Andy Morrow's Blog

Well, as indicated, the iPhone app is done enough to have been submitted to the store. The app website is up at stereostreamapp.com. It’s pretty bare, but it does what it needs to for now. Here’s to hoping that Apple decides my app is good enough for the store – and then that people decide that it’s good enough for their iPhones. I don’t know exactly how broad my target audience will wind up being, but hopefully it’s big.

In either case, I now have an iPhone developer license, meaning I’ve already got the 3.0 SDK. I haven’t even looked at it yet, though. Sometime soon.

My interview with Apple went very well last week, and I just talked my contact again. He said that he would get back to me either way within a few days. I’m hopeful. The one slightly disappointing sign is that the former intern didn’t ever call me, so I’m hoping that doesn’t mean that I missed the cut. If so, there are other jobs. A lot of doors have opened, and one of them will lead somewhere.

The math test spoken of in the earlier post was just returned to me today, and I scored an 86. The section average was 58. My study-mate’s section average was also in the 50s, and Tyler’s section average was 61. So, I scored quite well. I’m pleased with how I did.

Work is going well. I finished work on the scheduling project, which is a relief. It was difficult. I didn’t even know where to begin, but once I got my teeth into it, the bug surfaced very quickly. It turned out that Apache was randomly shifting time zones back and forward by one hour. Absolutely bizarre. We restarted Apache, and I put in code to always lock the app into a single time zone. Hopefully it won’t come up again.

I’m presently doing a very short project for a small group. They need to be able to upload a zip file and then only allow one person to download and work on it at a time. It’s drop dead simple. It’ll be done tomorrow, upon which I will continue working on the inventory project.

Well, I’m off to the temple. It’s quorum temple trip night. It’s wonderful to have a temple so close.

See you all in just about a month.

Most absurdly exciting news. I’ve just received an email from an Apple recruiter asking to schedule a phone interview. I had thought that they were done hiring and interviewing and that I had pretty much gotten the shaft. I guess Apple works at its own mysterious pace, however. I’m really very excited. Once again, just like the interview I had in person last semester, it may not mean anything, so I’m not getting my hopes up for an offer. It’s still, however, better than the stony silence I’ve received from every other employer. Plus, it’s coming from the potential employer I’d most like to work for. Hooray!

In other news, I just took a CS124 exam and scored a 90%. Here’s to hoping I can pull off a grade anything like that on my Math 113 exam, which I spent all of last night studying for. I think I might be ready.

Time to get back to work on my iPhone app. It’s not ready yet. Yikes.

EDIT: Tomorrow I’ll add pictures, so if you want to wait to read it until then, it may be a little less dry. I’ve just realized that it’s rather long.

EDIT: Pictures! Finally! I know, I know, a full week after I promised I’d add them. Life gets busy. I’ll try and write something about why I’ve been so busy… later. I’m not giving a date.

Time to finally write something about our trip to Death Valley. I’m sitting at a friend’s house with nothing better to do, so here we go.

We left early, early on Thursday. We arrived in a parking lot outside of the local Wal-Mart at around 5 AM, courtesy of Tyler. He dropped us off and then went back home and did homework. We loaded our stuff into the back of Robert’s camper, sat around for a little while waiting for people, grabbed a spare helmet for me from Mike Fish, and headed out. The drive was very long and very uneventful. Robert, Mike Fish, James, Scott, and I rode together and stopped frequently for gas and food. Robert’s huge V8 diesel was burning gas like nuts – around 6-8 miles to the gallon. (That’s not much worse than our V8 gasoline Suburban towing our trailer, but I guess his tank wasn’t as big.) We stopped at a TA in Vegas. I didn’t feel safe. Seriously, there were some nasty, shifty looking people around. Blech.

