Wyoming vacation follow along

Richele and I head up to Wyoming this Friday for a little over a week of backpacking, kayaking, and playing in the Yellowstone/Teton National Park region. If you are interested in where we are, I will be checking in with my Spot satellite messenger (see previous post) on a daily basis, so you can see whether we are car camping or hiking near grizzlies, bison, and geysers in the Yellowstone backcountry. Just check out my Spot map page to see our recent locations.

(Note: The Spot site was down as I wrote this, but I hope it will be active by the time the trip begins...)

Brown's Canyon at 3550 cfs!

This past Saturday which happened to coincide with the Summer Solstice and a nearly full moon, I headed down to the Arkansas River with Matt Ewald, Lou, Andy W. , and Andy S. to celebrate the last weeks of Matt's single days. We decided to take my raft down Brown's Canyon as a paddle rig, never mind the fact that I had never really paddle guided before or that the water was raging at a season high 3550 cfs!

By noon, we had inflated the raft, run the shuttle, I had given my safety speech, and we were on the water. We began to feel pretty good about our paddling after the first several miles of easy water, but then we entered the Canyon Doors rapid and we found out our real abilities! I steered us right at a big, crashing wave that I thought would be fun, but that instead resulted in me getting catapulted out the back of the raft as it snapped back after we crested the wave! When my head surfaced out of the water, I found my paddle and spotted the raft starting to drift away from me and the rest of the crew didn't even know that I had been ejected from the boat! I guess that I shouted a bunch of commands to get the boat closer to me and then I pulled myself back into the relative safety of the raft. Within a few seconds, our raft that had been unguided for half a minute found itself heading sideways right into a hole, and the awkward angle shot both Andy's and myself out of the raft! Uh oh, this isn't going well. Our first real rapid and we were already having major problems. The raft was left nearly uncontrollable with Matt and Lou on the same side, and the three of us castaways careening through waves and into holes. Somehow, Matt was able to pull Andy W. back into the raft, I pulled myself in again, and we headed after Andy S. to pick him up. He has definitely had better days than his swim through these rapids! Eventually, another raft offered help and to pick him up into their boat, but just as he reached for the paddle that was extended to him, the paddle was pulled away- psych! It turned out that we were as close to Andy at that point as the other raft, so we just picked him up instead, but that must have really sucked to have been that close to rescue and then get dissed like that! I was able to pull Andy in, get the boat under control, and land at the underwater beach at the top of Zoom Flume.

Wow, we were all really quite shaken up from the experience, but we all sort of kept it to ourselves which resulted in a very uncomfortable silence as we then scouted Zoom Flume and ate our sandwiches. Watching rafts go through Zoom Flume made us question being on the river that sunny afternoon, but then I bumped into John Leventhal and got enough encouragement to rally the troops for a run through the rapid. It turned out that our fears of Zoom Flume were much worse than reality. We set ourselves up on a perfect line and crashed down through the center of the rapids with all of us remaining in the boat! We stopped at the next eddy, drank a beer, and celebrated our successful run through the intimidating rapid. The rest of the rapids continued similarly in a successful fashion, although our heart rates and attention levels stayed high for fear of what would happen otherwise.

When we reached the Hecla's Junction take-out, it seemed wise to stop and gather some information about Seidel's Suckhole, which was just down river and the most formidable rapid of Brown's Canyon. Everyone said that you run it left at this water level and that it is quite forgiving. Forgiving? That's the kind of expression that is used when you go to meet your maker, but after my encounter with this rapid last year, I might have to agree that it was the correct expression. We forged on, determined to finish the run, and after two stops on river right to scout the rapid, we finally approached the beast. We ran it river left, just like everyone had indicated, and we crashed directly through the huge wave that forms in place of the hole at this high water level. Just like that, our collective stress level dropped, but around the corner we faced one last challenging rapid that nearly bent the raft in half and that got our hearts pounding once again. At around 6 pm, we floated under Stone Bridge leaning back into the raft to avoid decapitation (The bridge has to be portaged at 4000 cfs, and there was barely enough room to clear under it at this level.) and finally stepped onto dry land at the take-out! We celebrated once again with beers, packed up, and proceeded back to Buena Vista and the national forest for more beers over a big bonfire.

