If you visit West Yellowstone, Montana you are probably going into Yellowstone National Park at some point soon. But the town of West Yellowstone is worth a trip in itself, because it’s quite a neat town!
And you might not know this, but they have one of the best laboratories in the world!
Yes, in West Yellowstone there is a grizzly bear research center, where you can see trouble bears from the Park that they had to capture and put into captivity because they became a threat to humans.
Grizzly bears are very intelligent creatures, and they can be quite cunning when it comes to getting food.
They are very adept at getting into trash cans, coolers, tents, bags, cars, you name it, in order to get a good meal. So when you’re in bear country, you see all sorts of latches and mechanisms on trash cans and dumpsters in order to keep the bears out!
At this grizzly research center in West Yellowstone, they test new version of coolers, camping equipment, dumpsters, and trash cans with this grizzlies in captivity. In fact, many of the products that are used in the Park must pass these “lab tests” before they can be purchased!
They put food inside the container, and see what the bears do with it!
They have a neat exhibit showing pictures of ruined trash cans and camping gear, because the grizzly bears outsmarted them, or overcame the safeguards through their incredible strength.
And then, there are examples of equipment that was badly damaged, but still kept the bears from the food.
In our lab, we don’t have any grizzly bears (yet!), but we do a variety of tests. For frac sand, the most objective test that we can do is the crush resistance test. It involves using his stress in a controlled manner, in order to test the crush strength of the sand. This directly correlates to how the sand could perform downhole.
Check out our other social media pages!