Anyway, we moved on and arrived in Tecopa only a few hours after that. The only problem was that we couldn’t find the mine. The California group, the Underground Explorers, had been here before and told us that it was easy to haul a trailer up onto the tailings dump outside the mine and camp up there. They had sent us pictures of their last trip, and we knew there was a mine entrance level with the top of the tailings dump. So, we began driving up the mountain trying to find the entrance. Since Jim had a Toyota Land Cruiser and a much smaller tent trailer, we decided to drive his up the side of the mountain to try and find the entrance. We could see a big tailings dump with an ore bin next to it and figured that might be it – it seemed near our coordinates for the mine. We dragged Jim’s poor trailer all over that mountainside and accidentally ripped a drain trap out from the bottom. Luckily, we saw it lying in the trail on the way back and grabbed it. We found a mine entrance which later turned out to be the west entrance of the War Eagle (we were looking for the east), but knew that we couldn’t pull Robert’s trailer back there. So, we realized that maybe we had turned off too soon and decided to drive around to the opposite side of the mountain. As soon as we got around the corner, the GPS said we were spot on, and what do you know, right there was an easy pull up to the top of a huge tailings dump. (By the way, the GPS we were using was the one Dad gave me before I left for school. It was truly very useful.) We set up camp and headed into the War Eagle mine as soon as we could. We start out on the main level and had only begun seeing a tiny part of it when we had to get out so as to have dinner ready in time. We had an excellent dinner, sat around talking for a while, and went to bed.

Two tracks and a footpath. Taken by James.

The next morning, we dragged out in some sort of fashion that might resemble early, got breakfast, and headed into the War Eagle. We had found the main incline (pictured above) and decided to explore the mine from the bottom up. This was an extremely nice incline – it had a wooden walkway along the side. It was extremely safe and easy; there was even a handrail. So, we climbed down four levels to the very bottom and discovered that it had barely been excavated at all. The tunnels went back maybe 20 feet until they dead-ended. We stopped to catch our breath and grab water and snacks. The first level was extremely hot – probably 75 or 80 degrees Fahrenheit.

The Press Enterprise! One group had come for somebody's birthday years in a row.

We found a newspaper from several years back that had been signed by various people to come down into the mine. James added our group’s name – the Mojave Underground – and we headed up to the second level. The tunnels on the second level were nowhere near as extensive as the upper levels; however, they went back much further than the first. If I remember right, that was the level where we found the pile of dynamite. It was quite a stack – and most of it was sweating profusely.

Even the sweat was probably inert. We still didn't touch it.

The sweat is pure nitroglycerin and extremely sensitive, so after grabbing our fair share of photos, we left it all exactly where it was sitting. None of us really wanted to get vaporized.

We continued working our way up through the levels. The construction of the incline was quite interesting. There were two sets of tracks, one for each direction. On each level was a large platform with a short length of track with pointed ends that could be lowered onto the slanted track of the incline to divert cars onto that level. Pulleys set between the rails carried the cables that pulled the cars back to the winch room behind the incline. Sadly, the winch was no longer there; it was probably sold as scrap metal.

The same film crew that had been in the Ophir Hill mine here in Utah had been in the War Eagle, and they left signs. They had reinforced one of the platforms off the incline and had run speaker wire up and down the entire incline. They also left their fair share of trash. Darn people have no respect for the place; they trashed up Ophir fairly well too.

Anyway, we managed to get through the entirety of War Eagle that day. We had to come out around mid-day to re-supply on water, but we ate lunch in the mines every day. We’d usually sit together somewhere comfortable and turn out most of our lights. Even with just one or two lights on, you can see surprisingly well once your eyes adjust.

Once we’d finished down in the War Eagle, we slept well and headed out the next morning for the Columbia mine. The Underground Explorers told us that there was a lot of ladder work; however, at the bottom, there’s a mine cart still on the tracks that you can ride down a hill. They even have a video of them riding it. We were excited to get down there and give it a go, so we headed into the Columbia.

Scott climbing down the first ladder section. Taken by James.

The first stretch wasn’t bad. We climbed down about 100 feet of ladders at a fairly shallow angle down an incline shaft. When we arrived at the bottom, we worked our way through a few tunnels on that level before finding the next set of ladders.

A fellow explorer further down a ladder in the first raise. Taken by James.

This set was longer and more intense – about 200 feet long and vertical down wooden shafts. The ladders were made of 2 x 4s with rungs nailed on. The ladders themselves were then nailed to the wooden walls of the shaft. The shafts were about 3.5 x 3.5 feet wide, leaving not too much room to move about. Roughly every 50 feet there was a platform composed of a plank stuck into gaps in the wooden walls. All of these planks were covered in half a foot of dirt and pebbles, so every time you stepped onto a platform you unleashed a big pile of dirt and rocks onto the person below you. By the time we got to the bottom, we all had rocks in our shirts and had to stop to dust off and get all the rocks out. At the platforms, the ladders would switch from one side of the wall to the other, meaning you had to squeeze through a gap about 1.5 feet wide whilst wearing a backpack. I don’t know how Miah carried his huge camera case through there, but he did. There were several ladders that shifted when you put your weight on them, so we just hurried past those.

