Musings

Back in the 1970s, I was offered the position of president for a small public company that had an interesting patent for a wind turbine that could be used to generate electricity. I accepted the offer only to find out that I had assumed the helm of a sinking ship.

First of all, I determined that the wind turbine design, while interesting, could not be economically produced, and secondly, that the wind turbine energy market at the time was basically non-existent. To make matters worse, in going over the books, I discovered that the board of directors had ‘loaned’ themselves the bulk of the company's working capital.

As I was now the fiduciary of the shareholder's investments, I had a real dilemma on my hands. To protect them and save the company, I forced the board members to repay the ‘loans’ and cast about to find some vehicle to make the shareholders investments provide a reasonable return. In desperation, I latched on to an opportunity that seemed sound: The Yellowstone Motel was up for sale. I went up to Montana, and got the books from the owner and reviewed its operations.

It had been bleeding ‘red ink’ for years because it had only been operated during the summer months. The reason was that the central steam heating system that provided heat to the individual cabins had shallowly buried pipes that froze solid during the harsh winter. As the sport of snowmobiling was in its infancy, I saw an opportunity to make it profitable by enabling its operation year-round. The owner was desperate to get rid of it, and I negotiated an excellent price.

As soon as the deal was concluded, I brought in trenching equipment and started to lay pipe at a much greater depth. Another issue was the old central steam plant. This Gothic horror moaned and groaned loudly in operation, and I feared that the boiler might explode at any time. As luck would have it, a good attorney friend had just purchased the Yellowstone Hotel, and was in the process of expanding it, and replacing the steam heating plant with one of greater capacity. I was able to purchase his existing plant for dimes on the dollar, and it was as least five decades newer than the one I had.

I kept the motel close all that summer and winter as my father and I made the necessary repairs, and planned a grand reopening in the spring. At that time, I hired a young college couple on sabbatical to run the day to day operation, as I lived in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Of course, I had to travel there frequently to do the books and make sure things were running efficiently. In reality, this took very little time, and I actually spent most of my time engaged in fly-fishing for trout in the Madison and Firehole rivers, and in the small hidden lakes within Yellowstone Park. I had a grand time, and hiked all over the park that year. It was a wonderful interlude in my life, and as soon as the property had a history of profitable operation, I sold it for a tidy gain, and resigned my position with the company.

Since then, I have had a special interest in Yellowstone, and so I have become somewhat alarmed at the recent increased activity at the super volcano's caldera. Take a close look at the following chart produced by the USGS:

Now, the last time the volcano erupted was about 70,000 years ago. Interestingly, this was the same time that the Toba super volcano in Indonesia erupted, nearly making human beings extinct. This ‘recent’ Yellowstone eruption was tiny, only 1,000 cubic kilometers of Rhyolitic lava compared to the one that occurred about 640,000 years ago, forming the present 45 by 85 kilometer caldera. This eruption has been recreated visually in several recent made-for-television dramas.

A new satellite-based technique known as Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) allows direct and precise measurement of the vertical changes in ground level. This InSAR image of the area around the Yellowstone Caldera (dotted line) shows vertical changes during the 4-year period 1996–2000. The ringed pattern centered northwest of Yellowstone Lake is a prominent area of dome-shaped uplift. Each complete cycle of colors in the color bands represents a little more than one inch (28.3 mm) of vertical change. Yellow triangles are continuous GPS stations; white dots are locations of earthquakes in the period 1996–2000.

According to the USGS, “The uplift detected in the 1970s was centered near Le Hardy Rapids, between two resurgent domes-sections of the caldera floor that had earlier been pushed upward and faulted. Such resurgent domes form when magma rises to shallow levels beneath a caldera and slowly re-inflates a previously depleted magma reservoir, pushing the overlying caldera floor upward to form a dome. The pressure of the inflating magma reservoir may even force some of the molten rock to emerge at the surface as lava. The fact that the uplift documented in the 1970s was centered within the caldera near the resurgent domes seemed to indicate that the magma reservoir was again exerting pressure upward.”

I think I had better get up there soon to do a little more fly-fishing while it's still available!