UPPER LAKE, Calif. – A motorcyclist injured in a Saturday afternoon crash in the Mendocino National Forest had to be rescued with the help of a helicopter.

The crash, which was reported about the middle of Saturday afternoon, occurred about a mile and a half from the Upper Deer Valley Road and a mile and a half down the Sled Ridge Trail above Upper Lake, according to Northshore Fire Chief Jay Beristianos.

Beristianos said the male motorcyclist crashed and suffered a leg injury.

Because of the remoteness of the location, Beristianos said it was going to be a long, uncomfortable ride out to the hospital for the injured rider.

So Northshore Fire requested Kelseyville Fire respond with its all-terrain rescue vehicle, although Beristianos said that would still have been a bad ride.

Then, “The clouds kind of cleared a little bit and we were able to get a helicopter in,” he said.

The Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office’s Henry-1 helicopter responded and did a long line rescue, and then flew the rider to Middle Creek Campground, Beristianos said.

From there, Beristianos said a Northshore Fire ambulance took the rider to Sutter Lakeside Hospital.

Meantime, Kelseyville Fire used its all-terrain vehicle to take other people from the location and down the hill, which Beristianos said was a huge help.

In addition to Northshore Fire, Kelseyville Fire and Henry-1, Mendocino National Forest units responded to the incident, Beristianos said.

Radio reports indicated firefighters cleared the scene just after 4:45 p.m.

Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. . Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.

The first to map active lava flows from space.

The first to measure a facility’s methane leak from space.

The first to track re-growth in a partially logged Amazon forest from space.

After 17 years in orbit, one of NASA’s pathfinder Earth satellites for testing new satellite technologies and concepts comes to an end on March 30, 2017.

The Earth Observing-1, or EO-1, satellite will be powered off on that date but will not enter Earth’s atmosphere until 2056.

Launched on Nov. 21, 2000, EO-1 was designed as a technology validation mission focused on testing cutting-edge satellite and instrument technologies that could be incorporated into future missions.

Commissioned as part of NASA’s New Millennium Program, the satellite was part of a series of missions that were developed at a cheaper price tag to test new technologies and concepts that had never been flown before.

“EO-1 has changed the way spectral Earth measurements are being made and used by the science community,” said Betsy Middleton, EO-1’s Project Scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

EO-1 was launched with 13 new technologies, including three new instruments.

EO-1’s most important technology goal was to validate the Advanced Land Imager (ALI) for future Earth-observing satellites.

The ALI provided a variety of Earth data including observations of forest cover, crops, coastal waters and aerosols.

The ALI’s instrument design and onboard technology directly shaped the design of the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8, currently in orbit.

EO-1’s other key instrument is a hyperspectral instrument called Hyperion that allows scientists to see chemical constituents of Earth’s surface in fine detail with hundreds of wavelengths.

These data allow scientists to identify specific minerals, track vegetation type and vigor of forests and monitor volcanic activity.

The knowledge acquired and technology developed from Hyperion is being incorporated into a NASA concept for a potential future hyperspectral satellite, the Hyperspectral Infrared Imager, that will study the world’s ecosystems, such as identifying different types of plants and assessing wildfires and droughts.

With both of these instruments, the EO-1 team was able to acquire images with high spatial resolution of events and natural disasters around the world for anyone who requested it.

The EO-1 team could point the instruments at any specific location and gather images every two to five days of a particular spot, which was very useful for scientists as well as disaster relief managers trying to stay informed of rapidly changing events. (Landsat typically looks at the same area once every 16 days.)

EO-1 captured scenes such as the ash after the World Trade Center attacks, the flooding in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, volcanic eruptions and a large methane leak in Southern California.

EO-1 also served as a valuable pathfinder for a variety of space technologies. Technologists installed and tested autonomy software on EO-1 that allowed the satellite to make its own decisions based on the content of the data it collected.

For instance, if a scientist instructed EO-1 to take a picture of an area where a volcano was currently erupting, the software could decide to automatically take a follow-up image the next time it passed over the location.

The mission also validated software that allowed “formation flying” that kept EO-1 orbiting Earth exactly one minute behind the Landsat-7 satellite, already in orbit. The original purpose was to validate the new ALI technologies for use in Landsat 8, which was accomplished.

EO-1 was originally only supposed to last one year, but after that initial mission, the satellite had no major issues or breakdowns.

On a shoestring budget contributed by NASA, the U.S. Geological Survey, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Reconnaissance Office and Naval Research Laboratory, the satellite continued to operate for 16 more years, resulting in more than 1,500 papers published on EO-1 research.