FIBArk 2008

Another weekend and another great time boating on the Arkansas River in Colorado. This time, Richele and I headed down to FIBArk (First in Boating on the Arkansas River), which is a very cool festival that is centered around whitewater kayaking and rafting. It is one of the biggest festivals of its type and it attracts the best of the best to compete in various disciplines, including slalom, freestyle, downriver, Class V boater-cross, and the Hooligan race.

Saturday
The weekend really couldn't have gone much better and it all started with a lunch worth of free samples at the Safeway Grand Reopening and then me winning an iPod Shuffle in the checkout line! Shortly after that, we met our kayaking hero Eric Jackson! Not only did he insist that we take out two of his Hero line of kayaks (hmmm, maybe he was the one playing up the whole hero thing...), but he also sang You Got Legs to Richele! Let's just say that I've been wanting to meet EJ for the past several years, so this was a real treat for me. So then we geared up in our kayak attire, grabbed the two big, purple kayaks (Barney the dinosaurs) and plopped into the middle of the kayak course and competition right after Assad went by us! Neither of us had kayaked this stretch from Salida to Rincon and all we really knew of it was that there was a Class III rapid called Big Bear. A short while later after getting somewhat used to our borrowed purple dinosaurs, we encountered a turbulent maelstrom (well it felt that way!) of waves crashing from every direction! We both made it through without flipping, but we were both very surprised by the power of high water on the river. After a quick eddy break, we entered the main stretch of Big Bear rapid and I turned to my left to see Richele heading almost into the big hole that gives the rapid its name! The look on her face as she skirted the giant beast could only be described as awe, although a few beers would bring out many other names during the rest of the evening! At the end of the run, our luck continued as we immediately found a ride for us and our boats back to Salida with some nice folks in a big, ole Suburban. Once back in Salida, we got to watch the Hooligan Race, drink some beer, wander around the festival, listen the Hell's Belles, and watch part of the Pro Rodeo that EJ was competing in. Maybe it was winning the slalom competition or the boater cross or the fact that he was competing against athletes half his age that led EJ to finish second in the rodeo. But after it was all finished, he couldn't even stop playing. He got back into the hole under the spot lights and proceeded to out-do his previous moves all without a paddle, AND I was lucky enough to capture it on my little digital camera and get it posted on Youtube! So check out EJ with and without paddle tearing it up under the lights at FIBArk 2008!

Hand Surfing Video


Loop, Cartwheels, & More


Sunday
The second day in the Arkansas River Valley turned out to be every bit as good as our first. This was one of those weekends that felt like it lasted about a month, but in the good way! After meeting up with Colleen and Greg mid-morning, we dropped a car at the Hecla Junction take-out, inflated and rigged the raft, and were on the water mid-morning to raft Brown's Canyon. The day couldn't have been any nicer- not a cloud in sight, low 80's, no wind, and fast moving water on the river. The first several miles went by uneventfully and I don't think we really appreciated how high the river actually was. As we approached Zoom Flume (the main rapid of the run), I opted for scouting via proxy, which amounted to yelling over to some kayakers to ask if the run looked okay. They said to run it center, then right, which is my usual line, so no biggie. Then we got to the top of the rapid and got to see what it looks like at 2800 cfs! WOW! This aint your daddie's Zoom Flume, that's for sure! We set up perfectly in the center and rode the giant green tongue like it was a roller coaster and crashed through waves that made the 14 foot raft feel tiny. The girls paddled like pros up front and Greg had the time of his life hooting and hollering in the back! We made it around the huge hole at the bottom and were drinking Tecate a bit later to celebrate our safe passage. I grabbed these photos off the web of us near the crux of the rapid, and since whitewater photos never look as impressive as the first person experience, you can only imagine what it was like to be crashing through those waves! I can't wait to paddle raft it again this coming Saturday with Matt and friends for his bachelor party. The rest of the run went equally well, with huge waves that we blasted through while hooting and hollering! When we reached the take out, we all felt a bit of disappointment that such a great ride was over. In my mind, that's the perfect way to end a day on the water and a great weekend.

