SWWASAS Posted June 6, 2015 BFF Patron Author Share Posted June 6, 2015 (edited) Lesson learned here. Had a computer issue. Not sure if it was a virus or something else but lost most of my pictures. I had some important ones backed up but lost most of them related to BF research as well as sound files etc. Anyway the computer was basically a boat anchor yesterday and spent 3 + hours with Dell getting it back. So having to reload software and what backup pictures I have. Should have been backing up every week or once a month. Recommend others with research pictures not be as stupid as I was. When your turn on a computer after fixing it and it looks as empty as I was the day you got it, it was pretty upsetting. Some of my postings here are the only copy I have of these pictures. I just saved some I have posted to BFF on my computer. At least I can do that to recover some of the pictures. Edited June 6, 2015 by SWWASASQUATCHPROJECT Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SWWASAS Posted June 13, 2015 BFF Patron Author Share Posted June 13, 2015 (edited) OK boys and girls I think I just found the smoking gun of government involvement with BF research. Right smack in the middle of my former research area within 1 mile of nearly all of my encounters and footprint finds. Did some hiking and on my way out saw a narrow road cut back into the trees which are only about 10 years old since being replanted. Knew that the trees are too young to log so could not figure out why a road had been cut out into the forested area. Blocking the little road in was this sign. It got my attention. It reminded me of signs in the military. Well you don't often see signs like that out in the woods. Then as I continued I saw the top of a tower out in the middle of the trees off in the distance. I wondered if it was an exploratory drill rig and that was the reason for the sign too. A little further along I noticed a narrow trail had been cut into the trees. I hiked in on this funny little zig zag trail that seemed to head for the tower to get a better look and it then ran into what looks like interconnected sensors. They completely ring the tower and a conduit connected to them leads to the tower. No one can approach that tower without passing near these things that look like sensors the military uses around critical assents. The tower is an observation tower. It has no other obvious use. Here are the interconnected things that look like sensors to me. They are all interconnected with 2 inch conduit that runs all over the place completely ringing the tower and I followed the conduit run right to the tower. I saw at least a dozen of the sensors. What I know so far. This tower is smack in the middle of where I have had several contacts with BF. Within a mile. It has been erected recently since the last time I was in the area. A lot of money is involved so it has to be government. The tower is secured with guy wires to prevent it from blowing over. It is an observation tower but lack of a roof would seem to indicate that it will only be used at night. There is thousands of dollars of conduit running around the place interconnected with what appear to be sensors in unmarked metal boxes. OK someone might set up a tower to do some sort of wildlife study but why have such a sensor array unless you were concerned about humans or something else approaching the tower? Perhaps I now know why my BFRO reports have never been published. I wonder if those reports got someone in some university or government agency with some money interested. Or maybe the BFRO thought the area promising enough to put up the tower and string the sensors. Anyone have any other ideas what it could be? Edited June 13, 2015 by SWWASASQUATCHPROJECT Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SWWASAS Posted June 13, 2015 BFF Patron Author Share Posted June 13, 2015 I wanted to get these pictures published today. I half way expected to be arrested when I was looking around the tower but no one was around. They tried to hide the little trails the sensors were on by making them zig zag all over the place. Otherwise the trails connecting the sensors would lead right to the tower. It was very near the tower location where this glyph was left on the stump while I was there. It has to be only a few hundred yards from the tower. I will wait a couple of weeks and visit the location when it is up and running and see what is going on. Hopefully it is some civilian outfit and not military with guns. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LeafTalker Posted June 13, 2015 Share Posted June 13, 2015 Wow. Scary. Can see why you wanted to get those pictures posted as soon as you could. Hope you stay safe. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
daveedoe Posted June 14, 2015 Share Posted June 14, 2015 could it possibly be a future cell tower? or maybe a weather station? seems to me the most logical explanation. Would also be a good cover for something more sinister though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BC witness Posted June 14, 2015 Share Posted June 14, 2015 Strangeness! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted June 14, 2015 Share Posted June 14, 2015 Was there a power supply or generator unit near it? Also, how risky would it be to have a peek inside one of those boxes? I'll understand if you won't risk it, I wouldn't want you getting arrested. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MIB Posted June 14, 2015 Moderator Share Posted June 14, 2015 It's not BFRO. That's beyond their resources. I doubt the thing is complete. Construction may be shut down due to fire danger. We just went to "high" on Friday. There's probably more stuff that will go on top eventually ... and a lot more guy lines to keep it up in high wind. My best guess is FAA ... weather station, a beacon, or both. When it is complete there will probably be signs indicating which agency's authority the area is closed by. MIB Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SWWASAS Posted June 14, 2015 BFF Patron Author Share Posted June 14, 2015 Well for sure I will drop in on it now and then to see what is going on. If it was just the tower I might think it anything. The FAA is decommissioning all the beacons away from airports. But all that conduit and boxes all over the place ringing the tower I cannot imagine that has anything to do with weather station, or anything like that unless the contractor was on drugs or something. If it was some sort of communications tower they would have trenched straight down the road they cut in, laid cable, and could put a small fence around the tower. With that array of whatever those boxes are, the place has to be several acres now in total area. I am guessing close to 5 acres. Even the cell tower up on Bells mountain has a much