Mountains, Foothills, and Wind Tunnels

Welcome to another ThrowBack Thursday hodgepodgery! Today, we visit three locations. We’ll start at a scenic overlook just inside Colorado’s Golden Gate State Park. The date is May 25, 2009 and we are visiting Panorama Point Scenic Overlook & Picnic Area. But I didn’t bring any food, so you can forget about the “Picnic Area” part. Stay hungry, my friends. Now, please proceed to pleasant Panorama Point pictures, party people:

Neat, eh? Next, let’s go two days further back in time and pay a visit to Chautauqua Park in Boulder, Colorado.

The iconic Flatirons of Boulder, Colorado

And now for something completely different: Ames Research Center. No, we’re not going to Iowa. Ames Research Center is a NASA facility at the south end of San Francisco Bay. Begun in 1939, Ames Research Center was originally built for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). In its original capacity as an aeronautics research center, several wind tunnels were constructed. Big ones. Of course, it wasn’t long before the “space race” came along, necessitating the creation of a new government “space agency”. Thus, in October 1958, NACA was replaced by NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration). While a variety of research has been conducted at Ames over the years, the wind tunnels retained their prominence at Ames. Now, we’ve all seen video from inside wind tunnels, typically involving streams of smoke flowing around a mockup of an airplane or sports car. But have you ever seen the outside of a wind tunnel? Well, you’re about to: