighbors.

The National Weather Service began to slowly realize that its crest predictions might be too low to accommodate for all the overland flooding that was occurring in conjunction with river flooding (see previous entry). Accordingly, on April 9, the crest prediction for the Red River in Fargo/Moorhead was raised to 39.5 feet. Panic set in when it was realized that this would be a higher level that had ever been recorded. Efforts were made to quickly raise dikes throughout the Fargo/Moorhead area to unprecedented levels. As it turned out, however, on the next day – April 10 – the National Weather Service corrected itself and lowered the predicted crest to its previous level. A faulty automated gauge near South of Fargo near Hickson, North Dakota had been used to make the prediction.

Just like it had been for weeks prior, the crest prediction at Grand Forks continued to stand at 49 feet. On April 11, the National Weather Service speculated that the Red River would crest at this level in Grand Forks/East Grand Forks during the week of April 20-27.

April 11 was actually a busy day that also featured one of first of several visitors to the area from Washington D.C. in the form of Vice President Al Gore. He toured the southern portion of the Red River Valley, witnessing firsthand the damage in Breckenridge/Wahpeton and the valiant efforts being waged to fend off water in the Fargo/Moorhead area, offering comforting words along the way and promising that the federal government would be there to help residents with the cleanup.

Also on April 11, the Red River in Fargo/Moorhead appeared to finally be leveling off at a level of 37.55 feet, the second-highest level in local history. All was not fine, however, as an enormous pool of water from overland flooding and the nearby Maple, Sheyenne, and Wild Rice Rivers had the entire Fargo/Moorhead area surrounded. The most populous city in North Dakota and the most populous city of western Minnesota were becoming islands unto themselves. This fact was made even more obvious when parts of Interstate 29 were closed north of Fargo due to overland flooding. Getting from Fargo to Grand Forks now required a detour 20 miles to the west.

In Grand Forks during this time, there was a sense of weary optimism as people continued to build dikes that would withstand the predicted crest level of 49 feet. Hoards of volunteers were helping with the effort, including hundreds, if not thousands, of UND students. The university’s Memorial Union was headquarters for the on-campus volunteer effort. 24 hours a day during this time, buses filled with students would depart Memorial Union and make the 3 or so mile trek down to the river to help at first with sandbagging dikes along the river and later with sandbagging dikes protecting private residences.

Starting with this entry and continuing with many in the future, more emphasis will be placed on what was happening on campus at UND with regard to the flood. Because of this, there will be some locations mentioned that probably will not carry any significance to those unfamiliar with the campus. In order to try to convey this significance, I’ve put together a map showing some locations that I think are important to recognize. Click here to view and study this map.

The main threat to UND during the early stages of the flood in Grand Forks came from the English Coulee, the stream that winds through UND (and much of Grand Forks). Most of the time, the coulee is tame and it’s almost laughable to think that it could ever pose any flood threat. But in record flood years like 1997, the coulee behaves much like a large river, which doesn’t bode well for the buildings lying next to it.

With that little disclaimer above out of the way, another thing that happened on April 11 was that preparations were begun to build dikes around three particularly vulnerable buildings on the UND Campus – the Delta Upsilon fraternity, Gamma Phi Beta sorority, and Smith Hall. The cafeteria located (at the time) in the basement of Smith Hall closed indefinitely at noon on April 11 so that a clay dike could be built. From this point on, Smith Hall quickly became one of the most flood-threatened buildings on campus.

Check back around April 14 for the next installment in this series.

Links related to this entry:
Click here to read "The Kindness of Strangers," an excellent account of what it meant to be a volunteer sandbagger during this time.

Videos related to this entry:
Panic sets in for residents of Fargo, ND and Moorhead, MN on April 9 as the National Weather Service increases the predicted crest level of the Red River to 39.5 feet, a level higher than anything previously recorded. The prediction was brought down the next day after it was revealed that a faulty gauge had been used.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6Um1A3k_Ak

Rising floodwaters continue to threaten homes in the Moorhead area on April 10.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4JSXn3lwEc

Vice President Al Gore visited with flood victims in the Breckenridge, MN/Wahpeton, ND and Moorhead, MN/Fargo, ND areas on April 11, 1997.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYMXYDBOkco

The National Weather Service claimed that the Red River in Fargo, ND/Moorhead, MN had crested on April 12 at 37.61 feet. As it turned out, it was too early to say that, because the river later rose to a couple more feet to a level never before seen in the area. Also featured in this video are the efforts being made to save one of the first churches in North Dakota. It wasn't enough, however, as the flood destroyed the church the following day.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9xsYIP7RhU

Pictures related to this entry:

Sources used in writing this entry:
Beyond the Flood. Videocassette. Minnesota Broadcasters Association, 1997.

Floodwatch '97. Videocassette. WDAY Television News, 1997.

Orvik, Jan, and Dick Larson. The Return of Lake Agassiz: the University of North Dakota and the Flood of 1997. Grand Forks, ND: University of North Dakota, 1998.

Staff of the [Fargo] Forum, comp. Fighting Back: the Blizzards and Flood in the Red River Valley, 1996-97. Fargo, ND: Forum Communications Company, 1997.

Staff of the Grand Forks Herald and Knight-Ridder Newspapers, comp. Come Hell and High Water: the Incredible Story of the 1997 Red River Flood. Grand Forks, ND: Grand Forks Herald, 1997.

Flood of '97 Series: "Hard-Hearted Hannah"

2007-04-04T15:15:00.000-05:00

"We're in the hurt bag. We're drowning internally."
-Dan Rood, Wahpeton (ND) Mayor

Respite from the cold, oppressive weather that had griped the Red River Valley during the winter of 1996-1997 came toward the end of March 1997 when temperatures reached into the comparatively balmy 30s and 40s.

The relief ended there, however, as residents up and down the valley came to the realization that with the rising temperatures, the unbelievably massive piles of snow that had accumulated over the winter would need to start melting. As it turned out, nature actually seemed to cooperate for once when it came to this first wave of melting in the second half of March. From the 16th of the month onward, daytime high temperatures generally were in the upper 30s to lower 40s and nighttime lows were below freezing. Additionally, little additional precipitation fell. All of this facilitated a gradual melt, which was seen as being particularly desirable in trying to ensure that there would be as little flood-related damage as possible.

Nevertheless, there was just too much snow that had to be melted. By April 1st, flooding had arrived in earnest in places such as Wahpeton (ND), Breckenridge (MN), Sabin (MN), Dilworth (MN), Casselton (ND), and Ada (MN). Though out of the scope of this series, it should be noted that it was at this same time that flooding began on the Red River’s south-flowing cousin, the Minnesota River. Montevideo and Granite Falls were two Minnesota cities hit particularly hard.

Getting back to the Red River Valley, the type of flooding that had begun occurring by the beginning of April can be placed into two categories. The first is the logical one: water from molten snow ran into creeks and rivers and they subsequently swelled until they overflowed their banks. This is what was happening, at an alarming rate, in cities such as Wahpeton, Breckenridge, Sabin, and Ada.

On the other hand, the Red River Valley is amazingly flat. Even though it consists of numerous creeks and rivers that flow into the Red River, which itself later empties into the large Lake Winnipeg in Manitoba, the valley’s flatness means that water is transferred and drained rather inefficiently. Consequently, some places, like Casselton (20 miles west of Fargo), experienced "overland flooding," where snow effectively melted into puddles the size of lakes. These new "lakes" then started taking on lives of their own, threatening people living miles away from the nearest river or creek. Such was the case in Casselton as well as in outlaying areas of Cass (ND), Clay (MN), and Norman (MN) Counties.

By the morning of Friday, April 4, 1997, the National Weather Service in Grand Forks had started issuing storm warnings predicting that a potent winter storm would develop throughout the valley over the weekend. Although Friday morning started rather calmly (with the exception of fog from the snowmelt), conditions started deteriorating by the evening. Blizzard Hannah was arriving.

The storm started with heavy rain. This turned into freezing rain, and then sleet, which, in turn, became heavy snow. As the snow started coming down, the wind started to gain ferocity – even by Red River Valley standards. There was about a 15-hour time span between Saturday evening and Sunday morning in which many locales reported sustained winds of 40-60 mph; gusts at times topped the hurricane-force mark of 74 mph.