Rocky Mountain 1/2 Marathon

On June 8, I ran further than I ever had before in the Rocky Mountain Half Marathon! I had been training for this race all spring with FastForward Sports in Boulder and was ready for my training (see previous post) to be over, especially after running the Bolder Boulder in a personal best time of 53 minutes. Although Richele and Arrin Katz both ran the race, we each ran at our own pace, so I had to figure things out on my own. My only goal was to finish the race and run further than I ever had previously. I expected to walk through the water stations, but the night before the race I had a dream that I ran the whole thing without stopping! Normally, when I have dreams before something that I'm nervous about, it's about showing up late or some other negative, albeit untrue premonition. I was pleased to wake up with this positive thought in my subconscience, but I didn't expect any miracles either. The race started out with cool, light rain for the first several miles despite the forecast of 80 deg and sunny and I began running at a much swifter pace than my anticipated 12 minutes per mile that I had been training at on long runs. I stopped for a quick bathroom break after the first 5 miles, but otherwise continued on at a surprisingly fast 10 minute per mile pace. And when I came to the steep hill near Invesco Field, I felt all my training pay off as I maintained my tight running form up the hill at the same pace while those around me slowed to a walk. I finished the hill short of breath but invigorated and began to initially think that my dream may have been more of a premonition than wishful thinking.

Once I was half way around Sloan's Lake, I decided that premonition or not, my dream was at least going to be a self-fulfilling prophesy, so I buckled down and decided that I wouldn't make any stops for the remainder of the race. And shortly after that decision, I realized that I had been running slightly faster than a 10 minute per mile pace for over 8 miles, so I might as well try to finish with that pace! The remainder of the race was challenging, but I just focused on my running form and my 2 new goals. I boogied down the hill at Invesco Field and a mile and half later, I finished running my first half marathon in 2 hours and 9 minutes at an average pace of 9 minutes and 46 seconds per mile! (My official time was 2:12, but I don't think it's fair to count a bathroom break as part of my race time!) The full race record according to my Forerunner 305 is available on my Motionbased site.

I have to say that I'm relieved to be finished training, but I also want to keep running on a regular basis and maybe do another one of these races in the future!

Junction Link Magic

One of the great capabilities that I have used in Unix that does not exist for the average user in Microsoft Windows is the ability to create symbolic links between files or folders. Basically, these links can be thought of as shortcuts from one file or folder to another. For example, I might have a folder called C:\PatsPics that is really just a shortcut to C:\Documents and Settings\Pat\My Documents\My Pictures. It turns out that this is incredibly useful whenever you need to change the location of data that is used by another application. If I have an application that is looking for photos in C:\PatsPics and I decide to move my photos from My Pictures to an external disk, all I need to do is re-map the symbolic link and the application will continue to operate normally. Of course, if only one application is referencing the data, it isn't such a big deal, but when it's used by multiple applications, this really makes updating the computer system much easier.

But like I said, Windows does not provide an easy method for creating these links. That's where a nifty utility called Junction Link Magic comes in. Within a few minutes, you can install it and have created your first links between folders! Have fun!

May camping and kayaking

After a long, cold winter and over two months working on my newly acquired 1985 VW Vanagon Westfalia camper van, I finally got out camping in it over the past 3 weekends with Richele and the dogs. First, we attempted a trip to Moab over the weekend of 5/16-18, but we wound up just hanging around the Colorado River between No Name, CO and Glenwood Springs, CO. Although the van was really slow over the high mountain passes on I-70, the real reason we wound up staying was that it was so much easier to go for a long, 10 mile run along the path on the Colorado River on Saturday and then kayak the same stretch (Grizzly Creek to Two Rivers Park) on Sunday. With such beautiful weather and surroundings, we really didn't feel the need to move on to Moab and as a bonus we got to soak in nice, backcountry hot springs near Glenwood. The first weekend of camping in the van showed that it was definitely well suited to the 2 of us plus our 3 dogs and 2 kayaks and associated gear! Although our steath camping in the No Name rest stop on Friday night was pretty neat, I've gotta say there are other places I would rather be than smack between I-70, freight trains, and idling 18 wheelers!

The next weekend (5/23-25) we headed off to camp and play for Memorial Weekend with friends near Buena Vista, CO. Richele and I kayaked the cold water of the Arkansas River along the stretch known as the Milk Run on Saturday and then headed up to Buena Vista to check out some of the top kayakers in the world compete in the 1st Annual Buena Vista Pro Rodeo (that's kayak rodeo). We got to seek Eric Jackson (my hero), but unfortunately he wasn't competing. However, his 14 year old son, Dane, did finish second and looked absolutely spectular on the water. Inspired by the pros, I decided to get in the water and try my hand at the new play waves in BV which were a lot of fun. Afterwards, we camped with friends on National Forest land near Brown's Creek trailhead and then went for a hike from the trailhead on Sunday up to the Colorado Trail. I really wanted to take it easy on Sunday and head back early, because early Monday morning I ran in the Bolder Boulder for my 4th time. I'm happy to say that after training with FastForward Sports all spring that I ran a personal best time of 53 minutes!

