Ingalls Lake Trail

The trail up to Ingalls lake takes you over dry hills, through sparse clumps of larches to a beautiful and open alpine lake.

This hike provided a perfect compliment to the previous one in the Olympics. Whilst the Olympic national park is a temperate rainforest, Ingalls lake lies on the east side of the Cascades, in a rain shadow. The ground was dusty and the trees stunted and sparse.

The drive from Seattle was long but through interesting scenery and the novelty of farmland. At 10:30 am we hit the trail and after a couple of miles we were out of the forest and getting views of the red and grey rock-strewn hills around us. The plants here were very different from those in the Olympics, and there were barely any huckleberries.

Just before we reached the highest point of the walk, Rainier emerged from behind the nearest mountain to the south. It was a perfectly clear day and we could see the glacier-topped giant very clearly. To the west, far more distant, but still clearly visible, was its brother, Mount Hood.

From the high point in a saddle the trail contours roughly around the basin below. It was easily visible and we could see where lake Ingalls was probably hiding. The view across the glacial valley to Mount Stuart was impressive, but the views closer to us were equally good; [scored orange-red rocks][scratched rock] dotted with yellowing larches. There is a campground here, a superb isolated location, but it would certainly be cold. There was frost in the shade even though it was early afternoon.

On the way around the basin we encountered a couple of marmots, which didn’t seem bothered by our clumping boots and got too close to get completely in shot

The last leg of the walk turned into more of a scramble up over to the edge of the lake. It was a stunning view: Ingalls peak to the left of us, orange, streaked with grey and to the right, reflected in the blue waters of the lake, were the crumbling peaks of Mount Stuart.

We lunched here in the silence and sun, ducked below the cold wind. The view looked familiar, on checking the guide book, I found out why: it was on the cover.

The return journey, back out the same way we came in, passed quickly. We saw the marmots again - passed the autumn larches and went back over the saddle for more views of Rainier. We arrived back at the car at about 4:30pm and headed back to the city in search of food.

Seven Lakes Basin

This was a long one; 18.8 miles in one day with over 4500ft of climbing. We met people on the way round taking three days over this loop. “I hope you boys have got a flashlight.”

It was a long day: 16 hours from downtown Seattle until our return. There was no earlier ferry we could have caught. The trailhead is some 40 miles west of Port Angeles on the Olympic Peninsula, about two and a half hour’s drive from the ferry terminal in Bainbridge. We were on the trail, at about 9:30am, in the cold morning air. It felt like autumn was coming.

The trail emerges from the trees surprisingly quickly, so we had views from pretty early on, which made the climb far more bearable. The weather was superb, blue skys with a few wispy clouds above, but not too hot.

After a brief respite in a beautiful flat area full of ponds and ripe huckleberries the climb continued. We soon crossed over the ridge to views over the west side of the Olympic range, out to the Pacific.

We lunched atop Bogachiel Peak, which gave us views all around, over the Seven Lakes Basin to the North and South to the snow-covered summit of Mount Olympus.

The High Divide was a strange section; one side of the slope was south-facing an covered in tall pines, whilst the north side was open, covered with only grass and the odd stubborn and weathered tree. It’s a very pleasant section of the walk, being mercifully level and with views across the valley of the impressive glacier crawling down from Olympus. We soon spotted Heart Lake, but from our point of view, the heart shape was upside down. After dropping down from the High divide we soon entered thick forest and the rest of the walk was of close-up views of trees and undergrowth. There were plenty of varied fungi about in the damp autumn air. By the time we got back to the car, the light was fading.

It was a bit of a slog, especially towards the end, but absolutely worth the effort. You can do it one day, so do.

See all the pictures here.

Heather Park, Angeles Lake Loop

The labour day holiday provided the opportunity to do two hikes in one weekend and still get a rest day. Monday was walk two, this time in the Olympics. There were two possible hikes we had our eye on, but we had to settle for the shorter one due to not arriving at Port Angeles until 10am. The longer walk was another 50 plus miles down the road. It would have been dark before we got off the hills.

The trailhead for the loop we settled on is cheekily just outside the national park. The turnoff is literally within a stone’s throw of the pay station.