By Monday, April 7th, one of the most powerful storms ever recorded in the area was concluding. It left not only an additional, unneeded 6-10 inches of snow, but also utter destruction. Thousands of people lost power when power poles snapped like twigs in the wind; hundreds of farmsteads that had already lost land due to flooding lost livestock; the second-tallest man-made structure in the world, the 2060 foot KXJB-TV transmitter near Galesburg, ND, crashed to the ground. Most destructively, however, the cities of Wahpeton, Breckenridge, and Ada were completely inundated after the additional precipitation ripped dikes apart. By April 7th, the Minnesota Army National Guard helped to move all residents out of Ada, making it a darkened ghost town. Many had made the heart-wrenching decision to leave after fluctuating water pressure blew out drain plugs, causing basements and streets to fill with raw sewage.

The images to come out of Wahpeton, Breckenridge, and Ada were some of the most bizarre and memorable during the entire flood of 1997. When temperatures plunged to record-breaking levels after Blizzard Hannah, all the water that had devoured these cities froze, leaving everything – cars, houses, trees – trapped. As a way to help ease flooding once the ice started to melt, officials in Breckenridge and Ada began chopping the ice and hauling it away – they were literally trying to take the flood away piece by piece.

The destruction playing out on the southern end of the Red River after Blizzard Hannah was closely monitored by those living in the northern, upstream portions, which really had yet to experience major flooding. With the 49 foot crest prediction still valid for the Red River in Grand Forks and East Grand Forks, the two cities were diligently seeking volunteers to help place sandbags on city dikes so that they could be raised to 52 feet. Plans were also being made to haul in clay and soil to make improvised dikes in case the permanent ones failed.

The need to make all dikes higher in Grand Forks and East Grand Forks was underscored by the drastic rise of the Red River above the 28 foot flood stage. The gauge (on the East Grand Forks side of the river) measured 27.55 feet at 9 pm on Friday, April 4; 3 days later at 9 pm on Monday, April 7, it measured 37.49 feet. And the water continued to rise...

Check back around April 11 for the next installment in this series.

Links related to this entry:

Click here to read a first-person account of what it was like to live through Blizzard Hannah (PDF).

Click here for the archived weather measurements in Grand Forks on Sunday, April 6, 1997, during the worst of Blizzard Hannah. Notice that the first three measurements have no wind speed; this is likely because the automated system cannot measure sustained wind above 46 mph (40 knots).

Although there were many great photos that were published during this time span, not too many were included in the books I used in collecting information to write this entry. So I’m going to an include a link to a Fargo Forum website that features some (unfortunately) low-resolution pictures taken in the days following Blizzard Hannah. Click here to view.

Videos related to this entry:
Here is a video montage of WDAY-TV's coverage of Blizzard Hannah and the resulting flooding in Wahpeton, Breckenridge, and Ada

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blEVI15lP8U

Pictures related to this entry:

Sources used in writing this entry:
Floodwatch '97. Videocassette. WDAY Television News, 1997.

Staff of the [Fargo] Forum, comp. Fighting Back: the Blizzards and Flood in the Red River Valley, 1996-97. Fargo, ND: Forum Communications Company, 1997.

Staff of the Grand Forks Herald and Knight-Ridder Newspapers, comp. Come Hell and High Water: the Incredible Story of the 1997 Red River Flood. Grand Forks, ND: Grand Forks Herald, 1997.

Varley, Jane. Flood Stage and Rising. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2005.

Flood of '97 Series: The Cruel Winter of 1996-97

2007-03-21T15:06:00.000-05:00

If there’s one thing you need in order to have a substantial flood in the spring, it’s a winter filled with abundant snowfall. The winter of 1996-1997 certainly delivered on that front.

Before the snow, however, another event struck the Red River Valley that would later affect spring flooding. An unusually late outbreak of severe thunderstorms moved through the region on October 26, brining thunder, lightning, and drenching amounts of rain. Grand Forks picked up 1.12 inches of precipitation on that day alone; Fargo received 0.84 inches, but had another storm pass through 3 days later and bring an additional 1.31 inches. Of course, all of this rainfall in such a short amount of time saturated the ground right at the time when it was beginning to freeze for the upcoming winter. Indeed, the freezing process was accelerated after a cold front passed through a few days after all the rain and brought temperatures to near record-breaking levels in the lower teens. The cold meant that the excess moisture had little chance to evaporate or drain out of the soil. As a result, the ground would be less able to soak up moisture produced by melting snow when the spring thaw finally arrived.

Snow arrived with vigor in the Red River Valley on November 16 when Blizzard Andy struck (at the time the Grand Forks Herald would wittily gave names to all blizzards that passed through the area during a winter season). The storm bought strong winds in excess of 40 miles per hour and over a foot of snow to many communities in the area. One of the first storm-related deaths of the season affected the UND community when computer science major Francis Delabreau suffered hypothermia after he tried walking in the storm from a party to his house. His body was found two months after the storm in an abandoned van that he evidently climbed in to escape the elements.

Blizzard Andy ended up being a harbinger of things to come for the Red River Valley. Between the months of November and April, Blizzards Betty, Christopher, Doris, Elmo, Franzi, Gust, and Hannah struck, bringing white-out conditions, bone-chilling wind chills, massive amounts of snow, and unbelievably high snowdrifts. By the time the snow season was over, the area had received more snow than anytime before in recorded history. Between November and April, Grand Forks picked up 98.6 inches of snow, while Fargo received an astonishing 117 inches – 30 inches more than the previous snowiest season of a century before and 78 inches more than during an average season. What’s interesting to consider is how high the total snowfall would have been if February wouldn’t have been so relatively snowless – only 8 inches fell in Fargo during that month.

With the cold temperatures that often accompanied the snow, there was little opportunity for any of it to melt. It just kept piling up. By the middle of February, it was quite evident that some sort of flooding would take place once temperatures rose in the spring. On February 14, the National Weather Service’s North Central River Forecast Center in Chanhassen, Minnesota issued its first flood outlook for the spring. It called for major flooding to occur in the Red River Valley, with a predicted 49 foot crest of the Red River at Grand Forks (flood stage is at 28 feet). This would be slightly under the record 50.20 foot crest of 1897 and slightly above the 48.81 foot crest of 1979, which many in the community still remembered as being relatively undamaging. As it turned out, that number, 49, would later come back to haunt the forecasters in Chanhassen.

By the middle of March, cities in the region were bracing themselves for the major flooding that was likely on the way. Grand Forks turned on its brand-new, highly efficient sandbagging machine for the first time on March 15. Work was then underway on making sure that both Grand Forks and East Grand Forks would have a healthy supply of sandbags to use in raising preexisting dikes to 52 feet. The call for volunteers to help lay the sandbags on the dikes went out, and was answered by many in both Grand Forks and East Grand Forks as well as among students and staff at UND.

The last half of March ended up being much milder than the rest of the winter and finally afforded the chance for some of the snow to melt. But winter was in no way finished…

Check back around April 5 for the next installment in this series.

Pictures related to this entry:

Sources used in writing this entry:
Orvik, Jan, and Dick Larson. The Return of Lake Agassiz: the University of North Dakota and the Flood of 1997. Grand Forks, ND: University of North Dakota, 1998.

Staff of the [Fargo] Forum, comp. Fighting Back: the Blizzards and Flood in the Red River Valley, 1996-97. Fargo, ND: Forum Communications Company, 1997.

Staff of the Grand Forks Herald and Knight-Ridder Newspapers, comp. Come Hell and High Water: the Incredible Story of the 1997 Red River Flood. Grand Forks, ND: Grand Forks Herald, 1997.

Varley, Jane. Flood Stage and Rising. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2005.

Flood of '97 Series: Introduction

2007-03-12T16:34:00.000-05:00

The 10-year anniversary of the devastating flood that inundated communities up and down the Red River Valley of northwestern Minnesota and eastern North Dakota is fast approaching. In the coming days and weeks, expect to see quite a few entries commemorating this important anniversary. I am currently doing major research in hopes of presenting the most complete, thorough view possible.

Why am I doing this? The mission is really three-fold. First, it involves no intentional insensitivity or desire to dramatize the devastation inflicted on literally thousands and thousands of people. On the contrary, I think the story of the flood of 1997 is an uplifting one that shows how people, faced with adversity, can come together and remain determined to rebuild their community. Grand Forks and, arguably to a larger extent, East Grand Forks could have practically disappeared from maps after 1997. Plummeting population figures and scarce economic renewal could have left the cities as shells of their former selves. However, 10 years on, this has not happened. Grand Forks has more people now than before the flood, and new development continues at a brisk rate.

Secondly, I feel the 10th anniversary of the flood will be one of the most important ones. 10 years is recent enough that those who lived through the experience still have vivid and poignant memories. On the other hand, 10 years is also sufficient enough to allow for reflection and a look back at all that has been accomplished during the time span.