On March 30, 2017, the satellite will be decommissioned, drained of its energy and become inert. Without enough fuel to keep EO-1 in its current orbit, the mission team will shut down the satellite and wait for it to return to Earth.

When EO-1 does reenter the earth’s atmosphere in about 39 years, it is estimated that all the components will burn up in the atmosphere.

“We’ll probably just see EO-1 as a streak in the sky as it disintegrates,” said Middleton.

For more information about EO-1 visit https://eo1.gsfc.nasa.gov/ or https://eospso.nasa.gov/missions/earth-observing-1 .

Kasha Patel works for NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

This week in history features America’s (not quite) first bank robbery and the horrible disaster that sparked a worker safety revolution.

March 19, 1831

America’s first great bank robbery wasn’t actually America’s first. No one really knows what historian or reporter first claimed that the City Bank of New York robbery of 1831 was the nation’s first, but lazy journalists and even lazier historians rehashed the claim time and again.

In actuality, the dubious honor probably goes to the 1798 robbery of a bank in Philadelphia. Oddly enough, the 1798 robbery and the one that happened on this day in 1831 were both achieved using the same method: creating a duplicate key.

The story of America’s (not so) first bank robbery begins with two men: James Honeyman and William Murray.

Well-known thieves and ne’er-do-wells, Honeyman and Murray had spent their lives ripping people off. For all their rough edges, they had picked up a thing or two in their day.

Rather than try and break into the City Bank of New York by force, somehow the culprits had been able to make a wax impression of the key from the lock to the front door. Returning to the bank during the night of the 19th, Honeyman and Murray simply unlocked the front doors and sauntered inside.

For the next several hours, the men systematically packed sacks with roughly $245,000 in banknotes and coins. That was an enormous sum of money, roughly equivalent to $52 million today. Certainly the score of a lifetime.

They exited the bank just as easily as they entered it. No one was the wiser until the tellers returned to work the next day to find their vault and safety deposits ransacked.

By the time their dirty deed had been discovered, Honeyman and Murray were safely back in their hotel rooms, dividing the loot between themselves. Honeyman took his share in several trunks and rented a room at a nearby boarding house, where he sat on it for the next several days.

Meanwhile, rumor over the theft of so much money raced across the region, sped along by newspaper articles that advertised a reward in the several thousands of dollars. Everyone seemed completely flabbergasted as to who could have perpetrated such a crime.

Well, not everyone. Chief Constable Jacob Hays knew immediately that James Honeyman was behind the deed. Apparently, Honeyman was suspected of a theft of a Brooklyn store and several other misdeeds about the area. He was well known to say the least. However, when he went to search his home, Hays could find hide nor hair of Honeyman. The case might have dragged on from there had the landlord of the boarding house Honeyman was hiding out in not become suspicious of his new tenant and his several heavy traveling trunks.

On March 24, Honeyman took one of the trunks with him as he left the boardinghouse that morning, telling the landlord he would return for the others.

By now convinced that something was off about the man, the landlord contacted Chief Constable Hays, who came to the boardinghouse to investigate. Together with the landlord, Hays opened the trunks in the room and discovered most of the loot.

Lying in wait for the return of Honeyman, Hays apprehended the man when he returned to his room to retrieve the by now discovered trunks. A quick description of a man that routinely visited Honeyman at the boardinghouse convinced Hays that William Murray was his accomplice. Hays tracked Murray down in Philadelphia and returned him for trial.

In the end, the two men were convicted of the robbery and sentenced to five years in prison. Despite months of search, over $40,000 of the stolen money was never recovered.

While it was never really America’s first bank robbery, the story behind the robbery of March 19, 1831 certainly sounds like it ought to have been.

The vast sum of money stolen, the audacity of the thieves and the open-ended conclusion all make for the sort of story that reporters and historians just can’t ignore.

March 25, 1911

These days they are common features of all public spaces: fire extinguishers, exit signs, and fire alarms.

Like most innovations, however, events have to transpire that hit home the need for change before change itself is implemented.

Humanity is a dense pupil – we tend to take several harsh lessons before getting the point. One-hundred and six years ago to the day, the Triangle Shirtwaist Co. in New York City was the scene of one of these harsh lessons.

The Triangle factory was located in the top three floors of the Asch Building in Manhattan. Owned by Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, it was a sweatshop, plain and simple. Working in cramped, low-lighted spaces, young women sat hunched over lines of sewing machines.

The building had three elevators, but only one of them was operational on the fateful day of March 25 and access to it was only available down a narrow corridor, the women having to walk single-file to get to it.

Fortunately, the elevators were not the only means of egress from the building, with two rickety stairways also available.

Unfortunately, the door to one of these stairways was locked to prevent stealing and the other only opened inward.

