Primm, thunderstorms, and the Ivanpah solar plant

The end of the school year has interfered with my description of our trip to Ash Meadows, but I’m determined to get it done before I take off for Washington.

By the time we got to I-15, we realized that we were driving into a thunderstorm. The clouds that we saw building up since Kelso were resulting in the real deal, with lots of lightening in the distance. We tried (unsuccessfully) to outrun the rain.

We set out for Primm, for gas. Primm was really visible in the distancee, even though it was about 10 miles away:

The dry lake bed is Lake Ivanpah. It’s usually dry, as it was when we visited. Despite the impending rain, it was blowing up lots of dust:

I wouldn’t want to be in Primm during a big rain, however:

Primm was originally called State Line (changed to Primm after its owner because there was already a “Stateline” in northern Nevada), for the obvious reason that it was on the state line between California and Nevada and therefore the first place that people could stop and gamble after leaving California. Eventually it was built up into the three hotels you see today. You can see it better in a nighttime picture:

BTW, the lights in the distance (and you can see the buildings as well in the photograph at the top of the post) is the town of Jean, Nevada, some 12 miles away from Primm (you can see a LOOOOOOONG way in the desert). Jean is a town with no residents but with a casino, a courthouse, post office, Nevada Highway Patrol station, and a bunch of installation art pieces scattered in the surrounding desert.

Primm, however, is at heart 3 casinos, an outlet mall, and some gas stations and convenience stores. Built right up to the state line between California and Nevada, it’s the first gambling opportunity for Californians headed to Las Vegas (or, Lost Wages, as we used to call it). It has the main casino-and-outlet-mall:

There’s Buffalo Bill’s, with a roller coaster skirting the property that’s called the “Desperado”:

What would a casino in Nevada be without a big sign?

And finally, across the freeway from the other two casinos, is Whiskey Pete’s. Named after an early gas station owner in State Line who turned to bootlegging during the Great Depression, it’s an odd mix of pseudo-medieval or possibly Moorish applied to the edges of otherwsie unremarkable commercial motel architecture:

It’s often hard to tell in Nevadan programmatic architecture. Wild West it ain’t, despite its name of Whiskey Pete’s, although it does boast that it has the Bonnie and Clyde death car on display in the casino:

(No, we didn’t go in to see it!)

By the time we got to Primm the rain had come, and quite a downpour it was. We stopped at the Chevron station, filled up with gas in the middle of the downpour, and raced out of town:

Neither Buffalo Bill’s (above) nor Whiskey Pete’s (below) looked quite as enticing in the rain as in the advertising pictures:

Nevada towns are funny. Somewhere around 500 people live in Primm. Jean has no residents, but has the post office, so the people living in Primm have a Jean address. Sometimes you just have to go with the flow.

In retracing our route 10 miles to the west on I-15 from Primm to the Nipton Road, we passed right by the Ivanpah Solar plant. Unhappily, it’s hard to get the full impact of the 3,500 acres of heliostats (reflective mirrors). There are some regular solar panels that generate electricity directly:

But the main plant works on solar thermal power: thousands of mirrors that focus sunlight on the three towers which heats a liquid solution in boilers which powers steam turbines:

To get the full effect of the plant, however, you need aerial photographs:

That’s Primm in the upper right-hand corner. The individual heliostats are aimed electronically:

Ivanpah hasn’t been particularly successful as a solar plant. It can only produce electricity when the sun shines, and there’s no current practical technology for storing it (i.e., huge batteries or capacitors). Consequently, it needs to use a decent amount of natural gas to start up in the morning. Critics have been aghast, aghast at this, much like Colonel Renault was shocked, shocked to fine that there was gambling at Rick’s Cafe in the movie Casablanca:

A more practical complaint is that the technology has become obsolete as solar panels, which create electricity directly from sunshine without having to run boilers, have dropped in price and become much more efficient since the Ivanpah plant was designed about 10 years ago.

In a weird way, it makes sense to have Primm and the Ivanpah station so close to each other. Both are what pass for marvels of modern engineering, and both are in some sense completely out of place in the Mojave desert:

We drove out of the rain and got off where we got on I-15, and headed east toward Nipton. The glare of Ivanpah and Primm receded, and we were back to sky and road:

We were worried at first that we might be heading back into rain:

But it never appeared, and within 10 minutes–and without seeing a single car either way on the road–we were approaching Nipton, where we spent the night.