Lastly, a lot of my readers were quite young when the flood happened. Unless they experienced it first-hand or had family members who did, they probably don’t remember that much. Hopefully I’ll be able to provide some sort of historical record.

The first entry regarding the flood will come in a few days; it will discuss how the moist autumn and relentless winter preceding the flood combined to set the stage for destruction in the spring.

Cold

2007-02-10T14:33:00.000-06:00

A couple posts ago I mentioned how I thought the cloud of water vapor and carbon dioxide coming from the UND Steam Plant looks neat when the temperature drops to the 0°F mark. But what happens when the temperature gets, let’s say, 30 degrees colder than that? The answer was seen in Grand Forks this last Monday when the thermometer at the city’s airport reached a record-setting -31°F, one of the coldest readings Monday morning in the entire United States, including Alaska. A temperature like that combined with nearly calm winds allowed some interesting man-made clouds to appear over Grand Forks.

Firstly, here’s a video I shot of the cloud emanating from UND’s steam plant during the walk to my 8 AM organic chemistry class. The airport was reporting its minimum of -31°F at the time. Of course it was a cold walk, but, being that there wasn’t any wind, it didn’t seem as bad as some of my other (foolish?) outings in wind chills between -40°F and -50°F. Since I had planned to take pictures for a bit after I got out of class at 9 AM, I was also dressed in a few more layers than usual at the time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbNj800VrcE

By 9, the temperature had begun rising and had reached -27°F. The first cloud I noticed was a long, massive one in the general direction of Crystal Sugar’s plant in East Grand Forks. I made the trek over to where I knew I would be able to get a good picture – the top floor of UND’s Medical School.

On closer inspection, that cloud is too far north to be coming from Crystal Sugar’s plant; it’s more likely to be from one of the potato processors in East Grand Forks.

After this, I walked a little farther north to the Ralph Engelstad Arena. Here, the cloud coming from the Simplot potato processing plant north of the university could be easily seen. Ironically, I took some pictures from the Simplot-sponsored parking lot at the arena.

And here’s another picture from the plaza in front of The Ralph.

It was treacherous to have anything made out of glass exposed to the cold air at the time. Moisture had started to condense on my glasses, forming a layer of ice similar to what would need to be scraped off of a car window on a cold morning. The same thing was beginning to happen to my camera’s lens, but, luckily, I protected it before it got too bad.

The first 10 days of February have been particularly cold, not just in Grand Forks, but for much of the Upper Midwest east of the Missouri River. For the most part, the cold hasn’t been record setting (I think global warming can be blamed, in part, for that), but it has been one of the coldest stretch of temperatures in the last few years. Grand Forks stayed below 0°F for 6 whole days – 144 hours – between the 2nd and 8th of the month. And even when the temperature did manage to break 0°F, it only got to 1°F and only remained that warm for less than an hour. The cold has been so pronounced that even the “urban heat island” of Minneapolis has recorded an average temperature of -2°F for the first 10 days of the month.

The cold has been accompanied at times with even colder wind chills. As the cold front that ushered in the cold-weather pattern passed through Grand Forks, wind chills dropped to the -30°F mark. This meant that bundling up was a necessity when walking to or from class at the university.

One of the more beautiful things that the cold weather brought in was some impressive optical illusions with the sun. Sun dogs, sun pillars, and halos around the sun became commonplace as the cold weather was settling in.

Sun dogs and sun pillars form when a low-angled sun reflects light off of ice crystals in the atmosphere. That picture above shows the leftmost sun dog (there was an equally as striking sun dog to the right of the sun, but I didn’t have a wide enough lens to get both in the frame). Additionally, the beginnings of what would become an even larger sun pillar can be seen right above the setting sun.

6th Annual Top 10 Super Bowl Commercials

2007-02-04T22:22:00.000-06:00

The last time I did one of these was 2005. I don't remember what my excuse was last year, but I thought I'd revive the tradition this year. It's amazing how easy getting video of the commercials has become with the advent of Youtube and similar websites. Since I remember having to capture, encode, and upload video of the commercials myself back when I started doing this, it's great to note that advertisers have come to realize that their commercials can continue to attract many viewers on the internet long after the Super Bowl has ended.

10. Frito-Lay - "Making History"
click here to stream this commercial in Real Player

9. Fed Ex - "Judge Something by its Name"

8. Emerald Nuts - "Boogeyman"

7. Sierra Mist - "Beard Combover"

6. General Motors - "We're Obsessed with Quality"

5. Bud Light - "But He Has Bud Light"

4. Nationwide Insurance - "RollinVIP"

3. Bud Light - "Reception"

2. Careerbuilder.com - "Darts & Jungle, Inc."
Click here to view this commercial

1. Bud Light - "Rock, Paper Scissors"

Weather and Climate

2007-01-26T21:08:00.000-06:00

It’s been a long time since a new entry. I’ve wanted to write the following post for a couple of weeks now, but the (so far) hectic nature of this new semester has made me largely unable. But, here goes.

One of the gifts I got for Christmas a little over a month ago was a fully-functional, professional-grade weather station – the three-piece kind that include an anemometer (wind vane), tipping bucket (self-emptying) rain gauge, and thermo sensor. It’s something I had wanted for awhile, particularly ever since my favorite weather website, http://www.wunderground.com, started allowing users to continually upload the measurements from their individual weather stations.

My station is far from being top-of-the-line, but it’s sufficient enough for me, able to do a fine job measuring all of basic variables like temperature, humidity, dew point, and wind direction. My station has been in operating mode since the morning of December 25, when it began uploading its data to wunderground.com every 15 minutes.

In the future, I hope to get some sort of web server set up on the computer the weather station is connected to so that I will be able to run a website with a detailed look at all the data reported by my weather station. In the meantime, if you want to check out current conditions or view archived data, you’ll have to go to my weather station’s Wunderground homepage here. Alternatively, if you just want to see the current temperature and wind speed, take a glance over to the "sticker" I’ve posted over on the right-hand side of the blog here, under the "stickers" for the official Brainerd and Grand Forks observations.

Temperature and dew point observations reported by my station generally agree with those reported by the Brainerd's official, automated station at the airport about 3 air miles from my house. If the values vary in any way, it's usually just a degree or two, which doesn’t amount to anything noteworthy given the distance between the two stations and, presumably, the different surroundings they're located in. If anything is likely to differ appreciably from the official value, it'll be wind speed. Part of this is probably because the official anemometer is of higher quality and located 10 meters above ground. More probable, however, is that the difference is because the official anemometer is (or should be) in the middle of an open field. Mine is located in a residential area surrounded by other houses and old, stately trees. As such, you could say that it records wind values that are more realistic for an environment that contains a lot of obstacles blocking the wind – the sort of environment that most people who live in cities are likely to experience.

Assuming the electricity at my house stays on, my internet connection stays up and running, the wireless signal between the station’s outdoor transmitter and indoor receiver doesn’t stop working, and the computer I’m using for uploading doesn’t suddenly explode, my weather station should be bringing you the latest weather conditions in my backyard every 15 minutes, all day long. I hope you enjoy.

Now, speaking of climate, I finally got around to posting all of the data pertaining to Brainerd’s climate that I’ve slowly spent the better part of the last two years collecting and examining. I wasn’t originally going to post it online, but I changed my mind because I wanted to have easier access to it, and I thought others might as well.

So, I present to you The Climate of Brainerd, Minnesota. Click on that link, go to that Geocities page, and find answers to all kinds of questions regarding Brainerd’s climate that you never knew to ask: How many days in January typically see a low of -20°F or colder? What’s the average amount of precipitation that falls in October? How many days in 1960 had a high of 90°F or warmer?

All of the data I used in making the website came from the very handy historical observations database at the website of the Minnesota Climatology Working Group. There are uninterrupted, daily observations for Brainerd on there dating back to 1898. Those from the last couple decades come from the cooperative observation station located close to the Mississippi River near the cemetery in northeast Brainerd. Because of this, not all of the data agrees perfectly with that reported by the automated station located, once again, at the airport east of town.

It was a lot of arduous work at times going through all the data, but, in the end, I’m glad I did it because it’s been interesting to see that the anomalous warming the entire globe has experienced during the last decade or so has also been happening in Brainerd. Sometime soon I’ll present some of the evidence that shows Brainerd is becoming a warmer, possibly wetter place.