We finally all got to the bottom and hiked to the next set of ladders. These were the ones that Underground Explorers said were rather unsafe; they rapelled down the shaft. We sent the ever-fearless Stuart down to see exactly how bad it was and if we could go down without rope (most of us didn’t have harnesses.) He reported that the ladders were much more unstable, that the platforms were much further apart, and that there was a section roughly 20 feet long where the ladders had fallen off the wall and one had to climb the cribbing. We decided that the climb simply couldn’t be done safely by as many people as we had without rope, so we had to pull out. The climb was long and difficult. Stuart was nearly completely worn out by the time we got all the way out of there – and I can’t blame him; he’d climbed roughly 1000 feet round trip of ladders.

After we climbed out of the Columbia, we decided to try and find the connection between the east and west entrances of the War Eagle mine. From our earlier little jaunt up the mountainside dragging Jim’s tent trailer, we knew where the entrance was, and we knew it connected to the War Eagle thanks to a book we found in a museum nearby detailing the old mines in the region. We headed in and explored the main level, finding not a great deal other than a big old winch room. To our delight, however, near an intersection of two tunnels, a shaft disappeared underneath the rails with a ladder leading downward. We all crawled down in and several members of the party slid down a very small shaft out into a large incline we had previously discovered. We had found a way into it further up and discovered that it led into the winch room; however, we didn’t know where the end went. We had our suspicions, however, that it led into a 20 foot deep pit we had encountered coming the other way where a wooden support structure had given way and the rails had buckled downward. Miah and Robert slid down the incline slowly to see where it ended (for all we knew, it could have ended in a vertical shaft) and we waited to hear word back from them. Nothing  came. Finally, we sent Stuart and Crystal down part-way to communicate with Miah and Robert and discovered that the incline did indeed lead to the pit we had seen the other day. So, those of us who remained near the top came half-running, half-sliding down the incline very, very quickly. I was about half-way through the group, and the dust we kicked up became so thick that I couldn’t see my feet. When we finally arrived at the bottom, we were faced with a rock wall roughly 15 feet tall with a six foot aluminum ladder at the bottom.

Looking down on our group members in the pit. Check out that mine car.

Just as the other members of the group were saying, “How are we going to climb this thing?”, James asked that I hold the ladder and scrambled up before the other group members could even get their cameras out. I followed shortly thereafter.

Mike Fish exiting the pit.

The only difficulty came when some of the shorter members of the group couldn’t reach the rails above their heads to pull themselves up the final stretch. So, we grabbed some webbing off of Miah’s harness and got everyone up. We were out of the mine in less than half an hour.

After that, we decided it was time to hit the hot springs. We all hadn’t showered since we arrived and were feeling filthy and sore. So, all 14 of us shelled out $10 and we showered and got in the spring. It was actually a series of concrete pools with walls around them and water pumped in from outside. The pools didn’t have any smell of sulfur whatsoever – nothing like the springs near Yellowstone. When we got in, the water was sparkling clear. When we left, it most certainly was not. I felt rather bad – we had several very nice but grouchy looking Asian ladies waiting, and I suspect they were rather annoyed when they saw how dirty the pool was. Such is life, I suppose.

The next day we packed up and headed home. It was another long, boring drive. We stopped again briefly in Vegas and I hated it just as much as the first time. When we finally arrived home, we showered (hallelujah) and rested the rest of the day. It was one heck of a trip – some of the best fun I’ve had all semester. I’d gladly do it again any day, and I think the Mojave Underground just might next fall. If we do, I’ll be renting a harness and descension / ascension gear and riding that mine cart at the bottom of the Columbia.

Hope the article was interesting. Let me know about any grammar errors – I haven’t taken the time to fully review the post. Sorry. Anyway, hope it’s motivated everyone to want to go mine exploring and to keep abandoned mines open. Blasting them shut is destroying part of western history. Alright, alright, I’ll get off the soap box. I’ll be sending a link to the photos James took soon, so let me know if I miss anyone.

See you all soon.