With just a few instruments of the long-term line left to deploy and check I headed back to Winnemucca to get all of the equipment left behind there packed up and ready for shipment back to New Mexico.
If you don't separate everything and wrap up all of the cords when you pick it up from the field you get to do it later. Now was later.
I didn't have a banding tool and strapping to keep everything stuck to the pallets so I bought a roll of plastic wrap and went to town. I went around enough times to make me seasick. That's a self-portrait below. At this point I was the only one left on this end of the line. Everyone else was either on their way home or continuing the battle between Winnemucca and our second instrument center in Cedarville, California.
For the most part everything went pretty well. It was just that there was a lot of equipment to sort through and finish packing. About half of the equipment we originally brought was in Cedarville, but there was still plenty left in Winnemucca.
For the record, plastic doesn't work so well in cases like the pallet of batteries below. This pallet was all nicely wrapped up the night before, but when I came in the next morning all of the plastic had crept up and formed the wad at the top of the stack.
I got smart, went to the local Ace Hardware store, bought some cargo straps and was able to secure the 1000 pounds of batteries to the pallet such that they all arrived in New Mexico in one clump like they were when they left Nevada.
Is this like an artist's blank canvas? While I was incommunicado in the Soldier Meadows area the kind folks at PASSCAL back in Socorro contacted a trucking company and they dropped off an empty, small tractor trailer right at the entrance to our subterranean instrument center.
The local lumberyard, Tallman Lumber, helped out quite a bit. They had all of the stuff I needed for packing and they were just up the street from the convention center. They helped the people at the convention center get the truck that arrived with all of the the equipment unloaded before we arrived for the experiment.
Frank, from the lumberyard, helped get the 10 pallets of stuff loaded into the trailer. I certainly wasn't going to do it by hand.
Ready to go.
That was it! The trucking company came a couple of days after I left, picked up the trailer and hauled everything back to PASSCAL.
This was a doozey of an experiment...and I was only in on about 2/3 of it. As the vibrator truck made its way across the desert 100's of Texans moved along with it. They were shuttled a couple of hundred a day from the deployment areas to the instrument center that was set up in Cedarville and back out to the line again until the very end was reached.
Thanks to all of the deployers (about 500,000 of them), to the nice folks in Winnemucca, everyone out at Soldier Meadows Ranch, the folks from Stanford, and all of the taxpayers that funded this thing. This was hard, but fun!
THE END
2014-07-22