In the meantime, Grand Forks had a bit of a cold spell about a couple weeks ago. For 6 nights, nighttime lows were around -20°F and daytime highs hovered around "the doughnut" – the 0°F mark. One of the several neat things that happens when it gets that cold is that the cloud of whatever it is that comes out of the university’s power plant (probably mostly H2O and CO2) grows to massive proportions and looms large over campus. Here are some pictures:

By the way, the answers to those questions are about 6, 2.09 inches, and 7, respectively.

2007

2007-01-01T00:00:00.000-06:00

Happy New Year!

I would have posted this sooner into the new year, but my internet was down most of yesterday and today. For that reason, I'm bending the truth and saying I posted this at exactly 12:00 AM.

It's Christmas

2006-12-24T22:41:00.000-06:00

Merry Christmas

I'd like to wish all of my readers a very merry Christmas. Hopefully you got/will get all of the presents you wanted.

For an additional couple of presents, I just finished posting two new entries below this one. Yes, I posted them today, but I altered the dates to read when I would have posted them had I been more ambitious and not put off writing them until this afternoon.

5 Years ago Today

2006-12-23T11:24:00.000-06:00

Exactly five years ago today, I created this blog. Happy fifth birthday, Mitch’s Blog!

The internet has changed a lot since that day five years ago. Back then, almost nobody aside from the early-adopters of new technology had any idea of what a blog was. Blogs had not yet gone mainstream; the media treated them as a new, obscure internet invention that only a margin of those using the internet would probably ever make use of.

Indeed, I would have never known what a blog was or had heard about Blogger back then either if I hadn’t been an ardent viewer of Tech TV, the (now-defunct) cable-tv channel that was devoted to computers, the internet, and technology in general. Blogs had gotten a lot of acclaim on the channel back in 2001, and a seemingly large majority of the channel’s fans and hosts had a personal blog by the end of that year. A couple days before Christmas, I decided to join the herd and get one too.

Few people know this, but the original reason I started this blog was to communicate with family. Although I did want to be able to create entries that resembled emails, what I really wanted to do was share things such as photos and videos. The septillion photo and video sharing websites that are around now weren’t around at the time. I figured starting a blog to achieve this would be a whole lot easier than the alternative of starting an entire website from scratch. Naturally, I was correct.

Blogger has certainly come a long way since 2001 as well. Although it was well-known at the time among those who had heard about blogs, running a blog using Blogger wasn’t exactly seen as the most desirable thing to do. Instead, if you had the programming know-how (and, in general, the money to spare for website hosting), you would implement a proprietary blog publishing system like the one called Movable Type. This was because the service provided by Blogger was as bare-bones as possible. RSS feeds were unheard of, and, although it's hard to believe now, it wasn’t even possible to leave comments on individual entries. Additionally, hosting your blog with Blogspot meant that you had to deal with a barrage of popup and other unsavory ads.

Of course, Blogger has added a lot of useful features and become much better since then. Both blogs and blogging in general have also gained widespread notoriety and ubiquity. Through it all, though, this blog, the one without a witty name (witty names are another thing that weren’t very common in 2001) has been here. With any luck, I hope to have this blog going strong for another five years and for many more pentads* after that!

* Among other things, a pentad is a period of five years

Riding the Iron Horse

2006-12-20T19:49:00.000-06:00

With the exception of physics, all of my finals went well. Actually, comparatively, physics wasn’t so bad either. My score was better than the average, an unimpressive 45 percent. That's a solid D under the grading scale for that class.

Even though the last day of class before the start of the three week intermission between semesters was Friday, the 15th, I took advantage of the fact that my last final was in the morning two days earlier, on Wednesday, and came home on Thursday morning. For the second time in my life, I came in on an Amtrak train.

Riding Amtrak home at least once during the school year was something I had always intended to do last year. However, my actions ended up being entirely different from my intentions. Even though I knew precisely when the daily Empire Builder was scheduled to arrive in Grand Forks, precisely when it was scheduled to arrive in Staples (the nearest stop to Brainerd), and precisely how much a one-way ticket cost, I never did take it.

I vowed to change that this year. With the federal government increasingly pressuring Amtrak to cut money-losing, long distance routes such as the one of the Empire Builder, I figured if I didn’t ride at any time during this school year, I might not get any more chances.

So I thought it over during the summer and somehow came to the conclusion that the best time to ride the train for the first time would be during the three-day Veterans Day weekend. I think part of my reasoning had to do with my assumption that the train would be a lot less crowded on the day preceding Veterans Day rather than the day preceding Thanksgiving.

In any event, I made my mind up to ride home for the three-day weekend. By about the end of September, a funny thing happened: my roommate and a few friends decided that they were going to go to a concert in the Twin Cities during the Veterans Day weekend and that they were going to take the Empire Builder from Grand Forks on the same morning that I was planning on taking it. I thought this was great news, since it meant I wouldn’t be traveling Amtrak for the first time completely by myself. Shortly after I had heard about all this, I took the next step forward and ordered a ticket to ride from Grand Forks to Staples on the morning of November 10th.

And right around the scheduled arrival time of 12:57 AM on that day in Grand Forks, I boarded the train. As it turned out, I actually kind of did have to ride by myself, since the conductor placed all of the people I knew toward the back of the train and me in front. Still, I had an enjoyable experience. The ride from Grand Forks to Staples was comfortable, fast (average speeds are 70-80 mph), and, at a price of $25, right around what the gas would have cost to drive a car the same distance.

Something else that made the experience enjoyable was that I had brought my police scanner along so that I could listen to the behind-the-scenes operating aspects of the train that I was riding on. There is a bit more radio communication involved in operating an Amtrak train simply because, unlike on a freight train, the conductor is not in the locomotive cab with the engineer. In any event, as I was listening, I made sure to write down notes. I thought they would be a good way to remember my trip.

Skipping ahead to December now, I liked riding Amtrak from Grand Forks to Staples so much in November that I decided to take it home again last Thursday, the 14th. Though the train ended up being an hour late coming into Staples – which meant it came in at around 5 in the morning – I still had another great trip. As in November, I brought my scanner along and wrote down notes along the way. I thought posting them would be a worthwhile addition to my blog.

First, however, it might be necessary to have some background information. The route I took is outlined in blue:

An overview of the route; click on the picture to see a larger version

A detailed look at my route through Fargo/Moorhead

It might also be worthwhile to know that a (defect) detector is a device mounted alongside tracks that is able to scan passing trains for defects such as dragging equipment, shifted loads, or overheated axle bearings. In general, after a train passes completely over a detector, the detector transmits a computerized radio message that will either list the defects it found or simply state "no defects" if there are none. Many detectors, in their radio transmissions, will also include a count of the total number of axles on the train that has passed through as well as the current ambient temperature. Click here for an mp3 file of a typical "no defects" transmission from the detector located at the Knollwood Drive crossing in Baxter.

Additionally, a (track) warrant is a document that grants a train authority to move between two specific points on a rail line. For reasons I don't see necessary to discuss, my train only needed to obtain track warrants to move between Grand Forks (called FO Switch in railroad jargon) and Fargo (West Yard Limits Dakota Junction) and Detroit Lakes (CTC Richards Spur) and Wadena (CTC Wadena).

Here are my notes...

The lead locomotive was Amtrak 165

01:19 - AMTK 165 gets a warrant between Station Sign FO Switch and the West Yard Limits Dakota Junction

01:33 - Arrive at Grand Forks 36 minutes late to pick up approximately 35 passengers and let off approximately 15

01:42 - Depart Grand Forks 45 minutes late, with a delay stemming from all the luggage in the luggage car

02:01 - No defects at milepost 79.0 (Buxton, ND) detector (52 axles)

02:24 - No defects at milepost 52.7 (Grandin, ND) detector

02:38 - Notify the Dilworth Terminal Dispatcher that we've passed Argusville, ND; the dispatcher says that we'll be meeting up with a crewless coal train at Dakota Junction and the Lincoln, NE to Dilworth, MN freight train (H-LINDIL) at the Fargo Yard Office

02:43 - No defects at milepost 32.7 (Harwood, ND) detector

02:48 - Encounter red signal at Dakota Junction; stop and get talked
past it by the Dilworth Terminal Dispatcher

02:49 - At station sign Dakota Junction, pass a crewless coal train bound for Cohasset, MN

02:51 - Having entered the yard limits at Dakota Junction, void warrant between Station Sign FO Switch and the West Yard Limits Dakota Junction

02:55 - Stop at the Fargo Yard Office to meet up with a 7,000-some foot H-LINDIL

03:01 - With the H-LINDIL past the yard office, receive authority to proceed to the Fargo depot, proceed to Moorhead Junction and then continue east to Dilworth

