Homer Spit: Birds and Boats and Coal and Things (AK2011 Day 8)

The Homer Spit, with Coal Point at the end of the spit and Coal Bay near the beginning. From MSRMaps

After leaving the little lunch spot, we passed this (faux) lighthouse indicating that we were progressing on to Homer Spit, where Alaska Route 1, the Sterling Highway, comes to an end.

View of the Kenai Mountains across Kachemak Bay.

It was still rainy as we entered the spit, and powerfully windy. Here and there, we could see signs of campers on the west beach, their tents and gear tied down and heavily weighted against the wind.
Homer Spit is a bustling tourist stop, with places to eat, places sign up for and go out on halibut charters, places to buy touristy things, along with motels, hotels, condos, and B&Bs, not to mention at least a couple scattered bars and saloons. Over the many years of visits to Homer Spit, I've stopped here or there a couple times, mostly for suitable Alaskan lunches of halibut or such, but I haven't usually spent much time on the oft crowded boardwalks.
What I like to do is go directly to the end of the road and park overlooking the beach that wraps around the tip of the spit. (Google Street View of wet, potholed parking area.)

My mom and I were the only ones venturesome enough this time to walk down to the wet and windy beach.
After a storm, or almost anytime the wind isn't blowing as hard as it was, the beach is a great place to find shells and other things. Here I've found lots of rocks, mostly graywacke, and not so many shells. There is one black lump of a rock just above my foot, which might be coal. I'll get to that after a bit.
The beach is a good place to watch the waves, and to look at boats and birds.

Birds...

...and boats...

...and lots of birds, mostly gulls.

Down near the piers, you can sometimes find starfish frolicking in the waves or hanging out on the piers themselves. I've never seen this, but have found tiny living ones washed up onshore.
After not finding any starfish, I notice the coal once again.
Coal washes up on Homer Spit from a variety of sources, including some nearby seams of sub-bituminous coal to lignite found in bluffs cut into Tertiary sediments along the north side of Kachemak Bay. In fact, the Homer area was known for its coal resources long before the town was named in 1896 for con man Homer Pennock, who unsuccessfully promoted gold mining in the area for about a year before hightailing it off to the Klondike. Homer residents still come to the beaches after storms to collect coal to burn.

I leave the coal on the beach, and my mom and I retreat hastily to a drier environment: the car. We head back up the spit.
Here's a famous saloon I've never managed to stop in!
And we say goodbye to Homer Spit, Coal Bay, and Kachemak Bay. I wonder if the low, dark bluffs on the left expose low-grade coal beds.

October Sky Tonight

The movie October Sky, isn't strictly a geology movie, but it does feature a young man, Homer Hickam, who desperately wants not to follow his father into the local coal mines, but who instead wants to go into space: from deep inside the earth to way up into the sky and beyond. Based on a true story.

It's a good movie, IMO, and it's on tonight and tomorrow night on DIRECTV:

October Sky on AMC at 8:00 PM EST, 01/12/2009
October Sky on AMC at 5:30 PM EST, 01/13/2009

RoadTrip Update: Book Cliffs

Compared to the last time I drove by the Book Cliffs near Grand Junction, Colorado, a couple years ago (photo here), there was indeed a bit more snow when I drove by a couple days ago, although the snow was not deep.
The Book Cliffs are formed from a resistant sandstone in the Cretaceous Mesaverde Group - the two buff-colored cliffs at the top of the slopes above - which cap badlands formed on the Cretaceous Mancos Shale - the brownish to gray slope-forming unit below the capping cliffs. The Mancos Shale is fairly easy to recognize as you drive over it on I-70 in eastern Utah, because it is made of coaly beds and swelling clays, the latter of which cause the roadbed to become quite bumpy in places.
Above, a bit of detail in the Mancos Shale. Driving through the area from the San Rafael Swell into eastern Colorado always reminds me of the paintings of the artist Georgia O'Keeffe, who painted desert scenes and badlands, especially in New Mexico.

Crandall Canyon

The MSHA is set to release its findings tomorrow about the August 6, 2007 Crandall Canyon Mine collapse. It will be interesting to see what they say. A May, 2008 report entitled, Chairman Miller Statement on Findings of Investigation into Crandall Canyon Mine Disaster, by U.S. Representative George Miller (D-Calif), states that MSHA approved a faulty plan for retreat mining.

Retreat mining is a practice used in many coal mines; it involves the pulling of rock pillars as the miners retreat from an open room-and-pillar underground mine area. The pillars are ore; that's why they are pulled. The use of the room-and-pillar underground method, at least in coal mines, leaves more than 50% of the coal in the pillars. That's a lot of ore (coal in this case) to leave behind.

It doesn't matter whether the pillars in an underground mine are in gold ore or in a coal seam: they are there to hold up the mine. Pulling them involves an engineered or planned collapse of the mine section or room from which the pillars are pulled. It is not a mining method to be undertaken lightly or to be undertaken at all by anyone more concerned about profit than for miners' safety.

NIOSH has several links to information about safe use of retreat mining. According to their studies, reasons for failure of the practice wherein so-called "bumps" occur, as were reported at Crandall Canyon [these are actually rock bursts] usually have to do with "relatively thick overburden and extremely rigid strata occurring immediately above and below the mine coalbed" - but also have to do with certain mining practices that they recommend avoiding.