She says she has always wanted to fly in an F-18. In Kelly's line of work, she faces danger daily, but she says that's nothing compared to what the US Navy faces.
She says chasing this dream was a great experience. Kelly says, “We flew upside down, and I’m like hanging from my seatbelt dangling upside down looking at the canopy. We would go straight up and spin and it looks like the sun is just going around the nose of it.
The flight took place immediately prior to Fargo's AirSho between Aug 13th and 14th.
And by 'Tatas', I mean the company that manufactures trucks and other vehicles in India [NYSE: TTM]....jeez, get your minds out of the gutter already. You'd think that was a sugestive or misleading headline or something. Last night marked the debut or the History Channel's IRT: Deadliest Roads where some of the ice road truckers from Alaska and Canada travel all the way to Delhi, India to haul cement and construction supplies to a hydroelectric project in the Himalayas. To get there, they have to traverse the clogged, chaotic streets of Delhi before heading to a narrow mountain road hewn out of the mountainsides with little or no protection from a sheer 1,000 foot drop in many places. The company assigned spotters to each of the drivers (Alex Debagorski, Rick Yemm and Lisa Kelly) not because they're foreigners (although being unfamiliar with the road rules could play a role) but apparently that's a requirement in India to help the driver negotiate congested areas or parts of the roadway with tight clearance.
The most experienced truckers in the trio, Alex Debogorski, didn't last one day after getting into two accidents before he even left Delhi....and with some of the driving habits in that part of the world, it would be something of a stretch to say he was at fault. Then again, with 30+ years on the northern ice roads, it's not as though Alex has anything left to prove.
The thing I took away from the first episode was that truckers in India must belong to a particularly despised caste. How else could you explain jamming them into wooden-framed trucks with no air conditioning that wouldn't survive any significant impact and then sending them up mountain roads almost narrower than the trucks?
OK....I'm about a day late with this but on July 7th 1958, the Alaska Statehood Act was passed into law- even though statehood wasn't made official until January 3rd of the following year.
(History Channel)
So besides giving the rest of the USA oil, timber, gold, King Crabs, Native Corporations that subcontract no-bid, set-aside contracts, Sarah Palin, yodeller/songwriter Jewel Kilcher and tomboyish Lisa Kelly, Alaska is home to a one of a kind railroad- which would be none other than the Alaska Railroad. To start off with, the Alaska Railroad has no land connections with other railroads. While it does a robust business hauling sightseers between Anchorage, Fairbanks and Denali National Park, freight cars have to be brought in by barge from the Canadian National at Prince Rupert, BC or BNSF at Seattle, WA. They also have to be retrieved or put on the barge not by the locomotive, but a long string of empty flatcars coupled together that are pushed (or pulled) by the locomotives so they won't redistribute the weight on the barge suddenly or unevenly.
The extreme temperatures and remoteness of the state present its own set of unique challenges to the 470 mile railroad that connect the ports of Seward and Whittier with Anchorage and Fairbanks. In April 2009, a massive rockslide cut off the highway into the town of Whittier AK while the Alaska Railroad line was undamaged. With so many large boulders to clear, it took the Alaska DOT several weeks to clear the highway. In the meantime, the Alaska Railroad offered a free passenger service to shuttle the stranded residents to and from the town. There was also the problem of garbage accumulating in Whittier while they were waiting for the highway to re-open, since the company responsible for doing that was located on the other side of the rockslide. The ARR was able to help out by loading a few garbage trucks onto flatcars before offloading them in Whittier, have the garbage men make the rounds after bringing them in seperately by hi-rail vehicle and then load the garbage trucks back on the flatcars and return to Anchorage.
And while the ARR is fairly small and remote, they have managed to update their motive power, including new EMD SD70MACS and a Colorado Railcar self-propelled DMU. While they purged their roster of the GP49s, MP15DCs and vintage self-propelled Buddliners, they still reatain a number of older EMD GP40-2 and GP38-2s.