03:04 - Arrive at Fargo 51 minutes late to pick up approximately 30 passengers and drop off approximately 17

03:15 - Depart Fargo 1 hour and 2 minutes late, with a delay once again coming from all the luggage in the luggage car

03:26 - Pass the westbound Amtrak 7/27 train near the Dilworth Yard Office

03:29 - Exit the yard at East Dilworth and begin going up what's generally referred to "the hill" leading out of the Red River Valley

03:31 - Receive warrant between CTC Richards Spur and CTC Wadena

03:37 - Pass a United Parcel Service train west of Glyndon

03:39 - No defects at milepost 240.5 (Glyndon, MN) detector

03:46 - Pass underneath the wooden bridges west of Hawley

03:53 - Pass unknown type of train west of Lake Park

03:57 - No defects at milepost 221.2 (Lake Park, MN) detector

04:07 - Arrive at Detroit Lakes 57 minutes late to pick up 1 passenger and drop off 5, including two people traveling in a sleeper car

04:10 - Depart Detroit Lakes 1 hour late

04:12 - Pass double-stack container train in eastern Detroit Lakes

04:17 - No defects at milepost 203.0 (Frazee, MN) detector

04:29 - Pass unknown type of train in Perham

04:42 - No defects at milepost 174.1 (Bluffton, MN) detector

04:48 - Having passed CTC Wadena, void warrant between Richards Spur and Wadena

05:00 - No defects at milepost 151.6 (Staples, MN) detector

05:06 - Arrive at Staples 57 late to pick up 1 passenger and drop off
1 passenger (me)

05:08 - Depart Staples 59 minutes late

Spring Schedule

2006-12-07T17:00:00.000-06:00

I’m dropping in again to say that I picked out all the courses I’m going to be taking next semester. Actually, I did it a few weeks ago, but I just haven’t had the ambition to write anything about it until now. And that’s only because I really don’t want to start studying for the 5 finals I have to take in the first three days of next week.

At any rate, my schedule for next semester will go as follows:

8:00-8:50 – Chemistry 342, Organic Chemistry II (M,T,W,F)
9:00-9:50 – Math 265, Calculus III (M,T,R,F)
10:00-10:50 – Physics 252, University Physics II (M,T,W,F)
11:00-11:50 – German 308, Second Semester German III (M,W,F)
12: 00-15:00 – Organic Chemistry II Lab (T)
15:00-17:00 – University Physics II Lab (W)

All in all, not that interesting of a schedule. I’m going to like being done with class at noon again on Mondays and Fridays, and I’ll also really like having 5 hours of lab spread out over two days rather than having 5 hours of lab all in one evening. What I won’t like is not being able to guiltlessly sleep in on Thursdays, since – unlike this semester – I will have a class on Thursday mornings. I’ll continue to have just one class on that day, however.

Chemistry and physics next semester should more or less be a continuation of the chemistry and physics courses I took this semester. At least with regard to the subject matter; I will have different professors for each class, so I’m expecting teaching styles to be vastly different. And based on what I’ve heard, I’m also expecting there to be a lot more homework for both of these classes.

German next semester will be with the same professor as I have this year, so it should pretty much be exactly the same – I doubt I’ll have any problem with it. In some ways, German II here last year was harder than German III this year because the professor I had for German II emphasized listening and speaking activities much more than the professor I have for German III does.

Calculus III is a class I should have taken this semester, but I opted not to so that I could take Meteorology I in the evening this semester. Needless to say, I’ll be going into the last math class I need to take without the benefit of having had any math class in the past 7 months. Being as calc has never given me any problems before, I think I’ll be fine, but it’s hard to say right now.

Speaking of meteorology, I wanted to take ATSC 240 – Meteorological Instrumentation – next semester, but I couldn’t because it meets at the same time as German III. The only other meteorology class that I would have met the prerequisites for would have been ATSC 231 – Aviation Meteorology. Although I could fit that class into my schedule, I’m not going to. Taking it would mean I would have to deal with having 19 credits and being a non-aviation student in a class specifically geared for aviation students. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to fit the fall-only ATSC 210 – Meteorology II – into my schedule for the 2007 fall semester.

That’s all I have for right now; I suppose I should get to work on studying for those 5 finals.

20 Years On

2006-11-25T21:31:00.000-06:00

Like I've said in years past here on my blog, today is my favorite day of the year, since it's my birthday of course! Thanks to all who have written on my Facebook wall to wish me happy birthday so far. I entered my third decade of life today, but, so far, that fact has been overshadowed by the fact that I’ll never again have –teen suffixed to the end of my age. Unless, that is, I happen to be around in the year 2099. But I’m not planning on such a thing at the present time.

According to Wikipedia’s entry on November 25 – which, by the way, is the 329th day of the year – some important historical events took place on this day, some important historical figures were born on this day, and, likewise, some important historical figures died on this day. Here’s a rundown of what I find to be some of the more important or interesting events/births/deaths. The full list can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_25.

Events

1034 - Máel Coluim mac Cináeda, King of Scots dies. Donnchad, the son of his second daughter Bethóc and Crínán of Dunkeld, inherits the throne.
1120 - The White Ship sinks in the English Channel, drowning William Adelin, son of Henry I of England.
1491 - The siege of Granada, last Moorish stronghold in Spain, begins.
1542 - Battle of Solway Moss. The English army defeats the Scottish.
1667 - A deadly earthquake rocks Shemakha, Caucasia, killing 80,000 people.
1703 - The Great Storm of 1703, the greatest windstorm ever recorded in the British Isles, reaches its peak intensity and maintains it through November 27. Winds gust up to 120 mph, and 9,000 people perish in the mighty gale.
1758 - French and Indian War: British forces capture Fort Duquesne from French control.
1783 - American Revolutionary War: The last British troops leave New York City three months after the signing of the Treaty of Paris.
1874 - The United States Greenback Party is established as a political party consisting primarily of farmers affected by the Panic of 1873.
1905 - The Danish Prins Carl arrives in Norway to become King Haakon VII of Norway
1926 - The worst, deadliest tornado outbreak in U.S. November history strikes on Thanksgiving day. 27 twisters of great strength reported in the midwest, including the strongest November tornado, an F4, that devastates Heber Springs, Arkansas. 51 deaths in Arkansas alone, 76 deaths and over 400 injuries in all.
1936 - In Berlin, Germany and Japan sign the Anti-Comintern Pact, thus agreeing to consult on what measures to take "to safeguard their common interests" in case of an unprovoked attack by the Soviet Union against either nation.
1940 - Woody Woodpecker first appears, in the film "Knock Knock."
1943 - Statehood of Bosnia and Herzegovina was re-established at the Anti-Fascist Council of National Liberation of Yugoslavia.
1947 - New Zealand ratifies the Statute of Westminster and thus becomes independent of legislative control by the United Kingdom.
1950 - The People's Republic of China joins the Korean War, sending thousands of troops across the Yalu river border to fight United Nations forces.
1952 - Agatha Christie's murder-mystery play The Mousetrap opens at the Ambassadors Theatre in London and eventually becomes the longest continuously-running play in history.
1963 - President John F. Kennedy is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
1973 - Greek President George Papadopoulos is ousted in a military coup led by Lieutenant General Phaidon Gizikis.
1975 - Suriname gains independence from the Netherlands.
1992 - The Czechoslovakia Federal Assembly votes to split the country into the Czech Republic and Slovakia from January 1, 1993.
1999 - The United Nations General Assembly passes a resolution designating November 25 as the annual International Day to Eliminate Violence Against Women.
2004 - Korean Research team announce that they have used cord blood stem cells to regrow a parapeligic's spinal cord. Patient walks for the first time in 19 years.

