I’ve been working on a ColdFusion application that will let me send my SPOT checkins to BrightKite. I’ve got the longitude and latitude down but one cool thing about BrightKite is that in addition to sending a checkin from a random lat/lon with “@lat,lon” you can give that place a name by appending a string to the end of it like “@lat,lon My House”
Well thanks to Geonames I can make my random lat/lon SPOT checkins a lot more interesting because they have a huge set of reverse geocoding web services. Reverse geocoding lets you take a latitude and longitude coordinate and then give figure out what it’s close to. With Geonames you can get the closest address, closest place name, closest neighborhood, or basically anything you want. So now I’m building in reverse geocode lookup into my application so I can check in with latitude and longitude coordinates but then give that a meaningful label.
I picked up a pair of the Leki Thermolite Antishock Trekking poles from REI this week because I’m finally giving into the trekking pole thing and with a couple of hikes this week I figured now was a good time to do it.
In general, I was happy with the poles. They’re lightweight, and they condense down to a very short length which makes them ideal for packing away. The weight on them is speced out at 19.85 ounces and they can go from 53 inches to an itty-bitty 25.5 inches. I also liked the foam grip as opposed to the cork that’s on a couple of the other Leki poles. I decided to go with an Aluminum base instead of the trendy carbon fiber because my father-in-law had broken a pair of carbon fiber poles just last week. I’m fine with the extra weight I get from the Aluminum if I can be sure they won’t break when I need them the most.
My only real complaint with the Lekis was a big one. I’m not a fan of the “screw” system for changing the poles length. The other pair I looked at, the Black Diamond Trail Shocks have a nice switch that makes it hard for the poles to resize on their own. I found with the Leki poles that they’d come unscrewed on the trail and suddenly decide to shorten when I leaned on them. It meant I had to stop and tighten things back up which was kind of a pain.
Overall they’re good quality poles but I see the screw mechanism as a design flaw and with the price of the Black Diamonds being cheaper I wish I would have gotten them instead.
I’ll have a full trip report of our Mount Saint Helens climb later this week but I wanted to share with you a couple of videos from the way down. Glissading is the best part of climbing a mountain.
Gizmodo has a blog post about an unnamed GPS maker being “Scared Shitless” by the prospect of the iPhone having a GPS unit. I call BS. If anything, I think the GPS-enabled iPhone is going to make people more aware of GPS and possibly boost sales in the long term.
I’m salivating at the thought of a GPS-enabled iPhone device. Services like Brightkite, and my own personal projects rely heavily on location. Having that in my phone is going to be awesome. But the market for GPSes is far and wide. Is the iPhone going to replace automotive GPS devices? That have the maps preinstalled and work locally? No way. Hiking devices? Not a chance. Having the topo data in the middle of nowhere is key.
My hope is that the iPhone will actually get more people thinking about how GPS can be used in all aspects of their lives. The one area where the iPhone might affect sales is maps. I hate having to pay for updated maps. I sort of get it, but I think it’s annoying. If the iPhone can change how the GPS companies sell maps, that will be a good thing for consumers. I’m willing to pay for updated maps like I do with a data plan, but right now they seem way too expensive for me.
Today is the 55th anniversary of the very first ascent of Everest. I’ve been reading a book, Mountains of the Mind, that is a great read and today seemed like a pretty good day to mention it. The book attempts to answer the question “why do all of these people risk their lives to climb mountains?”. Even today climbing Mount Everest is dangerous. 55 years ago it was completely insane. Gear wasn’t as good, technology wasn’t as advanced, and getting help if something went wrong was much, much tougher. Hillary and Norgay were tough, tough dudes
The book works its way through the philosophical history of mountaineering. It talks about how humans first thought of the world and how mountains went from being seen as annoying obstacles to thrilling adventures. It’s a great read for the history, the psychology, and the stories from the mountains.
Ciara and I were looking for a backpacking trip with little to no snow and ended up finding it oddly enough in North Cascades National park on the Ross Lake Dam trail (map) (Flickr Photoset). In order to do the hike you need to get a free overnight backcountry permit from one of the North Cascade Ranger stations scattered about. That was pretty easy and once we did that we made our way to the trailhead. We got a bit of a late start and didn’t begin hiking until around 4:00 that afternoon.
The trail starts off going down a trail and then turning into a road where it intersects with the dam. The views off the Ross Lake Dam are great so take a moment to stop and enjoy. After crossing the dam the trail goes gradually uphill as it snakes along the lake. There are a couple of small, easy creek crossings along the way. Eventually the trail forks. The right trail goes down to the Ross Lake resort so keep left.
About 1/3 of the way through the trail starts to get higher and break through the trees a bit providing great views of the lake. About half way the trail intersects with with the Sourdough Mountain Trail so keep right and work your way gradually down through more forests. The trail goes through another gradual uphill and crosses a couple of streams before finally finding its way down to Big Beaver Creek. The first campsite along the trail is the Pumpkin Mountain campsite but we continued on to the Big Beaver Creek campsite.
We couldn’t actually find the Big Beaver Creek site. It’s a big area and we found signs for the horse camp and the boat camp but nothing that resembled an actual campsite. Instead we tried to camp in the lowest impact spot possible - an area that is normally covered by water.
Seattle has a group called the Thursday Night Afterburners (TNAB). They basically pick a pretty difficult hike every week and then on Thursday meet at the trailhead by 5:45 and start hiking. It makes for a very interesting Thursday night and the trip down, in which you’re hiking in the dark, is kind of a trip - literally.