smaller footprint. Just a couple of buildings with fences around them and a much smaller tower with arrays of antennas on them. No buildings at all in this location yet. What the thing really reminds me of is the tower that the first A bombs were hoisted up on before the tests. Same sort of tower. I suppose that there is a possibility that it could be some USGS experiment. I know they are planting seismographs all over the place surrounding Mt St Helens. Not sure what they would need a tower for in that case but you never know. I ran into a USGS geologist not terribly far from there. He had some kind of hand held electronic gismo, that he would stop, take readings, log then in field notes and continue. Maybe they have detected a bulge in the ground and need the tower to take laser measurements of the ground surrounding the tower. That certainly would explain what looks like seismographs, the tower, and the circular array around the tower. Who knows. The whole experience reminded me of finding a military base out in the middle of no where. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MIB Posted June 15, 2015 Moderator Share Posted June 15, 2015 (edited) The thing that sticks out as missing, at least from the angles you got pictures of, is, other than the one pink tag, any sort of stickers or tags on the boxes Most gear has something identifying the manufacturer with a bar code, part number, serial number. I don't see any of that which might suggest each thing is a one-off build ... private or experimental. The nature ... and ownership ... will probably become clearer over time. In a way this reminds me of what I thought was a landing strip being built. I could see it on one ridge top from across the river on another. They were working at night and everything was all lit up. With binocs I could see the big green Euclid dump trucks and people only about 2/3s as tall as the truck tires. I looked for probably 30 years and finally found it a few years ago. It is .. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvert_Peak_STOLport Its kind of weird to walk the length of it ... top of a mountain removed for the air strip, nobody around, looks like it was just built, paved, and then they walked away. MIB Edited June 15, 2015 by MIB Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SWWASAS Posted June 15, 2015 BFF Patron Author Share Posted June 15, 2015 That airport is weird. Really wide for the length. One that length would normally only be about 50 feet wide. Too short for fire bombers. I wonder what the BLM uses it for? It could be for fire coordination airboss aircraft. They coordinate the tankers drops and probably want to be closer to fires than the big tanker bases like Redmond. Also if smoke jumpers are dropped, they need places to hike out to for pickup but normally those strips are not paved. Private use means only the BLM can use it. With the government, who knows it might have been built for BLM brass to fly in and fish or something. Anything nearby of interest that way? You are right. I looked on the boxes and none seemed to have any labels. That in itself is strange as off the shelf stuff normally has all kinds of labeling. The stands those boxes are attached to seem way overbuilt to me. This picture shows the length of the conduit run between boxes. It seems to be some sort of experiment. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MIB Posted June 15, 2015 Moderator Share Posted June 15, 2015 I don't think it is in current use ... emergency landing only. The construction I saw had to have been in the early 1980s. Watching the construction from across the river was like seeing something out of "Close Encounters". The strip is sloped quite a bit, lower at the SW corner, higher at the NE. Just off the east corner of the NE end there are the remains of a burned out building which sat slightly below the level of the runway. Timber has grown up at both ends as well as on the south side. The wind sock was on the graveled area on the north side about midway along the strip. The cloth was entirely gone but the frame was still there. My guess is it was either for fire-boss planes / spotters, or for very very small retardant bombers. Perhaps something in the works that was never developed? Just after it was finished we had the spotted owl "debacle", timber harvest dropped. This air strip might be like so many roads that head off into the woods and just end at a landing where the logging was never done ... built for a future that never came. There is a BLM-owned, privately operated fishing lodge at the bottom of the hill, however, the same paved road that passes the air strip goes clear into that lodge. It's only about 10 miles. The whole area is chock full of roads, even back then. I'm not sure it would make sense for hotshot crews though that is possible not extraction, but deployment maybe. Back to the tower ... Y' know, you mention FAA decommissioning of beacons ... maybe someone bought one and relocated it there? It doesn't explain the purpose but that might cut the cost back to something a private entity could afford or it could be a cost-effective way for local law enforcement, USFS, etc to get better coverage by using a surplus beacon as a repeater site. Wild guesses at best. MIB Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted June 15, 2015 Share Posted June 15, 2015 It looks like it could be a flux tower, but the boxes and their arrangement seems very odd. Please keep us posted this is very interesting. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SWWASAS Posted June 15, 2015 BFF Patron Author Share Posted June 15, 2015 Communication repeater would be a good guess but why all the boxes and conduit circling the tower? All of those boxes are daisy chained together by the conduits, and when I was there, the conduit ran towards the tower but stopped short as if they had not completed the run to the tower. Another thought I had was that it was some kind of experimental solar power generation station. The stands the boxes in my photographs are attached to, are pretty beefy for the boxes they hold. Perhaps mirrors will be installed, and sun directed at the tower, which will collect the sunlight and generate power. Or it could be some sort of SETI installation. Where yet to be installed reflectors or antennas direct signals at the tower. The next time I am in the area I will stop and ask what is going on. A hiking trail runs very near to the tower and they are going to have to explain the thing at some point anyway. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
1980squatch Posted June 17, 2015 Share Posted June 17, 2015 Interesting, and sucks that this thing is being built in a good BF area... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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