Births

1501 - Yi Hwang, Confucian scholar (d. 1570)
1835 - Andrew Carnegie, British-born industrialist and philanthropist (d. 1919)
1841 - Ernst Schröder, German mathematician (d. 1902)
1843 - Henry Ware Eliot American industrialist, philanthropist and the father of T. S. Eliot (d. 1919)
1844 - Karl Benz, German engineer (d. 1929)
1881 - Pope John XXIII (d. 1963)
1914 - Joe DiMaggio, American baseball player (d. 1999)
1915 - Augusto Pinochet, Chilean dictator
1938 - Charles Starkweather, American serial killer (d. 1959)
1944 - Ben Stein, American actor
1947 - John Larroquette, American actor
1953 - Jeffrey Skilling, former CEO of Enron
1960 - Amy Grant, American singer
1960 - John F. Kennedy, Jr., American publisher (d. 1999)
1971 - Christina Applegate, American actress
1976 - Donovan McNabb, American football player
1979 - Brooke Haven, American porn star
1981 - Barbara Bush and Jenna Bush, daughters of George W. Bush and Laura Bush.
1986 - Amber Hagerman, American kidnapping and murder victim, basis of the Amber Alert system (d. 1996)

Deaths

1185 - Pope Lucius III (b. 1097)
1374 - Philip II of Taranto, Emperor of Costantinople (b. 1329)
1881 - Theobald Boehm, German inventor of the modern flute (b. 1794)
1884 - Adolph Wilhelm Hermann Kolbe, German chemist (b. 1818)
1885 - King Alfonso XII of Spain (b. 1857)
1885 - Thomas Hendricks, Vice President of the United States (b. 1819)
1920 - Gaston Chevrolet, French-born American race car driver and automobile pioneer (b. 1892)
1968 - Upton Sinclair, American journalist, politician, and writer (b. 1878)
1998 - Flip Wilson, American actor and comedian (b. 1933)

As you could guess from reading what historical events happened on November 25, the date is celebrated as Independence Day in Suriname and National Day in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The WeatherStar

2006-11-04T21:30:00.000-06:00

So back in the day I was a big fan of The Weather Channel. When I say back in the day, I mean during the middle part of the 1990s, way back before the internet was a source for all the weather information a person could ever want and before The Weather Channel itself started going downhill, in my opinion, by dropping intellectual documentaries in favor of sensationalistic "weathertainment" prime-time shows and featuring home & garden segments that have little, if anything, to do with weather. Though the changes the channel has made in the recent years may have brought in more advertising revenue and broadened the base of viewers, it’s led a lot of people who used to like the channel about a decade ago to tune out.

One of the cornerstones of The Weather Channel back in the 1990s was the widespread use of the WeatherStar 4000 machine to display local forecasts. I don’t know if many people know (or have ever stopped to think) about this, but every cable operator that carries The Weather Channel leases a machine that turns satellite-fed data from the channel’s headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia into information pertinent to the viewers in the specific area that the cable operator serves. The first machine designed to fulfill this function was called the WeatherStar. This name stuck with all subsequent upgrades and versions until the latest and greatest machine – the Intellistar – came out in 2004.

Today, most cable operators use the Intellistar or its slightly less sophisticated predecessor, the WeatherStar XL. However, a few select operators, primarily those that are either unaffiliated with one of the large cable conglomerates in the country or serve just a small base of customers, continue to use the WeatherStar 4000, the machine that defined The Weather Channel in the 1990s.

The WeatherStar 4000 debuted in 1990 as the first graphics-capable local forecast machine. Although they look charmingly outdated by today’s standards, the graphics on the WeatherStar 4000 made it stand out from its text-only precursors, one of which (the WeatherStar JR) is still used by a very small number of cable operators today.

What all of this leads to is a discovery I made all the way back in August. I was randomly browsing around Wikipedia, something I occasionally do when I get bored. I’m not quite sure how, but somehow I made it to the page that discusses The Weather Channel’s WeatherStar technology. Upon looking at the external links section, I noticed a link that led to the website of a maker of software that emulates the WeatherStar 4000 on any modern, Windows-based computer.

You can imagine my excitement when I clicked on that link. I knew I just had to get a hold of the program so that I could start running my own local forecasts on my own computer. As it turned out, however, getting the emulator wouldn’t be that simple. Over the summer, the people responsible for writing the emulator’s code discovered some sort of bug and took down the link to download it until a repaired version could be released.

Because the emulator is put out purely as a labor of love, fixing any problems that arise can take a while. Actually, a long while. An up-to-date, fully-functional version of the emulator wasn’t released until last weekend, meaning I had to patiently wait for my copy for nearly three months.

But now that I have the emulator and have set it up to display a local forecast for Grand Forks, I am thoroughly enjoying it. Seeing all of the screens from the WeatherStar 4000 brings back all those memories of watching the weather channel 10 or so years ago. In fact, here are some screenshots taken just a few moments ago (the actual output of the emulator is 800x600 pixels):

Do you want to run your own WeatherStar 4000 emulator on your computer? It’s easy to download it and set it up. Just head over to taiganet.com, read the information there, and then click on the link that says head over to the forums to get started. From there, the link to download the program is in the forum entitled downloads.

One important thing to note is that your computer will need to have the Microsoft .NET Framework Version 1.1 installed. If you don’t have it (most computers don’t), click on the link that says Microsoft .NET Framework on the taiganet.com homepage. Then download that program and install it. Once all of that is done, you can download and install the WeatherStar 4000 emulator.

It’s slightly tricky to get the emulator set up for the first time, but luckily there is good technical support on the taiganet.com forums. Head into the forum entitled tech support and look for the "sticky" post named Eltiempo's Documentation 'write-up', **updated**. This post will contain all the information necessary to set up the emulator. Alternatively, once you figure out what information you need to put in to make the emulator work correctly, you could use the handy weatherdaddy.us website.

Like the real-life WeatherStar 4000, the emulator also has the capability to play music. If you need any of the Muzak type of music played in the actual local forecasts, head on over to another great website for fans of The Weather Channel, twcclassics.com.

As for logos, those are also available on the forums at taiganet.com. Look in the general discussion forum.

So, there you have it, if you do decide to download the emulator, I hope you have fun with it!

Now, since I’ve been talking about the weather all throughout this post, I thought it would be good to include some photos of the recent weather in the Grand Forks area. A storm system associated with the cold front that brought cold weather to a large part of the country last week dumped a quick 1.5-2 inches of wet, slushy snow in Grand Forks last Monday, the 30th of October. As a result, October 31st – Halloween – looked and felt a lot more like November 31st. The snow largely stuck around until today, when the warmer temperatures invading the region began to melt it. In any event, here are a few photos:

The winter-looking scene along the Coulee - it's hard to see, but the water was already starting to freeze

The trees near Merrifield Hall cast shadows on the fresh snow

Your photographer and his footprints

Footprints leading up the hill behind Witmer Hall

This is what campus looked like on Halloween

Here's another Halloween scene - it was sort of strange to see leaves still on some of the trees

Fall Colors and La Beauté Magnifique du Canada

2006-10-22T15:04:00.000-05:00

This past week has not been a good one for sharing the boatload of photos I’ve been doing nothing with. Over the past five days, I not only had to complete the ordinary lab and German homework that I always seem to acquire during the course of the week, but also I had to take three tests. As a result, I had little time to devote to this little place on the internet. Until this weekend, that is.

I have two distinct series of photos I will be sharing in this post. If I wouldn’t have been so busy lately, I would have shared them in two separate posts. But, since the photos are a bit newsworthy – and it’s been over two weeks since I took them – the best thing to do, I felt, was to share them all in one post.

With that sait, the first series depicts how the fall colors looked in the Grand Forks area earlier this month. Though most of the trees are completely bare at this point, for the last week of September and the first week of this month, there was some nice color to be seen in the region. It was at this point that the lofty cottonwoods that so readily grow in the loamy soil of the Red River Valley began to show off the yellow that they’re so well known for in the fall.

Without further explanation, here are the photos:

The following four photos were taken from the top floor of UND's Medical School. As far as I can tell, this is the tallest building that I can legally gain access to in Grand Forks.

This is the walkway leading up to the south entrance of the med school

The grass over at University Park - just a few blocks east of the main portion of UND's campus - was littered with leaves blown off the trees by the powerful winds the Red River Valley is known for

Although you do have to look hard, fall does bring some red colors to Grand Forks

Along the walking path in University Park was a beautiful, old cottonwood bathed in yellow

The younger trees on the western end of University Avenue were also covered in yellow or orange colors

The Greenway, a hiking/biking path along the Red River in downtown Grand Forks, is a great place to walk under the towering cottonwoods

The yellow leaves of a cottonwood on the North Dakota side of the Red River have a good view of a nearly identical cottonwood tree on the Minnesota side

Fall brings a lot of yellow to the Red River - this is looking north, so North Dakota is on the left and Minnesota is on the right

In most places along the Greenway, the ground was completely covered in fallen leaves - notice here in this photo however that a couple strands of grass are trying to peek up from under the mass of leaves

The following series of photos are from the weekend trip I took to Winnipeg two weeks ago. After never having been to Winnipeg before, and not having been to Canada in years, I wasn’t really sure what to expect. But, in the end, I was really impressed with what I found. What made Winnipeg so great was not its scenery (the landscape looks a lot like that found around either Fargo or Grand Forks and consequently is nothing to write home about), but rather the cultural flair of the city. Here, just a little more than a two hour drive north of Grand Forks, was an actual "big" city complete with a sprawling skyline, vast entertainment district, and sizable international community.

