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Arlyne Reichert Community Heritage Bridge

10th street bridge, Great Falls Montana
10th street bridge, Great Falls Montana

Did the Luminaria walk the other night and I was somewhat disappointed at just how poor of a job they did restoring the old 10th street bridge deck .. walking surface was uneven asphalt that you couldn’t see because there is no lighting on the bridge and the lights at the refinery blinded you even more. As far as being ADA compliant, you better lock the front hubs on that wheel chair of yours, because you might be in for an off road experience you may want to write home to mother about.

Fake paper flowers and surprise, surprise, no picnic tables. I couldn’t imagine anybody having a picnic on that thing anyway for all of the wonderful appetizing smells that ooze from the refinery. I haven’t been on that bridge since the late 80’s. I came away with the notion that the bridge now is about as dangerous to walk on as it was to drive on then.

Back in the day it was better to stop at one end of the bridge if you saw a large truck coming from the other direction because it just wasn’t wide enough to safely cross any other way.

The Luminaria walk was great, and quite a few people showed up. Temps were mild with a slight breeze and everyone that I spoke to seemed to be having a great time.
What I found to be interesting was that out of all of the people I had talked to, not one ever actually had driven across the bridge when it was open.

When I ran away from Missoula all of those seemingly many years ago, I found myself having to cross that bridge on occasion. Fair enough I suppose — Every town has it’s little quirks … Missoula had malfunction junction and Great Falls had the 10th street bridge.

Back in the days of the Model T, the 10th street bridge must have been the Bees Knees. A wonderful addition to a growing industrial town that was coming into it’s own. The bridge served it’s very useful purpose for many many years. I’m pretty sure that when the bridge was built 100 years ago, the only things that existed on the north bank was the town of Black Eagle, the Anaconda Copper Mining Company smelter, wire mill, and a brick plant. The bridge opened up the north bank and the rest is history.

Excitement, for whatever it was worth at the time, grew immensely, when the state began construction on the new 9th street bridge. A new modern 4 lane bridge was long over due in my opinion, and they couldn’t get that thing finished fast enough. I’d been resigned to using the 15th street bridge long enough, so I was quite ready for a decent crossing at 10th street. I was more excited to drive the new bridge than I was about watching the old bridge being blown up.

Coming on to the old 9th street bridge from the south end off of River Drive was an experience in itself during the dead of winter, so when the new 9th street bridge was built, River Drive was realigned and straightened to meet the new entrance. Much much safer indeed.

The city of Great Falls was hooked out of the $400K that the state gave them to demolish the 9th street bridge because 5,000 people out of about 62,000 people signed a petition to save the bridge. And so the bridge sat …. for years …

Even with all that’s been done to the bridge, you can still see the rotten crumbling concrete. They put some fancy blue lights on it, and some fancy looking railings on it, and pretty much called it a day. Everything looks better in the dark I suppose.

So we wait.

Montana may not be well known for it’s great number of earthquakes, but earthquakes here do happen. I’m guessing that somewhere along the line we’ll have a 4 pointer that will bring that unsightly monolithic concrete eyesore down once and for all. For as rotten as portions of the concrete underneath it are, it may just end up falling down all by itself anyway, because, you know … gravity.

As an aside, with the official naming of the 10th street bridge to the Arlyne Reichert Community Heritage Bridge, all of the bridges in Great Falls have names now.

The 15th Street Bridge over the Missouri River is named for pioneer physician Dr. Harry McGregor, who practiced in Choteau and later Great Falls and who is considered to be the father of the Montana 200 Highway across central Montana.

The George Shanley Bridge, is named for the late architect, and is the bridge that connects to 1st Avenue North on one end and Central Avenue West on the other.

The Warden Bridge, which lines up with 10th Avenue South and was named for late Tribune publisher O.S. Warden, who also served on the Montana Highway Commission.

The Eagle Falls Memorial Bridge, or the 9th Street Bridge, is the newest of the city’s major bridges, and replaces the old 10th Street bridge.

The 6th Street SW bridge over the Sun River is named for longtime U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield.

The pedestrian bridge located just north of the 1st Avenue North Bridge is called the Weissman Memorial Bridge.

Where were you and what were you doing on 9/11?

Where were you and what were you doing on 9/11?
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It was a rather cool morning as I recall. Concrete showed up at 6 o’clock and we were pouring drives and access on Belle Vista Drive at Marketplace below Gore Hill.

A low haze hung in the air and the concrete from Great Falls Redi-mix was actually better batched than usual. The radio was on of course and the first 2 of 4 trucks were completed, when the news came on that there had been a horrific accident in New York City — An airliner had gone off course and hit one of the towers at the World Trade Center.

Work went on for a while when the news came on again about New York and one of the guys had to go over and turn it up because our F-15’s at MANG were making a helluva noise by that time. Unusual I thought at the time, because usually MANG would fly late afternoons and evenings … this particular morning, however, flights in and out of the airport were seemingly non-stop.

We listened to the radio a bit longer and when we learned that another tower at the World Trade Center had been hit, all of the noise our F-15’s were making made much better sense.