The start of the walk is on an old logging road at a ‘gentle gradient’ which soon raised the heart rate. It was at least an hour’s slog before we broke tree cover for a view into the thick of the clouds which were stubbornly clinging to the mountain tops. We met two seasoned hikers on the way up who both commented, with some surprise, when we told them we were doing the loop that “That’s a long hike fellas.” We had been warned.

After zig-zagging through alpine meadows and patches of trees, we chose a spot for first lunch near Heather Park in a saddle on the ridge we were going to follow. The clouds parted briefly to reveal a snow-clad Mount Olympus in the distance. Beautiful, and worth the climb.

Here we faced a decision. The book and its map showed a trail up through the peaks to the south-east. The only obvious trail was down and west, then contouring below the peaks. Add this to the fact that we weren’t entirely sure where we were, due to a possible branch in the trail some half a mile back down the hill. The GPS was useless; whilst it gave an accurate indication of our position, the map we had was devoid of grid markings. We plumped for the obvious trail.

The next section of the trek was a slog. After dropping a few hundred feet down gravel we countoured (roughly) below the crumbling peaks for a while before we had to re-gain the height to a saddle. From there it was another disheartening drop down into cloud to traverse another scree slope, then climbing back up to 6000 feet to another saddle. This was the only busy part of the trail due to the proximity of the Hurricane Road trailhead. There was still a mountain goat on the ridge though. A pleasant surprise and impressively big and furry.

The walk out was quick. No-one fancied being in the forest as it got dark. Lake Angeles proved to be a worthwhile (and minor) detour. It was flat as a mill pond, so reflected the surrounding mountains impressively.

Easily the most spectacular hike so far, even without the views. Worth the effort.

Denny Creek and Melakwa Lake

Saturday, Labour day weekend. We hiked up along Denny Creek to Melakwa Lake, in the Central Cascades.

The trail starts from a busy car park and soon takes you under the I90 westbound carriage, rising from the firs on concrete stilts. It looked suprisingly good.

Whilst the I90 route to the trailheads around North Bend is very coinvienient, it was getting a bit samey. At one point we were further from the car to where we were a couple of weeks ago. With all this wilderness, that’s not right.

We soon found ourselves zig-zagging up through forest and rockfalls to Keekwulee falls and alongside the more hidden Snowshoe falls. From there it is a short pull up more switchbacks to the lake itself.

Melakwa is Chinook for mosquito, apparently. There were certainly a few of the little suckers about, and their prescence, combined with the overcast skys and occasional drizzle made our lunch break short and the idea of swimming was never realised. There are a couple of good looking camping spots between the upper and lower lakes, but the eponymous mozzies might be a bit of a chore in the evenings.

Coming down was worse than going up, due to the rocky nature of the path, combined with the lack of novelty, as we’d seen it all on the way up. It was still enjoyable to be out in the ‘wilderness’ for a few hours though.

Vancouver - A trip to the land of metric

A weekend in Vancouver. The trip up from Seattle was painless enough apart from the grilling by the Canadian border guard, who seemed annoyed that he couldn’t refuse us entry.

I can recommend The Victorian Hotel. It was cheap (for downtown,) central, clean, independent, quirky and quiet. Quiet is good. We checked in, abandoned the car and walked around town in the sunshine, admiring the views across the sound to the mountains beyond.

On Sunday we hired bikes and pootled around Stanley Park for a few hours in the sunshine. I was pleased to find a game of cricket in progress. The clouds were scraping the hills on the other side of the water, which is why we’d saved Grouse Mountian until the Monday.

Monday: rain. Not forecasted. It cleared after breakfast but the clouds remained. We stubbornly set off up into the hills anyway. We tried to find the Lynn Creek suspension bridge, a free version of the Capilano bridge but marginally smaller and in the next valley over. We actually ended up in the Lynn Headwater park, which was great. There was hardly anyone there. We set off on a short walk through the fir trees past huge ancient stumps left from the first time it was logged.

On the second attempt we found the suspension bridge, bounced our way over and watched a couple of nutters jumping over the waterfalls in the creek below. They’d obviously chosen to ignore the gory warning signs explaining the multitude of horrific ways you can drown under a waterfall.