The two days I spent in Winnipeg really weren’t enough to see everything the city has to offer. Still, I managed to take in a couple of the most well-known attractions: The Manitoba Museum and The Forks.

The Manitoba Museum was comparable in size and comprehensiveness to some of the Smithsonian Institution’s museums in Washington D.C. Just going through the main part of the museum took me three hours, and, to be honest, I wasn’t even stopping to look at everything that was on display. The museum takes visitors on a winding walk through eight galleries that highlight the geological and cultural history and makeup of Manitoba. The walk starts off by examining the fossils of cephalopods, trilobites, and corals - the earliest known life forms to have existed within the present-day confines of the province - and culminates in a two-story replica of what both the rich and the poor sides of Winnipeg looked like in the 1920s. I really wish I would have taken my camera into the museum with me, but I regrettably left it behind because I didn’t know what sort of rules the museum had regarding its use (there weren’t any, as I later learned). In any event, there museum’s official website contains virtual tours that you can take. Click here to see them.

The Forks is both an historical park and entertainment district in the heart of downtown. Its name comes from the fact that it is located at the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers. The spot has been a well-known meeting place for numerous groups of people, ranging from the aborigines to nineteenth century riverboat workers. The historical portion of The Forks consists of various monuments and structures that are dedicated to the significant place the area has had in the histories of so many people.

But The Forks is much more than just a historical site; it continues to be a gigantic meeting place for Winnipeg and Mantioba to this day. To this end, The Forks contains numerous restaurants and markets housed in historical buildings. My favorite was The Forks Market, which is essentially a huge mall housed in a building that was originally two separate stables for two competing railroads. Unlike ordinary malls, however, The Forks Market consists entirely of independent retailers selling, among other things, souvenirs, crafts, and jewelry. Besides that, there are numerous European-style "outdoor" food markets that sell fresh fruit, vegetables, cheese, and bread. And as if that weren’t enough, there are also a lot of great restaurants that feature cuisines from all over the world. After debating between the Greek or the Sri Lankan eatery, I decided on trying out some food from Sri Lanka. It was a bit spicier than I would have liked, but, other than that, it was a highly enjoyable experience.

After spending a few hours on a Sunday morning at The Forks, it was time to head south to the border. So off I went with my ketchup chips, bacon chips, French chocolate, and $0.919/litre gasoline. Hopefully I’ll be able to make it back to Winnipeg some day. There is really much more of both the city and southern Manitoba that I would like to explore. Besides, Canada is a great place.

As a result of taking U.S. Highway 75 in Minnesota to get to Winnipeg, I passed through many typical northwestern Minnesota towns like this one, Kennedy

A somewhat colorful street scene in Warren, MN - in what is so typical for the whole of Minnesota, notice how wide and nice the city streets are

Here's another street scene from Hallock

The Two Rivers River, which runs through the eastern end of Hallock, was quite alive in fall color

Two yellow leaves on a cottonwood in Humboldt, MN manage to cling on amid the strong winds that have already taken most of the other leaves off

Here is the Canadian customs building outside of Emerson, MB - As I have marked, I was just a few yards south of the border in North Dakota

This was my first glimpse of the Winnipeg skyline - this photo was taken atop a manmade hill on Winnipeg's westside

A typical street scene in downtown Winnipeg

A typical street scene in residential Winnipeg

A typical street scene in the mixed commercial/residential area of downtown Winnipeg

A typical street scene in the aspen forest of southeastern Mantioba

A lonely dirt road in the somewhat lonely area east of Winnipeg

Canadian railroad croassing signage

This spot is what gives The Forks its name - the Assiniboine River is on the right and the Red River is on the left

A couple Canadian flags were being wipped around in the cold, persistant wind from the northwest

The Assiniboine River

The picture above was taken from this, an old railroad bridge that used to cross the Assiniboine River

There is a nice path that leads alongside the Red and Assiniboine Rivers

This is the Oodena Celebration Circle, a natural ampthithetre that pays tribute to the original inhabitants of the region

The Winnipeg skyline as viewed from an observation tower in The Forks

I liked the shadows created on the lettering to the entrance of The Forks Market

The Forks even has an automated weather station on display

This is an ordinary tipping bucket rain guage, used, of course, to measure precipiation

This is the entrance to the Peace Meeting Site

Three Canadian flags rise up from the walls of the ancient-looking Peace Meeting Site

The French-speaking enclave of Saint Boniface is visible across the Red River

A sculpture that pays homage to the animals that once roamed the prairies of Manitoba

The Esplanade Riel is both a pedestrian and vehicle bridge that symbolically connects downtown Winnipeg with the French Saint Boniface district - that's a revolving restaurant in the middle of the bridge

Even the feathered use The Forks as a meeting place

Scotiabank sponsors an outdoor theater within The Forks - fireworks are shot off from here on New Year's Eve and Canada Day

My last glimpse of the trans-Canada highway as it runs through downtown Winnipeg

My last glimpse of Canada from the now-shuttered border crossing on U.S. Highway 75 in Noyes, MN, the northwestern-most city in Minnesota - I would have liked to have gotten closer to the border, but there were cameras all over the place, not to mention that somebody remains on patrol in the U.S. Customs office

Late September Doldrums

2006-09-30T22:44:00.000-05:00

My life seems to have become quite mundane and monotonous since the last time I posted. I am now extremely comfortable with my weekly class schedule and know what to expect in all of my courses. As a matter of fact, I have now taken at least one test in every one of my non-lab classes. And with the exception of physics, I scored on an A on every one. So, with regard to my courses, there’s not too much I can complain about. As for the monotony, I hope to break that next weekend by taking a weekend-long trip to Winnipeg, a city I had always intended to visit last year. I need to take advantage of the fact that I live only a little more than two hours away from the largest city in Manitoba and the largest city in the 1700 miles between Toronto and Calgary.

After spending all last year deriding the website and questioning why it is so hugely successful, I finally got on Facebook a couple of weeks ago. I’ve been surprised with how much I’ve enjoyed and become addicted to it so far. There’s definitely a lot less sleaze than at Myspace, the only other social-networking website I have any familiarity with. As a matter of fact, Myspace is one website I never intend to sign up for a membership at. All in all, though, what I’ve liked most about Facebook so far is the ability to catch up with friends from high school that I haven’t spoken with for more than a year.

Actually, through the use of some tracking code that only I have the ability to view, I did see that a few visitors to this blog in the last week have been lured here from the link I put up on my Facebook profile. If you are a new visitor, don’t be shy and reluctant to post a comment or something. It should be pretty apparent that this place is in need of some rejuvenation. Visitor levels have been quite flat since the beginning of this year, due, in part, I assume to the frequent gaps I have in between postings. One thing that I hope may alleviate this problem is the reemergence of the Moblog – a feature I’ve always enjoyed but let fall to the wayside nearly a year ago. It isn’t that I’ve stopped going on spur-of-the-moment photo shoots, it’s just that I’ve been too lazy to edit and shrink my photos down to the size needed for posting. With that said, however, starting today, I hope to have the Moblog regularly updated. The first photo featured on there is one of the fireworks that lit up the UND campus two weeks ago during the annual Potato Bowl week in Grand Forks.

Something that would be perfect for inclusion on the Moblog would be a picture of the magnificent yellow and golden colors that the cottonwood trees that line University Avenue – UND’s primary thoroughfare – should start turning sometime in the next couple weeks. While most of the other types of trees on campus have already begun displaying vibrant hues and shedding their leaves, the cottonwoods are a stubborn bunch and usually retain their green leaves for a longer time than others. I got some pictures of them when they finally did turn colors last fall, but I didn’t get the picture that I am currently envisioning in my mind. I also didn’t get my new, immeasurably better, camera until late last October either, so all of the pictures I did take of the fall colors on campus last fall were with my old camera. Hopefully I’ll be able to get out with my new camera this year and take the exact picture I want.

I still will have a post with the aerial photography that I talked about last time – I just don’t know right now when I will have the chance to write it up. In the meantime, you can keep stopping by to see if I’ve made any updates to the Moblog. I do appreciate your continued visitation!