Despite knowing the danger of fire in the building (fires had broken out in the Asch building only nine years earlier), the owners never installed fire sprinklers.

Fate can only be chanced so many times before the inevitable happens. For the 600 workers toiling away in the Asch building on Saturday, March 25, the odds finally came up against them when a fire started in a rag bin.

It didn’t take long for the blaze to get out of control and panic to set in among the frightened – and trapped – workers.

The manager on the floor where the fire broke out attempted to extinguish the fire with a nearby hose – the only safety measure the building had. Like every other feature of the building, however, the hose was faulty and could not put the fire out.

Chaos ensued. The lone working elevator was only able to make a few trips up and down before the blaze became too intense.

By the time firefighters arrived on the scene, women were jumping to their deaths out of windows to escape the fate of burning alive. They were far better off than the unfortunates who were caught in the stairway with the locked door.

The horror was over in just 18 minutes, but the death toll was staggering. In all, 49 people had burned to death or been suffocated by the smoke, 36 lay dead in the elevator shaft and 58 bent and scattered on the streets below.

That day 145 people died because the owners of the building placed the safety of people below that of profit.

The horror of the fire galvanized the nation and reintroduced the issue of worker safety into the public debate. In the state of New York, the Sullivan-Hoey Fire Prevention Law passed that October and required owners to install fire sprinklers inside factories.

One-hundred and forty-five lives is a steep price to pay for a lesson in the need for safety regulations. It is a far higher price when we consider that corners continued to be cut.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911 was not the end to the problem, but it was the beginning of recognizing we had one in the first place.

Antone Pierucci is the former curator of the Lake County Museum and a freelance writer whose work has been featured in such magazines as Archaeology and Wild West as well as regional California newspapers.

LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – When you consider the span of human history, it was not too long ago at all when what is now Lake County was inhabited strictly by American Indians.

There were numerous villages, or what some anthropologists like to call “city states,” here.

The Pomo, Wappo, Miwok, Yuki and Patwin Indians lived here in Lake County for thousands of years.

Anthropologist A.L Kroeber wrote that California Indians comprised the most diverse cultural range found in what is now the United States, before being decimated by the missionaries, settlers and a host of other negative impacts.

There were different kinds of homes utilized then. At every permanent home site a sweat house could be found and a dance abode, as well.

The elders of each group, along with the small children inhabited permanent village sites. The men who hunted and fished occupied various temporary, or seasonal, villages.

Each person in the group knew his place and job. The occupation of tool-maker, or arrowhead chipper, was extremely important.

Obsidian, the volcanic glass that abounds in the unique geologic area of Mt. Konocti, a dormant volcano, provided bountiful, igneous obsidian rock that was used to form a variety of tools and arrowheads.

Borax Lake obsidian has been excavated at other archaeological sites at Indian villages throughout California, as it was a valuable trading commodity by American Indians.

This special volcanic region, now known as Clear Lake Volcanics, produced a unique translucent, gray-black to light gray-colored glass that was used for many kinds of spear tips, arrowheads and tools.

These once-valued volcanic remnants were mightily important in the Pomo and other Indian cultures. The rock was painstakingly fashioned into arrowheads, fishhooks, scrapers and tools of all description. Jasper and chert were sometimes used to fashion arrowheads and tools, as well.

Obsidian is a volcanic or igneous rock that forms when almost crystal-free magma that has flowed to earth's surface solidifies.

Not considered a true mineral, obsidian is sometimes called a mineraloid because it is glass and not crystalline.

Found worldwide where certain types of volcanic eruptions have occurred, such as in Argentina, Australia, Canada, Italy and more, obsidian is usually black but can be found in gray or, even more rare red-brown colorations.

The obsidian found here in Lake County could be found at Borax Lake, Cole Creek, Mt. Konocti and other special quarries, and was highly prized as a tool-making and trading medium.

There were times when access to a rich source of obsidian was denied by a group of Indians, for example, if there were attempts at thievery in an obsidian quarry, but it was more common for all to share and trade.

The shiny, sharp material was there for all tool makers to use to create spears, hooks, drills, arrowheads and cutting tools.

Through the study of American Indian trade routes in California, Lake County obsidian tools and obsidian cores – the unfinished piece of obsidian – have been found north and south of here, as well as in the eastern Sierra Nevada and west, to the coast regions.

Scientists learn a great deal from a tiny obsidian flake, via obsidian hydration and X-ray fluorescence spectrometry, the study of the rock's hydration bands which can reveal both the age and type of obsidian and its source.

