Gold Districts of California

1. Poker Flat Chronicler Crossword
2. Flat Poker Term

POKER FLAT

'The Outcasts of Poker Flat'This unit comes complete with Bret Harte's famous story 'The Outcasts of Poker Flat,' which has been edited with footnotes and is 7 pages. (The text is fair use.) In addition to the text, there is a 2-page vocabulary assignment that comes with the answer key. The Poker Flat Research Range, the only university-owned rocket range in the world, is still in operation. Now much expanded, it has launched more than 2,000 rockets in the past 50 years. “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” has been associated with “regional-realism,” a literary movement popular in American literature during the time of the story’s publication. Regional-realism concerns itself with the local cultural and social customs of a particular area: in this case, the California Gold Rush region. Oakhurst sat there, cold and still. They said he looked peaceful. A single bullet from a small hand gun nearby had ended his life. John Oakhurst had been both the strongest, and the weakest, of the outcasts of Poker Flat. “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” by Bret Harte was adapted for VOA Learning English and read by Jim Tedder. John in Outcasts Of Poker Flat (1937).

Location. This district is in northern Sierra County about 10 miles north of Downieville. It includes the Howland Flat, Table Rock, Deadwood, Mt. Fillmore, Potosi, and Rattlesnake Peak areas. It is mainly a placer-mining district.

History. The streams were first mined during the gold rush., The locality was extremely rich then; in one month gold valued at $700,000 was produced. Hydraulic mining was done on a major scale from the late 1850s through the 1880s. Some lode mining and drift mining continued through the early 1900s, and the area was prospected in the 1920s and 1930s. The district was made famous by Bret Harte's tale, The Outcasts of Poker Flat. This district has been highly productive, the mines at Howland Flat alone being credited with an output valued at $14 million.

Geology. The northern part of the district is underlain by amphibolite with some serpentine. To the south and east there are slates of the Blue Canyon Formation (Carboniferous). Substantial portions of the area are capped by andesite. Extensive deposits of Tertiary auriferous quartz gravels are part of the Port Wine channel, which extends west and northwest through this district and then west and southwest into the Port Wine district. The lower quartz-rich gravels were also gold-rich. Portions of the channel have been faulted. Some narrow gold-quartz veins occur in amphibolite and slate.

Mines. Placer: Caledonia, California, Clippership, Deadwood, Forest Queen, Gibraltar, Hawkeye,- Herkimer and Bunker Hill, Manchester, Miners Home, Pacific, Poker Flat, Potosi, Rattlesnake, Scott, Virginia, Tennessee, Winkeye. Lode: Alhambra, Mammoth, Mt. Fillmore Cons., New York.

Excerpt from: Gold Districts of California, by: W.B. Clark, California Department of Conservation, Division of Mines and Geology, Bulletin 193, 1970.

Return to Principal Gold Districts

The Poker Flat Research Range (PFRR) is a launch facility and rocket range for sounding rockets in the U.S. state of Alaska. The world's largest land-based rocket range, it is on a 5,132-acre (20.77 km²) site about 30 miles (50 km) northeast of Fairbanks and 1.5 degrees south of the Arctic Circle. More than 1,700 launches have been conducted at the range to study the Earth's atmosphere and the interaction between the atmosphere and the space environment.^[1] Areas studied at PFRR include the aurora, plasma physics, the ozone layer, solar proton events, Earth's magnetic field, and ultraviolet radiation. Rockets launched at PFRR have attained an apogee of 930 miles (1,500 km).

PFRR is owned by the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) Geophysical Institute, which operates it under contract to the NASA Wallops Flight Facility. Other users include the United States Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), the Air Force Geophysics Lab (AFGL), and various universities and research laboratories. Since its founding in 1948, PFRR has been closely aligned with and funded by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and its predecessor, the Defense Nuclear Agency (DNA).

History[edit]

The University of Alaska had performed auroral research since the 1920s, and when sounding rockets were developed for this purpose, the university decided to build a range for them. The UAF Geophysical Institute leased the land that became the PFRR from the state of Alaska, and the range's facilities were initially completed in 1948 with leadership and vision from T. Neil Davis. PFRR's first supervisor, Neal Brown, directed the facility from 1948 to 1965. In the 1990s, new facilities were built with a $30 million grant provided by Congress. Refurbishment of older facilities is an ongoing project.^[2]

Facilities[edit]

Poker Flat Research Range has five launch pads, including two optimized for severe weather, that can handle rockets weighing up to 35,000 pounds (16,000 kg). Range facilities include an administrative facility, a concrete blockhouse used as a mission control center, several rocket assembly buildings, a 2-story science observatory, and a payload assembly building.^[3] Three S-band antennas are used to collect telemetry, and a C-band radar is used for tracking rocket payloads in flight.^[4]

Poker Flat's activities are changing with the recent addition of SRI's PFISR (Poker Flat Incoherent Scatter Radar) phased-array antenna and the recent purchase of several Insitu drones.

The Alaska Ground Station (AGS) supports PFRR operations of many NASA and other nation's spacecraft including Aqua, Aura, Terra, and Landsat 7 with S band and X band services. The Honeywell Datalynx PF1 & PF2 antennas were hosted at the range, as part of the Earth Observing System Polar Ground Network (EPGN), along with the Alaska Ground Station (AGS).^[5] However, PF1 & PF2 were purchased by Universal Space Networks, now part of Swedish Space CorpSSC and later moved to SSC's North Pole facility and renamed USAK04 and USAK05. Other ground stations in the EPGN include the Svalbard Satellite Station (SGS), the Kongsberg–Lockheed Martin ground station (SKS), and the SvalSat ground station (SG3) in Norway, as well as the SSC North Pole facility.

Sounding rockets[edit]

Poker Flat Chronicler Crossword

See also[edit]

References[edit]

1. ^'Poker Flat Research Range General Information'. April 2003. Archived from the original on 2004-09-17. Retrieved 2006-04-11.
2. ^'Poker Flat Research Range History'. April 2003. Archived from the original on 2005-12-31. Retrieved 2006-04-11.
3. ^Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement for the Sounding Rocket Program. Wallops Island, Virginia: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Wallops Flight Facility. August 1994.
4. ^'Poker Flat Research Range Facilities'. September 2004. Archived from the original on 2001-04-28. Retrieved 2006-04-11.
5. ^'Universal Space Network Buys Honeywell’s Datalynx' February 2008. Retrieved 2017-08-20

Further reading[edit]

• Davis, Neil (2006). Rockets over Alaska: The Genesis of the Poker Flat Research Range. Alaska-Yukon Press. ISBN978-0977814107.
• Merritt Helfferich, Neal Boyd Brown, and Peggy Dace. 1980. Poker Flat Research Range: Range Users' Handbook. Geophysical Institute: University of Alaska Fairbanks.

External links[edit]

• Poker Flat at Encyclopedia Astronautica.
• Aurora rocket article from USA Today.

Coordinates: 65°07′N147°28′W / 65.12°N 147.47°W

Flat Poker Term