Visit to Altamont

December 4, 1994

Rod's conference was at the Doubletree Hotel in Santa Rosa on December 3. He had been invited out because of his experience with a Physics Teachers group he had started in Atlanta for area physics teachers, meeting at Georgia State University. The hotel was decorated for Christmas, so we took advantage of the setting in the hotel lobby.

Early on December 4 we took off toward the San Rafael-Richmond Bridge, which we had never seen.

Our immediate destination was the Altamont area where Rod wanted to see the large wind energy concentration.

The bridge was pretty remarkable, and we could see San Francisco far to the south of us.

We spent a couple of hours in the huge wind farm along the tops of the ridges at Altamont. We had been amazed to see this tremendous collection of wind turbines on our flight into the airport in September and had hoped to come back for a closer look. The turbines numbered in the hundreds and were of several sizes and shapes.

The "farm" in "wind farm" had a double meaning, because there were cows grazing all around under the wind turbines. As an added attraction, we saw a nice bobcat along one of the small roads - he was too quick for me to get a picture.