For more information on American Indian tools, visit one of our great museums, such as Ely Stage Stop in Kelseyville, Gibson Museum in Middletown, Lakeport Historic Courthouse Museum or the Lower Lake Historic Schoolhouse Museum, or visit archaeologist Dr. John Parker's interesting Web site, http://wolfcreekarcheology.com/Elempoints.html .

Kathleen Scavone, M.A., is a retired educator, potter, writer and author of “Anderson Marsh State Historic Park: A Walking History, Prehistory, Flora, and Fauna Tour of a California State Park” and “Native Americans of Lake County.” She also writes for NASA and JPL as one of their “Solar System Ambassadors.” She was selected “Lake County Teacher of the Year, 1998-99” by the Lake County Office of Education, and chosen as one of 10 state finalists the same year by the California Department of Education.

LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – This week Lake County Animal Care and Control has a group of mixed breed dogs – both small and large – available to new homes.

This week’s dogs include mixes of boxer, Catahoula Leopard Dog, Chihuahua, dachshund, German Shorthaired Pointer, Labrador Retriever and pit bull.

Dogs that are adopted from Lake County Animal Care and Control are either neutered or spayed, microchipped and, if old enough, given a rabies shot and county license before being released to their new owner. License fees do not apply to residents of the cities of Lakeport or Clearlake.

If you're looking for a new companion, visit the shelter. There are many great pets hoping you'll choose them.

The following dogs at the Lake County Animal Care and Control shelter have been cleared for adoption (additional dogs on the animal control Web site not listed are still “on hold”).

Dachshund-Chihuahua mix

This young female dachshund-Chihuahua mix has a short black and tan coat.

She’s in kennel No. 3, ID No. 7148.

'Miles'

“Miles” is a young male pit bull terrier mix with a short brindle coat and gold eyes, and he’s a shelter favorite.

Shelter staff said he is great with other dogs and a little shy of people, but show him some kindness and he will learn to trust you. He would do great in a home with children ages 10 years old and up. He’s also OK with cats, based on an introduction with shelter kitties. He’s looking for a calm, quiet home.

She's in kennel No. 6, ID No. 6875.

‘Love’

“Love” is a male German Shorthaired Pointer mix with a short black and white coat.

Shelter staff said he is a big, young, happy, bouncy boy would will be a lot of fun for an active family that is willing to include him in their activities. He would benefit from training classes for basic manners. He does well with other dogs that tolerate his level of play, but would do best in a home with no small dogs or cats due to his size and energy level.

He’s in kennel No. 7, ID No. 7057.

Catahoula Leopard Dog

This female Catahoula Leopard Dog has a short red merle/brindle coat.

Shelter staff said she is a very sweet girl, and is very submissive with people and other dogs. She will be a great dog with a little work and someone to build her confidence. She needs an experienced dog owner or someone willing to go to training with her.

She’s in kennel No. 8, ID No. 7058.

‘Asha’

“Asha” is a female boxer-pit bull terrier mix.

She has a short brown brindle coat with white markings.

She’s in kennel No. 10, ID No. 7079.

Female pit bull terrier mix

This female pit bull terrier mix has a short white coat with black markings.

She’s in kennel No. 12, ID No. 7156.

Male pit bull terrier

This male pit bull terrier mix has a short cream-colored coat.

Shelter staff said he is an overgrown puppy that loves to play and jump around. He needs a home with a family willing to start from the beginning and teach him manners and boundaries with other dogs, sometimes he is too playful. He would do best in a home with children ages 12 and above and an experienced dog owner or someone willing to go to training with him.

He’s in kennel No. 13, ID No. 7032.

‘Daisy’

“Daisy” is a female pit bull terrier mix.

She has a short coat coat with tan markings.

She’s in kennel No. 15, ID No. 7059.

‘Trixie’

“Trixie” is a female boxer-Labrador Retriever mix.

She has a short tan coat with white markings, and has already been spayed.

Shelter staff said she is very bouncy and playful needs an energetic family that will give her lots of exercise and guidance. Trixie does well with other dogs her size that will tolerate her playfulness. She would do best in a home with no small dogs, cats or livestock,and has great manners.

She’s in kennel No. 17, ID No. 7036.

To fill out an adoption application online visit http://www.co.lake.ca.us/Government/Directory/Animal_Care_And_Control/Adopt/Dog___Cat_Adoption_Application.htm .

Lake County Animal Care and Control is located at 4949 Helbush in Lakeport, next to the Hill Road Correctional Facility.

Office hours are Monday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., Saturday. The shelter is open from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday and on Saturday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Visit the shelter online at http://www.co.lake.ca.us/Government/Directory/Animal_Care_And_Control.htm .

For more information call Lake County Animal Care and Control at 707-263-0278.

Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. . Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.