A Delayed Commentary on Returning Back to School

2006-09-13T22:00:00.000-05:00

Hopefully everyone who wanted to read my vacation reports has, because I’m going to start updating on what I hope to be a regular basis. Like last year, I’m going to try to write or post something during the days that I’m least busy, generally Fridays or Saturdays.

I’ve been back at UND for a whole three and a half weeks now, having moved in on Saturday, August 19th. Classes started the following Tuesday, the 22nd, and so far everything has been going well. I was actually surprised to find out what a difference having already spent a year here made. Everything that took some time to figure out last year, like what all of the names of the buildings are, how many minutes it takes to walk between two points on campus, and what the daily specialty bar items at the dining centers are, I already intimately knew. Additionally, in contrast from last year, I knew people or recognized faces right from the first day. The result of all of this was that the enjoyment of discovering something new pretty much every day for the first few weeks was gone. Instead, I essentially just settled into an everyday routine a whole lot faster than I did last year.

Now I know I posted my schedule shortly after I registered for this semester last fall, but, even so, I doubt anybody remembers that far back. So, once more, here are the classes I have:

8:00-8:50 M,T,W,F Organic Chemistry I
9:00-9:50 M,T,W,F University (calc-based) Physics I
11:00-11:50 M,W,F German III
12:30-14:30 T Metrology I Lab
15:00-18:00 W Organic Chemistry Lab
18:00-19:30 T,Th Meteorology I
19:00-22:00 W Physics Lab

Let’s do this in a list format.

Organic Chemistry – Without a doubt, this has been my favorite class for the past 3 1/2 weeks. I have really enjoyed learning what I have so far, although I’m in no ways surprised that I ended up liking this class so much. After all, chemistry is the subject I’m attempting to get a major in. It’s also worth noting that, from what I’ve heard, the professor teaching this class this semester is a whole lot better than some of the ones that have taught the class in the past. Unlike some of the past professors, the guy teaching this semester actually speaks English without too much of an accent. If you listened to him, you would be able to tell he comes from Russia, but, still, you would likely be able to understand everything he was saying just fine. Besides that, he seems like a pretty easy person to go to get help, and, so far, he’s been able to explain everything in his lectures to my liking. He also can be quite humorous at times, which is a good thing at 8 in the morning.

Physics – Like I pretty much already knew, I don’t care for physics that much. Perhaps my problem right now is that I’m not learning too much new material; most of what the professor has lectured on in class has just included things I either learned about in high school physics or in some form of chemistry course. The one thing I have to look forward to in physics is its generous grading scale – any grade that falls within 80-100% is considered an A. Along with that, the professor drops the lowest test score and the four lowest quiz scores when calculating final grades. Other sections of Physics 251 have a more common grading scale.

German – German III at UND seems to be like a mirror image of German II, with the only difference being that different professors teach the two courses. German III basically consists of reading short stories out of the textbook or from printouts that the professor hands out, writing a short essay every week, and completing grammar-related exercises in the textbook. Along with that, we usually form groups of 2 in class and take 5 or 10 minutes to discuss a pre-planned topic. With only 11 students, German III is by far my smallest class. Unless you count labs (which are generally limited to no more than 20 students), all of the other classes I have this year are housed in large lecture halls that seat no less than 50 and no more than 150.

Meterology – If you recall what I mentioned last spring, I decided to take this class largely out of interest. Right now, I can tell you that I am highly satisfied I am in this class, since I do think the subject matter is interesting. With a total of 124 enrolled students, meteorology is the largest class I have. In total, there are some 400 students at UND who are taking ATSC 110 – Meteorology I. The main reason why so many people take Meteorology I is because the class is a requirement for most of those who are pursuing some sort of aviation major through UND’s well-known School of Aerospace Sciences. As far as my class goes, I’m sort of an anomaly. Not only am I not a freshman, but I am also not majoring in aviation. The fact that I’m not involved in an aviation program is made acutely aware when I look around in class and see that I’m one of only a handful of people who doesn’t have one of those Dell laptops that the Aviation Department supplies to every incoming student majoring in aviation.

Labs – I haven’t really had enough labs to form an opinion on them yet, so I won’t say much. With that said, I can say right now that, like last year, chemistry labs will probably be a lot of work for just one measly credit. The other two labs I have, in physics and meteorology, shouldn’t be too hard, although I may end up aggravated with my physics lab. Apparently the Physics Department at UND is in the process of its labs to a model developed by the University of Minnesota, and the students enrolled in physics labs this semester are sort of the guinea pigs to see how well the new system works. So far, lab assignments have appeared rather disorganized and appreciably vague. All I can do right now is hope all the kinks are worked out within the next few weeks.

I thought I would absolutely hate having class at 8 AM four days a week, but so far I haven’t had too much of a problem. I really enjoy how my schedule is laid out this year. Being done with class at noon on Mondays and Fridays is a great way to start and end the week, and, of course, not having class until 6 PM is wonderful on Thursdays. Tuesdays and, in particular, Wednesdays, are busy, but at least I can get all the labs out of the way by the middle of the week.

That’s my report for this week. Next time I decide to write something, I’ll post some excellent aerial photographs of UND that I found over the summer. If you’ve never been to Grand Forks or seen the campus, you’ll want to stop on by to see what everything looks like.

May We Never Forget

2006-09-11T13:35:00.000-05:00

In a lot of ways, the events of September 11, 2001 happened both a long and short time ago. My condolences go out to those who continue to mourn after losing loved ones five years ago today.

2006 Vacation: Day 9 Summary

2006-08-17T16:39:00.000-05:00

Day 9 Summary
Sioux Falls, South Dakota to Brainerd, Minnesota
Monday, July 24, 2006

I had been to Sioux Falls a few times before, but I had never gotten the chance to explore some of the sights downtown. So, this time when I was in town, I made sure to go to Falls Park, home of the gaunt Big Sioux River and the waterfalls that put the “falls” in Sioux Falls.

The city has built an observation tower in the park that overlooks the waterfalls and the downtown area. The view from the top was nice, but because the park is set in the valley of the river, it’s not possible to see much of the outlaying city or countryside.

After spending some time at the observation tower and then walking along the trails that meander along the river, it was time to get out of Sioux Falls. Rather than taking Interstate 90 into Minnesota, I wanted to go an alternate way that led to the tri-state border of South Dakota, Iowa, and Minnesota.

The border, which is only one of a few tri-state borders in the country that is located entirely on land, can be found about 10 miles east of Sioux Falls. It’s easily accessed by using paved farm roads that go through rural countryside.

To the northwest, nearly 30 yards away from the spot on the roadway where the three states converge is a small parking area and marker designating the tri-state border. Although the marker is now located entirely within South Dakota, it was once cemented to the middle of the roadway. After somebody ran into it in the 1980s, however, it was moved away from the road and to its current location.

After spending some time at the border, I made my way to Hills, the southwestern-most city in Minnesota. From there, my unconventional route led north to Pipestone, east to Slayton, southeast to Windom, and then north to Redwood Falls. The reason I went the way I did was so that I could see Murray, Cottonwood, and Redwood Counties – three of the six Minnesota counties that I had not yet visited.

Since I had the chance to see those three counties, however, there now remains only three counties in the entire state that I have not been to – Le Sueur, Blue Earth, and Faribault. Hopefully, I can make it down to these final three sometime next summer so that I can finally say that I’ve been to all of Minnesota’s 87 counties.

From Redwood Falls, U.S. Highway 71 took me into Willmar. From there, it was easy to get on Minnesota Highway 23 heading toward St. Cloud. And, of course, from St. Cloud, it wasn’t too hard to get back home to Brainerd to end my 2006 vacation.

Pictures:

The reflective water in Covell Lake in Sioux Fall's Terrace Park

A duck enjoying a leisurely swim in Covell Lake

The following three photos are from the Shoto-Teien Japanese Gardens, which are located inside Terrace Park

The soothing cascading waterfall in the Japanese Gardens

Here's the view of the waterfalls and downtown from the observation tower in Falls Park

A closeup of one of the smaller waterfalls in Falls Park

Here's the road that leads to the tri-state border - to the left of the road is South Dakota and to the right is Iowa

The tri-state border marker

This road forms the border of South Dakota and Minnesota - SD is on the left and MN is on the right

Here's a picture of where on the road the three states meet up

The road through Windom

In an example of how "German" the city of Sanborn is, one of the bussinesses in town is "Deutschland Meats"

Low-grade camcorder pictures:

A typical elm-lined street of Hills

This gas station in Hills was one of the few places I saw during my vacation selling gas for more than $3.00 per gallon

Video:

Tri-State Border

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t70dAt72yCs