After a picnic lunch in the woods by the bridge we headed home, stopping to admire the distant view of Vancouver from Crescent Beach. That was a strange little community. Very peaceful and more lifeguards than swimmers.

All in all a great, very relaxing trip with some of the best elements for a good time: good food, good sleeping, great views… and not getting mugged even when you accidentally walk though the crack-ridden areas after dark.

More pictures here.

Paradise, Mount Rainier

The call of the mountain became too much again. On Saturday we drove the three hours from Seattle to Mount Rainier with the intention of tramping on it a bit. We set off early, but in my usual style we took many stops on the way to obeserve the view, take pictures and do a little bonus walk in a quiet area. My favourite viewpoint was the one without a view - well, no view of Rainier, just some fir trees up close.

When we finally arrived at Paradise, it was full. There were cars everywhere. Both main car parks were full, as were the overflow ones. The roads were lined with vehicles and all but the lowest picnic spot spaces were filled. We parked about as far from the visitor centre as possible, and had lunch. I was getting a little despondant as I didn’t fancy walking up a road as part of my trek and there were people just everywhere - busier than if we’d stayed in Belltown. Add this to the fact that my water bottle had leaked a couple of litres through my rucsac all over the boot of the car.

I think there’s a Joni Mitchell song about paving over paradise.

We tried the car parks again, and this time, amazingly, we got a spot. I refilled the offending water bottle and we set off up the tarmac’d path of the skyline trail. The views were spectacular in all directions. North was filled with Rainier’s glacier-clad southern face, and in all other directions we were surrounded by more modest peaks. In the southern distance Mount Adams and Mount St. Helens were visible - emphasising the fact that we were in an active volcanic zone, halfway up a non-extinct volcano. Even though it was a clear August afternoon, the wind was cold, reminding us how high up we were: 7000ft above sea level.

The higher the path went, the less crowded it became. Not surprising really, but very welcome. At the highest point there were bits of glacial ice blocking the path and all around were barren rocks. Despite the early, disappointing signs, the trip was well worth the effort. I probably won’t get too many chances to clamber on a volcano in my lifetime, and glaciers are quick becoming a thing of the past - I should take these opertunities whilst I can, even if in doing so I expediate the glacial retreat a little.

See all the pictures here.

Gallery2

I have been trying out Gallery2, a huge leap forward on Gallery, but not quite mature yet. You can find my g2 implimentation here: http://www.prizeonion.co.uk/gallery2.

I was all set to switch over to it permanently, when I discoverd that there is currently no RSS feed plugin. There seems to be a fairly active effort to rectify this though. Read the discussion here.

The transition was painless though, I have a parallel setup and just imported all the Gallery1 pictures using the plugin in the admin page. Very nice.

Snow Lake

Another walk in the cascades. This one proved popular, with a group of eight of us heading for the hills; it took a while to fill out the permit… It was another ludicrously hot day and the majority of my pack was full of water. Our goal was Snow Lake, an alpine reservoir at some 4000ft above sea level. It’s a well trodden path and by far the busiest yet, I can see why though; after only three miles and a few hundred feet of elevation we crested a rise to be confronted with a spectacular view of a dark blue lake, surrounded by white rocks and deep green pines.

We’d set out to swim in the lake. It seemed like the perfect day for it, being as it was so hot, the cool alpine waters would be refreshing. They were indeed. I found them a little too refreshing and after ten minutes my teeth were chattering. I spent the next half an hour trying to maintain my core temperature by shivering on the shore bathed in sunshine on a 30°C day.

At least I actually swam, not like our friends from the lower latitudes.

Summary: Busy, but well worth it. Don’t forget your trunks.

More pictures in the gallery.

Kendall Katwalk

Another fine walk. This time we headed east, to the Central Cascades. We were at the trail-head in about an hour, far more convenient than the Olympics. Our goal for the day was to reach the Kendall Katwalk, a narrow path along a cliff face, which turned out to be disappointingly safe.