A good deal of the ARR's online traffic is aggregates such as gravel and ballast. Much of this is destined for in-state projects and even the Alaska Railroad's right-of-way. Railpictures.net contributor mtgteam2 caught Alaska Railroad GP40-2 #3012 in charge of a work train hauling just such a commodity in some old ARR hopper cars crossing Twenty Mile River at Portage, AK on June 2, 2009. The aforementioned railpictures.net contributor points out that it's not unusual for the ARR to run three work trains a day in the summer months, since it's important to get the major projects finished in the warmer weather.
OK- I missed last week's Ice Road Truckers largely because I was imbibing in large quantities of alcohol and watching fireworks before leaving a trail of bottles and patio furniture (but mostly bottles) back to Chalet Fenway. But apparently the History Channel showed a promo that I just now heard about that will feature some of the Ice Road Truckers hauling cement on one of the mountain roads on the Indian side of the Himalayas.
Besides the discussions on the History Channel bulletin boards (apparently some people actually saw the Ice Road Truckers: Himalayas promos themselves but couldn't believe it), a number of articles interviewing Lisa Kelly or Alex Debagorski make mention of their trip to India appear after my customary half-assed internet search while some video of a blue-mohawk sporting Rick Yemm in the Himalayan foothills have been circulating.
OK...besides the really obvious questions like 'What would Lisa Kelly look like in a sari?' or 'Is there some smoldering Bollywood bombshell out there who secretly longs to become a truck driver on a dangerous mountain road?', I have to wonder if the road they're using for Ice Road Truckers: Himalayas would actually be an 'ice road' in the show's definition where they drive across frozen bodies of water. Technically the Dalton Highway might not count but Jack Jessee and Lisa Kelly were shown continuing on past Deadhorse and onto Prudhoe Bay itself.
The two Canadian truckers who have been with the show since its inception- Alex Debagorski and Hugh Rowland- can now add 'author' to their resumes. Last month, Hugh Rowland's On Thin Ice was released by Hyperion press. Alex Debagorski, who wore many hats before the History Channel series even began, has a book due out in November.
While our independence day is right around the corner, today marks Canada Day (formerly Confederation Day) for our neighbors up north. Sure- we may think of Canada as a safe haven for draft-dodging hippies back during the Vietnam era, but there's more to the Great White North than geriatric hippies and lengthy wait times to see a doctor under their healthcare system.
[Nose Art on WWII-era RCAF Lancaster]
Don't let the decades of Trudeau-esque nanny statism fool you, either- Canada's rugged individualism has been out there for all to see over the last few years [I could even make the case that it was there all along, just not noticed until fairly recently- NANESB!]. You want badass? How about driving 18 wheelers over frozen lakes? You want even morebadass? Try being the first one to drive heavy vehicles across the frozen waters in the wilderness: that sounds like ex-soldier, ex-Mountie John Denison ,who began supplying remote mining camps in the Northwest Territories at first with 'Cat trains'- a bulldozer pulling several sleds loaded down with supplies and lashed together- and then with a secondhand Army truck in the 1950s. Today there is a fairly well co-ordinated system overseeing operations of the seasonal ice roads in the Northwest Territories; that's not to say it's no longer dangerous, but imagine heading out into the wilderness in not much more than a secondhand two and a half ton truck. Denison was considered the original architect of the ice roads and was awarded the Order of Canada in 1998. John Denison passed away in Kelowna, BC in 2001 at the age of 84.
Not badass enough? Try one of the longest confirmed sniper kills on record! Then-Master corporal Rob Furlong of Princess Pat's Light Infantry set a world record in 2002 with the longest confirmed kill during Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan's Shah-i-Kot valley, when he dropped a machine gun toting Al Qaeda fighter from a distance of more than 2600 yards (or just over a mile and a half). Having said that, Furlong's record was recently surpassed by a British sniper- also in Afghanistan.