 

Northwest Mojave Preserve: Joshua trees, plutons, and solar plants

After a leisurely lunch at the picnic tables at the Kelso Depot, we headed northeast on the Cima Road toward Nipton, where we would be spending our first night of the trip. On the way out of Kelso, I noticed that there were serious thunderheads building up to the north:

As I wrote about a couple of years ago, thunder storms typically happens in areas of mountains or areas of intense heating. Both provide lift to moist air. You wouldn’t think of the eastern Mojave Preserve as being an area of moist air, but the fact is that a lot of moist air comes up from the Gulf of California. This moist air causes a true monsoon season in Arizona and parts of New Mexico. Whereas coastal southern California has most of its rain between November and March, the heaviest rains in Arizona are in August. April is a bit early, but it’s something you watch for….as will see later.

In the meantime, the next hour was devoted to slowly climbing the east side of Cima Dome. Cima Dome covers 72 square miles and is very gently sloping:

It’s so gentle that I first assumed that it was a basalt eruption, which typically has very dark and very fluid magma that spreads like water and doesn’t form dramatic peaks. But it’s actually a granite pluton, meaning that it formed miles under the crust and gradually rose to the surface after the rocks above it were eroded away.

This isn’t the kind of mountains you expect to see in the Mojave, which are more typically like this:

Yet there’s no denying the size of Cima Dome. It took us more than an hour to skirt it and head off to the northeast toward Ivanpah and Nipton, where we stayed the first night.

As you climb the Cima Dome, there are plenty of sedimentary mountains to the east. Here’s one due east of Kelso:

These mountains are largely limestone, laid down a few hundred million years ago this area was the passive continental shelf of what would later become the North American continent when the giant continent of Pangaea began splitting apart a couple of hundred million years ago. As we’ll see later in the trip, this kind of rock is permeable to water and, as a consequence, there’s lots and lots of underground water in the Mojave, including in Ash Meadows.

Since the mountains are limestone, they are easily dissolved by water. On the other side of the mountains are Mitchell Caverns, limestone caves similar to those in the Kentucky karst country or the Carlsbad Caverns. They are the only limestone caves in the California State Park system and, unhappily, have been closed since 2011 for safety reasons. The intervening budgetary crises of the California state government have made repair funds unavailable, although the caverns have been inspected and remedial measures proposed. They are supposed to be quite spectacular, and I hope all of us get to see them in the future. Here’s a link where you can find out more about them and check on updates about reopening.

As we climbed the road leading to Cima, the landscape change from creosote scrubland to Joshua tree forests. It’s hard to photograph them from a moving car and get the full effect. These are real forests. The trees don’t provide a lot of shade, but they grow close together and are quite impressive. Here are a few shots:

Here’s one looking north (note the thunderheads continuing to build):

And this, looking off to the east:

At the top of the Cima grade is the Cima Store. We will well-stocked, so didn’t need to stop.

We descending the other side of the Cima Dome until we got to the Ivanpah Road. I wanted to see the Ivanpah Solar Facility, which is an usual solar plant in that it concentrates sunlight from thousands of mirrors onto three towers where the heat is transformed into fluid that can run what is essentially a steam generator for electricity. Since it’s called the Ivanpah plant, I assumed (silly me) that it was in Ivanpah. So we turned left on the Ivanpah Road and headed toward Ivanpah. It’s a long, lonely way:

After several miles, we had risen a thousand feet or so above the valley, but weren’t spotting any solar facility. Kathy was getting a bit nervous about gas, although we still had half a tank (the distances in the desert seem enormous). Eventually we turned around and headed back….and realized we’d been going in the wrong direction. Now that we had climbed above the Ivanpah Valley, we could see the solar plant shimmering before us in the direction from which we came.

As we drove back down into the valley, details of the complex slowly emerged.

Eventually, there was nothing but the towers poking above the ridge line in the distance. The light from the towers was so intense that I had real trouble getting a reliable focus:

We passed the road to Cima and headed toward the Interstate (I-15). We decided to head to Primm, Nevada, about 10 miles away, rather than backtrack into California. When we got to the interstate, it was also apparent that the Ivanpah plant was a good 10 miles from Ivanpah, and right next to the freeway. Somehow my research into the plant hadn’t revealed exactly WHERE it was, right next to the freeway in full view of everybody!

More on Primm, the Ivanpah solar facility from the freeway, and the thunderstorm we drove into in the next installment.