The trail starts at about 1000m, in the the forest, and winds gently up to the peaks with the occasional breaks in the canopy, most spectacularly with a huge section of flattened trees, crushed and swept down the hillside by an avalanche.

On the way up there were berries growing, some I recognised and some I didn’t. I ate the ones I did. I’m still here, so I guess I was right. They looked like bilberries, tasted like bilberries and stained my fingers like bilberries, they must be… huckleberries.

The path opened up to spectacular views over the local peaks in the Cascades, including Red Mountain and south to Rainier, looking unfathomably big as usual.

Again the GPS struggled to keep a lock in the dense trees and steep valleys, but when it did lock on, it provided proof that we were at possibly the highest altitude I’ve ever walked at. The route ends at a high point of about 1660m, some 5000ft or more. There were no clouds and it was really hot up there. There were still some patches of snow on the northern faces, however. We didn’t hang around too long after lunch at the turn-around point and tramped off through the alpine meadows back into the cool shade of the forest. It seemed a longer trudge down than up, perhaps because the only thing at the end was having to drive home, tired.

Six and a half hours, 18km; a good day out.

See all the pictures in the gallery.

CityPass Leftovers

This weekend I managed to use up the leftovers of someone’s CityPass tickets, resulting in trips to the Seattle Aquarium and the Museum of Flight, neither of which I would have gone to otherwise.

The Aquarium was pretty small and frankly not as good as the one in Birmingham. They did have sea-otters, however, but they were in a pretty small tank. It was worth the visit for the cuttlefish though. They scudded about, flipantly changing colour and I wasn’t sure who was the observer and who the observed. I made a rule to never trust a cephalopod.

The Museum of Flight, down at the Boeing airfield was a real surprise to me; I enjoyed it. I generally don’t like aeroplanes. The best part was the WWI and WWII section which had some human stories and wasn’t all completely heroistic.

Some of the old bi-planes were great too. I particularly liked this one which looked less like a plane, and more like an opulant flying wardrobe. I was also amused by this seat from a 1923 DH-4, made from wicker and leather. I think I sat on something similarly uncomfortable, but with less style on my flight over here.

Amongst other gems in the main hanger were the impressively large blackbird and a cruise missle, “capbable of delivering a nuclear payload.” It bore a wonderful danger sticker:”Ordnance activated devices within.”

As a little unexpeced bonus, the Blue Angels were there, taking off to do their stuff for the unfathomable Seattle Seafair festival. The police turned up on their Harleys, and as if to upstage the Blue Angles, gave an impressive display of formation parking.

Lena Lake Trail

Following a “high-energy” breakfast in the fabulous Five Point Café, I and a couple of colleagues managed a day hike over in the Olympic Mountains. This trip was to be a recce., to find out how long it’d take to get to the Olympics, and to see find out what the trails are like.

It was a good journey just getting there; the ferry from Fountleroy to Southworth was a pleasing start to the trip, with fantastic, peaceful views across the blue waters of the Puget Sound. Once over the other side, we hit the trail-head after about 90 minutes driving along the coast, past numerous firework shops, followed by a short journey up Hamma Hamma Valley.

The track wound up from the valley floor through mainly pine trees with some interesting flora on the way. The number of switchbacks seemed a little excessive a times but it did mean it was never too much of a slog uphill.

The GPS was struggling in the steep valleys and dense tree cover, but I managed to get a lock for most of the route. It turned out to pretty pointless taking it. There is only one track, and it’s pretty much a motorway up to the first lake. Still, carrying that, my digital camera, SLR and two lenses, fleece, waterproof, food, spare batteries and two litres of water was good exercise.

I was thinking originally of uploading the GPS track for others to use as navigation, but frankly you’d be insane to use such wildly inaccurate data.

The lake itself was nestled in a very secluded spot, with the camping sites hidden up amongst the pine trees. It really made me wish I’d brought the tent - and swimming kit.

You’ll find plenty more photos in the gallery

RSS Reader Plugin for WordPress

I wrote a little plugin using lastRSS to fetch a RSS feed and output the result as a list. You can see it running here under the “Bookmarks” section, where it’s using my del.icio.us bookmark feed as its input.

