Mike Pearson's Adventures on a Pale Blue Dot

Here's a quicky blog post...just to tell a story about a set of photos from one day, one minor event on the Sea to Sky highway project. After drilling of a round of blast holes, the operator of a Tamrock Ranger 800 rock-drill was moving to a new location. The pathway to and from the drill site was really nothing more than an unimproved goat trail, high above the main access road. At one point the driller felt the road give way on his blind side..and the machine leaned over. The driller stopped the machine and got out to check his situation. It wasn't a nasty situation...but it had all the makings of one. The operator could have said nothing and tried to wiggle his way out of the predicament. Instead, he called out and asked for another opinion. It was decided that the safest thing to do was to put a heavy duty tow line from the drill to a large excavator to pull the drill away from the edge. Also because the 385 excavator was close by, we decided to use that to support the...

No big deal here..I was looking through my 2009 Reykjavik photos and found this guy in the crowd. He looks amazingly similar to a 1966 or so vintage Lennon. Maybe his day job is with one of the dozens of Beatles tribute bands. Compare to these old images from around 1966

Cuts 7 and 8 on the Sea to Sky improvement project were challenging in their own unique ways.  The one tricky bit of cut 7, was the steep side-hill below the cut, that lead directly to the highway below. All the rock that needed to get blasted away from the lower side of the cut...automatically wanted to roll all the way down to the road below. The other part, that was both a blessing and a curse, was that the cut 7 rock was the softest rock on the site. This means a couple of things..one was that the soft rock would jam up the drill bits if you tried to drill too fast. On the other hand...if you had the drill rig all dialed in and paid attention...you could make record time on drilling each blast hole.  The rock on Cut 7 was so soft, that after each blast the 385 excavator would just keep on digging and tearing it's way past the limits of the blast pattern. Instead of drilling and blasting every second day...we would have to wait for the 385 to hit harder rock that was ...