Keep in mind that Canada entered WWII two years ahead of the USA. James Doohan- the actor who played Scotty on Star Trek- was with the Canadian Army when they stormed Juno beach on D-Day. He was hit by gunfire and lost his finger that day but would survive. Later on in his acting career, cameramen would ty and avoid filming his hand that was missing the finger.
Let's not forget ice-hockey, hardly a pursuit for the faint of heart. Sure, it's been awhile since a Canadian team brought home the Stanley Cup, but Canada provides a good deal of the manpower for those championship teams. One possible upside of the 'Fairness Doctrine' being imposed on American broadcaster is that USA viewers could be treated to a 76 year old Don Cherry reducing Keith Olberman to a snivelling, incoherent shell of a human being with just one glance...well....I guess an even more incoherent snivelling shell of a human being during NBC'sFootball Night in America (a name NBC 'borrowed' from CBC's long-running Hockey Night in Canada). Hell, Cherry would probably make Olberman's awkward, gangly stepson Rachel Maddow hold his technicolor dream coat while he effortlessly sapped the MSNBC 'personality' of his will to live. And let us not forget the First Canadians (an Anglo Canadian neolingism for 'Native Americans')such as the Baker Twins- Shannon and Shauna- from the Stellat'en First Nations Reservation in Northwestern British Columbia. OK....to be honest, since I don't watch Smallville, I only found out about them like 20 minutes ago. Apparently Shannon's appearance on Smallville was supposed to be a one-time deal that got extended when the producers found out she had a real-life identical twin.
[Image: CMT]
There's also a good number of country musicians that hail from Canada. In the interest of full disclosure, I hardly ever listen to country music but have to acknowledge that a disproportionate number of attractive women seem to gravitate towards that medium as performers. Montreal-born and Medicine Hat, Alberta-raised Terri Clark (shown above) has been in the business for the last 15 years.
Let us not forget the iron horses that- just as in our history- played a pivotal role in the development and expansion of Canada. One could make the argument that Canada as a nation would not have survived were it not for the completion of the Canadian Pacific line between Ontario and the then-obscure pacific coast port of Vancouver. In fact, completion of the line was a condition for British Columbia's 1871 entry into the Confederation of Canada. Canadian Pacific's line was completed in November 1885, followed by Canadian Northern's transcontinental line (which would become Canadian National). Like their American counterparts, Canadians have also taken steps to preserve equipment and structures from that era- such as former Canadian National streamlined U-1-f 4-8-2 Mountain class built by the Montreal Locomotive works. #6060 (shown above) is such an example and is maintained by the Rocky Mountain Rail Society and frequently operated over the Alberta Prairie railroad in Stettler, AB (the Alberta Prairie has a smaller ex-US Army Steam engine of its own it will operate on a more regular basis).
This video from TLC also gives viewers an idea of what it's like to operate a train over the Canadian Rockies in more modern times (it starts about 40 seconds in):
So Happy Canada Day, our neighbors to the north! I'm not sure if you traditionally set off fireworks like we do on independence day, but raise a frosty pint of Alexander Keith's or Okanagan Spring to your underrated nation on this first of July!
Today's Train of Thought comes to us from Alaska. That's right- Land of the Midnight Sun, Sarah Palin, Lisa Kelly and yodeller/songwriter Jewel.
Photo- John Burcham
Do I have your attention? Okay...I'm going to ramble on about railroads for a little bit, so feel free to scroll back to these images if your attention starts to wander.
Railpictures.net contributor Dave Blaze captured this image of Alaska Railroad's Hurricane Turn flagstop train, powered by a pair of Budd RDCs (Rail-Diesel Cars, basically self-propelled passenger cars) as they creep across the 300ft high Hurricane Gulch trestle at Hurricane, Alaska in September 2008. By the end of December, all of Alaska's vintage Budd RDC's had been withdrawn from service and were awaiting disposition.