I wrote it because the other del.icio.us plugins I found were using the PHP curl module, which isn’t installed on my server. After I’d finished coding, I discovered the Wordpress RSS Link List Plugin, which basically does the same thing but is more mature and has a couple more nice features like the ability to add a RSS feed in a WordPress article.

It was a good exercise in writing a plugin though, albeit a very simple one. I still think the name of mine was better though: RSSGrabber.

Firefox Extensions

One of the best things about Firefox is that it installs pretty much as a minimal browser. It is then up to individuals to install the extra features they want. There are a couple which I’ve found invaluable:

• Adblock - which allows you to block adverts, pop-ups and other annoying elements and scripts on any page. Very easy to use and makes a huge positive difference to browsing.

• SessionSaver - so that you can quit Firefox and have all your open tabs reload on the next start-up. It also allows you to re-open recently closed tabs, which is handy if you close one by mistake.

I’ve been using others too:

• Tabbrowser preferences - which adds more options to do with the browser tabs, unsurprisingly

• Greasemonkey - which I’ve not had a lot of time to investigate, but has provided a couple of useful scripts to change the way some of my more frequently visited sites behave.

• delicious - very handy plugin to add and view links to your del.icio.us account. Has both right-click and sidebar tools.

Google Maps - High Resolution images worldwide

Despite the fact Google maps are only available for the US and UK, the satellite images now cover a large proportion of the globe. High resolution aerial photographs are also available for certain major cities and other random areas. The UK, for example, has central London coverage but only the south-east of Birmingham.

More spectacularly Beijing is covered, here is Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. Not having the maps (or even place names beyond countries) makes finding places difficult. It’s easier to find the longitude and latitude of a place via a normal google search and then plug that straight into the Google Maps URL.

Kimya Dawson

Saw Kimya Dawson play last night at Chop Suey, a cosy venue over by the university. It was a great gig, and the varied warm-ups were pretty good too. The first bunch I saw were a little odd, but they had some good titles like “No More Animal Shit in Modern Art.”

The Pharmacy played a few pogo-inducing numbers before settling down to share the main set with Kimya. I was at the back, and a bit miffed to find Ms. Dawson seated below the shoulder level of the crowd. Thankfully she invited everyone to sit on the floor, which we all did. Everyone got great views and the whole set felt like some kind of infant school story-time… with swearing. It reminded me of a Kathryn Williams gig, but faster.

She closed the set with the rather marvellous “The Beer,” have a listen.

Gallery RSS Feed

I have been using the rather powerful Gallery for a while but only recently activated the RSS feeds on my gallery pages. The main reason was so that I can have any updates to the gallery appear on this front page sidebar. Again, this is done using my little RSS plugin.

Strange Cloud Formations

Got talking about strange cloud formations recently, having been sent this link, then remembered these spectacular images from a while back.

I’m not sure about the first link, but the second are definately mammatus formations. They’re formed by cold, saturated air dropping back down from a cloud. We’re not used to seeing clouds without flat bottoms, and this, added with some lighting from the side at sunset, it combined to produce such spectacular effects.

A quick image search for mammatus brings in some more examples of varying extremes.

The Sound of Enceladus

Cassini is still busily collecting data around Saturn; lots of pictures and this audio snippet, an audible representation of electro-magnetic field measurements taken during a flyby of Enceladus.

There are plenty more examples on the University of Iowa “Space Audio” page. Of particular note is this “AKR” recording from the Earth’s magnetosphere, which sounds rather like the jungle at night.

Amateur Mapping in the Guardian

Interesting to see how the press is picking up the idea of free maps. This article in the Guardian is the latest I’ve seen, following the New Scientist mention a few weeks back. Its good to see the issues of mapping copyrights being aired in the national press like this.

US Air Traffic

Found this fascinating video of US air traffic over a day. I can’t imagine how much fuel that lot burnt up over the course of the animation.

Found via LawGeek.

Meloe Proscarabaeus

Found this unusual beetle:

Bigger…

A little research revealed that it is an oil beetle, genus Meloe. I’m not too sure on the species, but the Proscarabaeus is most common in the UK and blue-black, so I’ll plump for that one. Though, according to my invaluable book, it’s a big one.