Tonight we went to Mailbox Peak (good photos here, review here). It’s about 5 miles round trip with an elevation gain of almost 4000 feet, so you’re spending a lot of time going up; the whole point of a TNAB outing.
The parking lot is just a bit beyond the exit for North Bend on I-90. The trail itself starts off fairly level through some dense forest before turning into switchbacks on the way up. The switchbacks last about 1/3rd of the way up and they’ve been pretty well groomed so the trail is easy to find. After the first set of switchbacks you continue in pretty dense forest through a combination of switchbacks and straight up the mountain. There aren’t a lot of overlooks or flat areas here, you’ve still got to gain a bunch of elevation.
About halfway up the mountain you’ll come to a fork. Each fork has the telltale orange dots and the one on the right has a bunch of the dots on a tree. Either fork will get you to the top, I took the one on the right. After the fork the trail gets kind of dicey. You can continue to follow the orange dots and they’re pretty evenly spaced. You’ll be doing a bit of switchbacks and a bit of straight up and the actual trail starts to disappear. If you follow the orange blazes you’ll come to a tree with an orange X blazed on it. I have no idea what this is. At that point you’ll want to veer towards the left and get on the ridge where the trail is more pronounced.
You’ll continue along the ridge slowly getting high enough where the trees start getting smaller and you can see some views. In May, we started hitting snow here and by another 500 feet it was all snow. You’ll eventually come out on a boulder field. Continue on through the field into a grove of trees and when you come out of the trees you’ll see the slope up to the summit. It’s a pretty easy (but steep) climb to the top.
The hardest part with the Thursday Night Afterburners is the way down. We hit the summit a little bit before 8:00 PM I think as the sun was going down. We spent most of the hike back in pure darkness. You basically have to put your headlamp down, pay attention to the shadows, and place footing carefully. It was kind of crazy but it was a lot of fun. All in all, a great trip. I have some videos on Flickr and I’ll post the GPX file of the trip here as soon as I get it. All in all it was quite a workout.
Brightkite is one of my favorite web services out there and I’ve only been using it a couple of days. It’s a lot like Twitter but very focused on Geographic locations. You can search for a business, or enter an address, then “check in” from that location and any posts or photos you upload will be associated with that place. It’s cool to see the notes and photos from people around you. Another cool thing is that if one of your friends checks in close to you, you’ll get a message about it so you can have an impromptu get together.
So one tip I figured out recently is that you can actually use longitude and latitude in decimal degrees format in lieu of an address. So you don’t actually have to be anywhere specific to check in. Because of the way the site works you’ll still see notes and photos from people close by, so if you’re in the boonies or a foreign country, using lat/lon coordinates would be a good way to go.
Backpacker.com recently rolled out a new website with a bunch of Web 2.0 goodness including a mini Flash UI and integration with the ever-awesome Google Maps Terrain feature. The site also added some community aspects so that you can submit trip reports, gear reviews, video/photo uploading, and rating features. They’ve also added a bunch of social bookmarking links so you can share with all of your social networking friends (though it doesn’t work on individual trips sadly - I think it’s a bug). All in all it’s a pretty good revamp and it’s made Backpacker a heckuva lot more useful to me.
I have a couple of nitpicks about the site however. One is that with all this Ajaxy goodness they didn’t take the time to make photo uploading easy. Instead of letting me upload any photo and doing some basic cropping and resizing I have to stick within the guidelines. Also, when using the trip finder, it’s hard to find things by activity. For instance, if I’m looking for a backpacking trip instead of a hiking trip I’d like to be able to see that before I click on it. You can sort of tell with mileage but it’s not perfect.
But in general it’s a great site and a great way to find interesting places to go. Once you drill down on a trip you can download the waypoints, see the trip plotted on a map, comment, and rate the trip. Another great feature of the enhanced Google Maps that they use is you can get the Topo data as well as the Terrain data. I think Backpacker.com will have an easier time of building a community than, say, Outdoorzy, just because of the built in readership.
But no APIs show we’re still in the infancy of Web 2.0 in the outdoors. But the new Backpacker is a good start.
National Geographic just rolled out a beta of their new TOPO! Explorer website. It’s got a really nice Ajaxy-Google Maps interface but with real, genuine topo data, something that’s impossible to get on the web. I took a look at the source and they’re using all of the technology-goodness of Google maps but sadly there isn’t any kind of API so we can start creating topo-mashups of our very own.
The site has some great features. You can upload GPX data, geotag your photos and videos, then share all that data as a trip. You can also buy Topo maps (a key feature for National Geographic). Having all of this Web 2.0 goodness with the Topo data is awesome but it does leave me hungering for more. I’m totally fine buying software to sync with my GPS. And I think freeing the data and letting people do awesome things with it would only drive more sales. But what do I know.
In general, I was happy with the poles. They’re lightweight, and they condense down to a very short length which makes them ideal for packing away. The weight on them is speced out at 19.85 ounces and they can go from 53 inches to an itty-bitty 25.5 inches. I also liked the foam grip as opposed to the cork that’s on a couple of the other Leki poles. I decided to go with an Aluminum base instead of the trendy carbon fiber because my father-in-law had broken a pair of carbon fiber poles just last week. I’m fine with the extra weight I get from the Aluminum if I can be sure they won’t break when I need them the most.
Overall they’re good quality poles but I see the screw mechanism as a design flaw and with the price of the Black Diamonds being cheaper I wish I would have gotten them instead.
Brightkite
