When I could still go caving 30+ years ago, I wanted to visit Ellison's and drop Fantastic Pit, yeah... 586 feet free, that would've been fun.
But I was too busy discovering/exploring/mapping caves in California to ever make it to Ellison's Cave.
In fact, I was working in a cave I discovered in Sequoia National Park that was 900 feet directly about another cave some friends had discovered several years before, Hurricane Crawl Cave.
The small group of NSS cavers I was working with had an M.O.U. with the Natl Park Service to explore and map any caves we discovered, and we gated Hurricane at their request after we finished our survey and drafted a map of the cave.
As it's a hazardous cave with a stream and deep vertical drops, it is now a locked closed gated cave, and only vetted cave explorers and scientists are allowed in.
I was hoping to make a vertical connection between the two caves via a pit I hoped would be deep enough to shatter the depth record of Fantastic Pit, but my health ran out before I could make that connection.
Perhaps some day a determined caver will continue the work I was doing and find that connection pit.
I agree, but even when I was installing/servicing hydro, wind and solar systems years ago, solar was still the least expensive way to go if one had sufficient solar exposure.
And solar panels have drastically come down in price since then too, so solar is certainly the most economical way to go for off grid power these days.
From my experience, smaller scale Wind Turbines are more hassle than they are worth, at least in the early 90's when I was servicing them.
First, one has to complete a wind survey, so installing an anemometer for a full season to get an idea of the annual wind resource, in order to properly size the turbine.
Of course, one can use weather service annual wind velocities for your local area as a general guide, but every place has it's own micro climate, so a site local wind survey is essential.
And one also needs a Tall Tower to get the turbine well above any close by hills, trees, or structures, otherwise quite a bit of efficiency is lost.
Towers are expensive, and usually require specialists to safely install them.
And smaller scale wind turbines also need to be maintained at least yearly, which requires climbing the tall tower to do so.
And wind turbine systems were very expensive back then (12-20K US$), but costs may have come down since then, not sure.
They also can be a bit noisy when wind speeds are higher.
I also can't really speak about the micro wind turbines I see for sale, other then to remark they are not as efficient as larger turbines mounted on tall towers, and I don't see them as viable, reliable sources of power.
I also would like to hear from someone who's been installing wind turbines in recent years, to see if things have changed in a positive way.
Micro Hydro is a bit of a misnomer here, the link leads to a device thats more like mid sized hydro.
In the early 90's I was installing/servicing micro hydro systems here in rural Northern California, on properties off the grid where there was no sun due to all the redwood trees.
We were using tiny Pelton style turbine wheels, and our systems produced about 500 watts 24/7 (10-12 Kilowatt Hours) on the small streams in our coastal mountainous area.
Once the infrastructure was built (dam, penstock, base for the turbine, wiring, control system, etc), the systems were rock solid reliable, and required minimal yearly maintenance.
The one major problem was that they were VERY LOUD, so couldn't be near the living quarters because it was so annoying.
Eventually, it became nearly impossible to legally install them in our County due to Fish & Wildlife Regulations concerning the damming of waterways, no matter how small ("Won't someone think of the salmon";-).
Not sure how loud this new turbine is, but due to County and State regulations it seems to me that this so called "fish friendly" turbine will still have very limited locations where it can be installed, at least here in California.
Yup, when I saw the initial report I wondered if it was a murder/suicide, or an extremely distracted or inattentive driver.
I've driven that section of Highway One South of Pacifica many times and it's narrow, so it could have been an accident, because lots of folks have gone over the cliff there and died over the years.
I hope the survivors of this family will be able to recover, and if the driver really did attempt to murder them, they should never get out of prison.
And the Hart family murder/suicide happened just about 20 miles North of my current town at my favorite turnout, which I now can't hang out at and enjoy the view anymore, too brutal of a memory.
I walked by the Hart family the day before the tragic event, they had just come out of our local ice cream shop, and couldn't help but notice them due to their mixed race.
As far as I recall, it was determined that it was only the driver who did it, as the rest of them had been heavily dosed with Benadryl.
The body of one child was never found.
Also, several years before that and about 10 miles further South, a mother drove her van off the cliff in a similar murder/suicide at Blues Beach.
I believe they all survived but the baby had permanent brain damage due to being upside down for hours before a local discovered them.
Back in the 60's through the 90's we also had Haltech and Halted Specialties, electronics supplies and surplus in Sunnyvale/Santa Clara, each about a mile from each other.
