So it’s an OK view ………..

…………… but great????  I don’t think so and definitely not “grand”.  Despite what the town fathers may have thought, the view from Grand View, Idaho is OK or maybe good at best. 

One of the coolest things about this Growsafe gig is the places I get to see.  There’s absolutely no reason to go to Grand View, Idaho unless you are somehow connected to Simplot’s land and cattle operation here.  You might go to Mountain Home which is just up the road if you were connected to the air force base just outside that town.  That’s exactly what I did in fact the first morning I tried to get from my motel in Mountain Home to the Simplot feedlot at the aforementioned Grand View.  The turnoff isn’t particularly well marked and at 7:00 in the dark it might as well not have been marked at all.  So I ended up at the checkpoint to enter the airbase.  A nice young man in desert fatigues with a khaki balaclava found it hard to believe that I had managed to miss the turnoff but he stopped traffic in the lane to the left of me so that I could turn around and head back the way I came.  He assured me that I “couldn’t miss the turnoff” and I pointed out that in fact I already had missed the turnoff but the second time was a charm and I eventually ended up at the feedlot.

That turned into a minor adventure too because the office staff hadn’t showed up yet.  The doors were all open so I could just wander in but I didn’t feel like I should go poking around looking for the stairs to the basement where my contact had told me to find him.  I tried phoning but the grand features of Grand View don’t include cellular coverage.  The switchboard phone looked way too complicated for me to use to call my guy so I finally started snooping around until I found the stairs and soon after that found my guy.

Simplot has capacity for 150,000 head at this lot but only 65,000 on feed right now.  That’s a lot of feed and a lot of shit.  They must pay the feed truck drivers by the load, judging by the way they drive.  The first day I was here I saw one of the trucks being dragged back into the shop with a seriously destroyed front end hung high by a 2 or 3 yard loader.  Apparently two of the trucks had a spectacular collision a few days ago that sounded like one of the local AFB jets breaking the sound barrier.   They do that regularly but most days its been too cloudy to see much of them.  (that’s the jets that make noise daily – the truck drivers fortunately don’t tend to run into each other very often although I’ve been warned to leave my truck well out of the feed alleys)

I’ve had a little difficulty on this project to get everybody to keep their eye on the ball.  It seems like nobody has a clear idea of what the overall project consists of and nobody seems to be responsible for the entire project.  As a consequence things aren’t that well planned and we spend a lot of time waiting for somebody to do something that they should have known yesterday that they would need to do today.  Tonight I’m feeling pretty cocky that I have tomorrow planned out with Simplot staff lined up to do what I need done but I have every confidence that they are capable of wiping the grin off my face by noon if they want to.