Snow and the Gas Drilling

The first three pictures show you the snow we got Saturday night. It took us several hours of digging, scraping, and driving to finally make it around the mountain to our work site.
The snowmobile looks like it is waiting for a chance to get out from under its covers and run. This is usually the time of year we wonder why? Why do we stay up here and struggle to do anything? Going anywhere requires at least 4 hours and walking is difficult.

Then when you drive through the forest and see how beautiful it is in a fresh covering of snow and how quiet it is, you know. It is easy to come under the spell of Leetonia in the winter and become a hermit. The desire to do anything leaves you and the warm fire begs you to stare at it and feed it logs. The unfortunate thing is bills must be paid and money made. So you force yourself up and into the tasks ahead for the day.

As we drove out of the woods, we spotted one of the Gas well explorers running cable for miles back and forth across the road. These cables go to sensors which pick up the vibrations sent by the heavy machines you see in the pictures. These machines slam the earth with heavy metal plates mounted in the middle of them. This makes a vibration which is picked up and interpreted by the technicians to determine the best place to drill for natural gas.

They also use a helicopter that has a sonic device which swings below it about a hundred feet or so providing shock waves towards
the ground sensors. I was shocked to see the helicopter out in the snowstorm Saturday. You could barely make out the helicopter in the white-out snow conditions. I can't imagine that it is very safe to fly in under those conditions. There is a lot of money involved in gas wells right now and it is probably one of the few things helping the local economy out a bit. Mountain girl, Paula, logging out and getting ready for work.