Though what had happened in New York City was terrible, we had the last of 4 trucks already on site, so we went ahead and poured it out. We wrapped it all up about noon, and it was decided that it would be a short day — We all buttoned it up and went home.

I didn’t learn about the Pentagon being hit until after I got home and turned on the news.

Seemed like the President was on all evening that night.

The only aircraft that flew over Great Falls the following week was military. Our Airmen and missileers over at Malmstrom went from wearing their Air Force blues to wearing ABU’s, and every single one of them sported an M16 rifle. They wear their ABU’s to this day, 20 years later.

We used to go to yard sales on the base (base yard sales had all of the cool stuff), but after 9/11, all of that came to a screeching halt. I haven’t been to a yard sale on the base in 20 years now. Short of actually obtaining a D.O.D. ID for work on the base, I haven’t gone any other time.

After 9/11, the base main gate got jersey barriers .. today, there are even more jersey barriers along with other added features that would disallow any unauthorized access.

River’s Edge Trail Luminaria Walk

Friday, September 10th is the annual River’s Edge Trail Luminaria Walk.

Over 1500 luminaria will line the trail every ten feet from West Bank Park to the 10th Street Bridge, decorated by our local kids, service groups, and volunteers.

For the past 24 years, the volunteer River’s Edge Trail Board of Directors invite musicians and vendors to choose a location on the trail to entertain walkers.

Folks are invited to stroll the trail between 7:00 – 11:00 PM and begin walking anywhere between West Bank Park and 10th street bridge.

This will also be the grand opening for the bridge as it is completed.

Get more information here.
September 10, 2021
7:00 PM – 11:00 PM
River’s Edge Trail | Great Falls, Montana

Vintage Compaq Presario SR1610NX

Who remembers the old Compaq Presario SR1610NX?

Finished this Compaq Presario SR1610NX up tonight — circa 2005, it’s in totally mint condition and sports an Intel Pentium Dual Core E2200 processor @2.20 GHz 64bit (threw a 500GB HDD into it just for good measure)

Operating system is the Microsoft Windows 10 Professional 21H1 build 19043.1202

Compaq computers are still around. The ancient, older than dirt units can be found in places like Newegg and Ebay going anywhere from $35 to $70 (with $70 shipping of course) that contain all of the original hardware and software.

Compaq Presario
Compaq Presario SR1610NX (tap or click image to enlarge)

I got this Presario from a kid that works at Albertsons, who studies computer sciences at our local college. I think I gave him $30 for it, and it came with all of the original components, including a licensed version of Windows XP with a recovery partition, in tact, on the original IDE 70GB HDD.

The case, as you can see, is in stellar condition. No scratches, wear, or other signs of extensive use.

This box sat on my shelf for quite a while because I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do with it.

I’ll take in old, run down units from people (sometimes I’ll purchase for the right price) on occasion, so I’ve got plenty of perfectly good components laying around collecting dust.

Acer Aspire M5641 Desktop
Acer Aspire M5641 Desktop (tap or click image to enlarge)

The other day I was wondering what I wanted to do with this old Acer desktop box I had. It was pretty beat up and it didn’t have a very practical design.

I had installed Microsoft Windows 10 on it and left it at that.

Acer was never really in to producing attractive units, and boy-ole-boy, this Acer box was uglier than a mud fence … even with Windows 10 installed, I figured that it would be a pretty hard sell just on account of it’s looks, or rather in this case, lack of looks. A 1963 Dodge truck came to mind every time I looked at it.

Not too unlike someone putting a 327 cu. in. Chevy engine into an old 1950’s International pick up truck, I pulled the hardware out of the old Acer and put it into the Presario case.

I also installed a NVIDIA GeForce GT 730 video card (DVI, VGA, HDMI). The motherboard from the Acer unit also has on-board HDMI, but I’ve found that running HDMI through a video card always works out better in the long run. (video card uses it’s own RAM and spares on-board RAM for other things)

I also added TP-Link Wireless WI-FI @150mbps to it because, who needs wires anyway?

This box build doesn’t have UEFI/BIOS or any TPM, (I could install a separate TPM 2.0 module to run bitlocker) so there’s no way it will ever run the new Microsoft Windows 11 due to be released October 5. But with that being said, It’s a unit that will run any Windows 10 build from now until 2025 when Windows 10 reaches EOL.

I’m still not exactly sure what I’ll do with it. It’s a rather nice unit. I’ll probably fire it up on occasion and just look at it … take it for a spin around the internet once in a while. You know — sort of how we do with our classic cars.

Happy trails

Thanks for the read.

Frank Borell – Natural Beauty

Sitting back, enjoying the Montana summer evening, away from all of the business of the day.
Frank Borell is the perfect fit for evenings like this.

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For more than 20 years the musician Frank Doberitz a.k.a Frank Borell from Bonn is one of the most popular international downbeat, lounge, chill out and electronic music producers from Germany.

Frank Borell is well-known for his ambient and electronic music projects like Ibiza chillout, café abstrait, lounge del mare, dream café, island of chill, ibiza chillout café, young grooves, kaffeehaus lounge series, Ibiza beach house and many more made Frank Doberitz a.k.a Frank Borell is one of the most important artists of the electronic music scene.

Visit Frank Borell’s website: https://www.frankborell.com/