On the Road Again

[Image: The 5,000-ton neutrino detector of the Soudan Underground Mine State Park in northern Minnesota].

I've been on the road for the past three weeks, wrapping up our final site visits and interviews for Venue across the northern Plains, eastern Oregon, the Great Basin, and, now, northern California. It's been hard to find time to post during all this, sadly, but I thought I'd just put up a few quick Instagrams of our travels—you can always see more, and follow along, at my Instagram feed, if you're interested.

[Image: The subterranean domestic furnishings of the Free Enterprise Radon Health Mine in Boulder, Montana].

A lot of this will also be documented in a forthcoming feature in the July/August issue of Popular Science, including a small map for anyone who might want to do some of these travels themselves.

In the past few weeks alone, we've been 2,341 feet below the earth's surface visiting the vast, 5,000-ton underground neutrino detector in the old Soudan Mine in northern Minnesota, the headwaters of the Mississippi river in the nearby Itasca State Park—

[Image: At the headwaters of the Mississippi River in Itasca State Park, Minnesota].

—a branch of the Ice Age Trail in central Wisconsin—

[Image: Hiking the Baraboo Hills branch of Wisconsin's Ice Age Trail].

—the extraordinary Berkeley Pit in Butte, Montana, home to extremophiles—

[Image: Butte, Montana's Berkeley Pit].

—the world's largest organism in the mountains of eastern Oregon's remote Malheur National Forest, and much more.

In any case, I'll begin posting again as these travels wrap up, but I thought I'd say hello from the road... Hope you're all having a good summer.