Bigger…

More Conjoined Grapes

A quick search on Google revealed that my conjoined grapes are by no means unique.

There’s two more examples here along with some other foodal anomalies.

Space Research and Pretty Pictures

I know there’s more to space research than pretty pictures, but there do seem to be a lot of them about at the minute. ESA’s Mars Express has snapped this little lot of the northern pole’s ice cap (and a other interesting features.)

Then there’s Cassini, which is still out there, producing some stunning pictures. There’s the Hubble telescope too, which looks like it might last a bit longer still, after a little jiggery-pokery.

Precision and Accuracy

I was pleasantly surprised at the accuracy of the tracks I was getting out of my GPS unit until the other day.

Then I noticed something odd; the tracks in places follow a very smooth curve, apparently matching the road I was following. At certain points there are glitches, where the track jumps a few metres then carries on in a smooth curve.

The Above image shows the same section of path walked on two separate occasions. Note how the track for the higher resolution data (yellow) deviates from the former track. Also note the sudden re-alignment and the consequent parallel nature of the paths. (Scale of 1m/pixel)

This highlights to me, the difference between precision and accuracy. The precision of GPS units looks impressive, but precision is not the same as accuracy.

Precision is how well defined a value is, for example 3.141593, is precisely defined to the 6th decimal point. This does not mean, however that the value is correct - i.e. it is not necessarily accurate.

Accuracy is a measure of how correct a value is, for example 3.14 ± 0.02. This tells us that there’s no point in quoting a precision of six decimal places (as above) because the remaining four decimal places will almost certainly be wrong.

Relating this back to my GPS example we can see that the unit precisely tracked a curve, but not necessarily the correct curve. The curve looks correct because it precisely follows a neat curve, but it is not accurate because it is the wrong curve.

I’m assuming that the jump occurs when the unit locks to a new satellite, or a building reflects the signal.

Zissou

Go and see Life Aquatic. It’s brilliant and I’m not the only one who thinks so.

I recently bought a Garmin Geko 201 GPS unit, which is rather neat. It came with no software, despite the fact that it boasts one of the better trackpoint memory capacities (for the budget models anyway) of 10,000 points. Thankfully there’s a lot of free stuff out there.

Rather thoughtfully Garmin provide the pin-outs for their propritary data connector, so I could rig up a serial cable from an old null modem cable and a matchstick. I downloaded my data to the PC in the GPX format using the handy GPSBabel tool.

Data transfer has not been a problem; there are more than enough tools to do that. The problem has been finding a decent tool to plot the data. For 2D, the best so far is Viking. It uses GTK, so works on the common platforms. The main problem is that it doesn’t accept GPX files, but only files in the GPSPoint format. There is a tool to grab data from Garmin units in this format, GPSPoint, but I had to compile the Windows binary as I couldn’t find a working link to any pre-compiled versions. Get my GPSPoint Windows binary here if you need it.

As far as I can tell, there is no 3D visualisation in Viking, so I’m still searching for a good realtime 3D GPS visualisation tool. It’s good, none-the-less, to be able to see exactly where I’ve been over the past few days. Hopefully I’ll be contributing my data to openstreetmap.org soon, after I’ve done a few more miles.

Conjoined Grapes

I found a pair of conjoined grapes!

Amateur Huygens Images

As I mentioned below, I was pleased that the raw image data from the Huygens probe was released so quickley. This has lead to some rather impressive images from amateurs to be produced. This sort of thing shows how useful, and good, the web can be.

Huygens Success

Well, I’m glad to see that Huygens was so successful. It’s also pleasing to see that all the raw image data has been published so soon. There’s a press conference on Friday too.

Huygens Splodge-down

Huygens will enter the atmosphere of Titan tomorrow. I’m hoping this won’t be as disappointing as the Beagle “landing.” Data should be first recieved back on Earth at 16.14 CET.

New Zealand Satellite Image

Found this rather good image of New Zealand. It was imaged from the Space Shuttle back in 2000 using radar topography. It really shows off the active geology of the country, something which impressed me when I was there.

The film’s pretty good too, as is the same sort of image for Australia.