Many folks confused the names.
As I recall, both of them had resident cats as well.
My High School electronics teacher turned me onto them in 1969.
It appears Haltech is defunct, and not surprising since the owner was OLD when I was shopping/browsing there in the 70's - 80's.
Oh, looks like Halted changed their name to HSC and may still be in business.
If you believe radio kits were as advanced as one could buy "back in the day", I guess you never looked at a HeathKit catalog, they offered all kinds of kits more sophisticated than radios.
In 1980 I got one of these kits for my auto repair shop, and yes, it was quite a challenge to build, but it saved me hours of automotive diagnostic time.
A comparable automotive ignition analyzer scope at the time was thousands of dollars.
Actually, rescuers did use a rock hammer drill to place anchors to attach pulleys to, so he could be extracted, unfortunately, the drill bit broke and they had to return to the surface to get another one.
Then (tragically) after they set the last anchor, one of them broke out from the passage wall, and that's when he slipped back down further than before, it was so damn SAD!
There are very few "professional cavers", i.e. those who are paid to go into caves.
It's mostly hard core cavers who do the majority of cave exploration, surveying/mapping and biological/archeological inventory in caves around the world.
Almost all of us are volunteers, and arrange our lives around caving, not our jobs, it's a passion that consumes us.
Before retiring from caving due to health issues, I caved with the best of the best for years, and none of us were/are "adventure seekers", not even close, we are pragmatic, calm, and seriously experienced in cave exploration, as opposed to those who are untrained casual cave explorers (what we call "spelunkers", i.e. flashlight cavers).
Both of those stories garnered world wide attention, but one of the positive unintended consequences of those tragic events was that they scared many "adventure seekers" enough that they stayed away from cave exploration, which is a "good" thing.
About 30 years ago I became trapped in an alpine cave in a way very similar to Floyd Collins, when a football sized piece of marble fell from the ceiling about 30 feet into a virgin body sized phreatic tube I was exploring.
It landed on my ankle, pinning it so I couldn't move forward or back, and the passage was so tight that I couldn't move my free leg to dislodge it, and yes, Floyd Collins entrapment was the first thing I thought of.
Thankfully, I had two things in my favor, one was I had a caving partner on the surface who knew where I was, and I could communicate with, so if I couldn't self rescue she could hike the 5 miles back to a road end and get help (no cell phone service back then).
And two, I was an experienced caver, so I remained very calm, and kept working my free foot in order to attempt to dislodge the rock pinning my ankle, and after about 10 minutes I was able to somehow with great effort, shift the rock enough that I could move deeper into the cave.
I crawled forward another 15 feet to a pit about 20 feet deep that I was able to free climb into so I could turn around and head back out, and was able to push the rock ahead of me and I got out just fine.
It didn't phase me one bit, as I'd had much more serious life threatening events in caves previously (almost "flat rocked" in Lechuguilla Cave, NM), but I was well aware that it could have been a serious situation as it got down into the 20's at night in that location, so hypothermia was a real possibility.
The lesson here for non cavers is, don't explore caves alone, especially if nobody knows where you are, and get proper training before doing so, from a local "grotto" (chapter) of the National Speleological Society https://caves.org/ .
I spent 12 years at KMFB FM on the Mendocino coast (show host & Control Op), and it was a rare commercial station that had specialty shows where the host would have to get their own advertisers to be on the air.
I recently retired after a 42 year career in broadcast radio (at six different stations), and the two non commercial stations I worked at had "underwriting" which is kind of like a commercial, but legal under FCC rules.
My father was an ME and EE and was one of the principle engineers on that project (of Clementine, the BIG claw that picked up the Russian Golf Class sub).
I used to drive him to and from the Redwood City shipyard as there wasn't a lot of parking there.
He also gave me 9 or 10 manganese nodules from the "test" mining run, which was the CIA cover story.
They look like fist sized black to gray cauliflower heads.
After the project was declassified he got a Presidential Commendation, which he framed and hung over the kitchen table.
If I'm understanding what you're getting at, I believe all the main dating sites already share user profiles between themselves to flesh out their "stock" of potential paying customers.
So using a specialty site like Kayak Dating, or some such, owned by this dating site group would still get you some non kayaker profiles.
I discovered this because I like round women and I'd have profiles on a few specialty sites, and I'd still get thin women profiles occasionally because other qualifiers I'd listed were close to theirs.