http://trail.digitalbackcountry.com Ryan Stewart's Blog for the Intersection of Technology and the Outdoors Sat, 19 Jul 2008 18:50:34 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I'm something of a GPS geek. When I hike/backpack I carry 3 different GPSes on me. I've got my Garmin Colorado, my TrackStick, and my Garmin Forerunner. I've always been on the lookout for a device that would let me do some kind of real-time communication with my GPS data ... http://trail.digitalbackcountry.com/2008/07/gear-review-spot-satellite-messenger-personal-tracker-review/ 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 ... http://trail.digitalbackcountry.com/2008/07/geonames-reverse-geocoding-web-services/ 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. ... http://trail.digitalbackcountry.com/2008/06/gear-review-leki-thermolite-antishock-trekking-poles/ 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. http://trail.digitalbackcountry.com/2008/06/glissading-down-mount-saint-helens/ 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 ... http://trail.digitalbackcountry.com/2008/05/garmin-in-trouble-with-gps-enabled-iphone-no-way/ 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 ... http://trail.digitalbackcountry.com/2008/05/happy-mount-everest-day/ 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 ... http://trail.digitalbackcountry.com/2008/05/backpacking-trip-report-ross-lake-washington/ 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 ... http://trail.digitalbackcountry.com/2008/05/thursday-night-afterburners-mailbox-peak-trip-report/ 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 ... http://trail.digitalbackcountry.com/2008/05/brightkite-tips-using-latitude-and-longitude/ 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 ... http://trail.digitalbackcountry.com/2008/05/backpackers-new-web-20-site/