And now that brings us to last weekend, 5/31-6/1. Once again, we loaded up the van with our kayaks and the dogs, but we headed North this time to the Poudre River west of Fort Collins, CO to kayak with Colorado Whitewater Association for their annual Poudre River weekend (which just happened to be where Richele and I met last year!). We kayaked the Filter Run stretch with a friendly beginner group on Saturday, hung out in the Mountain Park group campground with our kayaking friends that night, and the kayaked a beautiful Class II/III stretch on the upper Poudre called Sleeping Elephant.

It's been a busy 3 weeks of camping, kayaking, and figuring out the Westfalia, and there will be plenty more of all them this summer! Until my next report, check out a few photos and a map from all these recent adventures...


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IPTC Metadata

Interesting topic, huh? It turns out that metadata is one of things that is quietly in the background making things more efficient and productive without you ever knowing it. Every time you take a digital photograph, information is stored in an EXIF header that includes the camera settings (shutter speed, exposure time, flash, etc.) and the time and date of the photo. This makes it very easy to find when photos were taken without you needing to manually record the date, time, and camera settings the way photographers used to do SLR film cameras. This information is considered metadata because it is a small snippet of the file that is separate from the digital representation of the photo that is the bulk of the file.

Now, don't you wish that there was other information associated with each photograph, like location, who is in the photo, the photographers name, and a description? Lots of different software applications are attempting to deal with this by allowing you to "tag" photos or by including a description, and this definitely is a step in the right direction that will allow you to search for photos more easily in the future. But what if you stop using Windows Vista, .Mac, or Flicker? What happens to those descriptions and tags? They disappear! That's because they aren't part of the photo and they aren't based on an industry accepted standard. This is where IPTC headers come in. IPTC stands for the International Press and Telecommunications Council. This group recognized that photos needed metadata attached to them with descriptions, photographer, etc. so that they could be easily passed from one news organization to another. The reason this matters to us is that it provides a standard format for this metadata that will remain largely accepted throughout the world for the forseeable future.

Now the question becomes, how can IPTC be used to actually make my digital photography experience better? First off, you need to be able to add IPTC headers to existing photographs. I'm sure there are dozens of ways to do this, but I will just mention a few here. Originally, I used a free application called PixVue to edit and view IPTC data for photographs from within MS Window Explorer, but it has come and gone and come again, so I can't guarantee its availability. IrfanView is a popular, free image editing software that can also be used to view and edit IPTC data, but I found the process to be somewhat cumbersome. Most recently, I found that Microsoft has released a tool called Pro Photo Tools (previously called Photo Info) that is very similar in functionality to PixVue for editing and viewing metadata for groups of photos with the additional added benefits of being able to correct camera date/timestamps and geotag photos. I think this type of tool should be included in the Windows and Mac operating systems since it is such a basic task. I'm not going to go into the details of editing this data, but basically, you just need to select a group of photos and right-click on them to be presented with a dialogue box that lets you edit their values. The toughest part of this editing process is remembering to actually do it! However, once that information has been entered once, there will be no need to re-enter it again in the future.

Once you have populated your IPTC header data, you can then take advantage of its presence. There are 3 ways that I currently used this information and I'm sure it will only expand in the future. The first way the data is useful is when searching for photographs. If you use a search tool on your local machine, you can now search for terms inside the photos instead of just browsing through your own personal heiarchy to find photos. For example, it would be much easier to do a search for "Pat" within all the photos in My Pictures than it would be to browse through thumbnails of all those photos to find pictures of me in them. Second, I use JAlbum to create online photo albums of my photographs and once the IPTC is populated, the album software is able to simply extract the description and location information and post in on the web pages without me doing a thing! Similarly, when I use RoboGeo this data is also used to create descriptions of photos within Google Earth.

That's all for now!

Update, 3/6/2011:

After a recent round of computer updates, I found myself needing to edit some photo metadata. Initially, I used the PixVue installation that was referenced above, but Windows Explorer (the file browser, not the web browser) kept crashing under Windows 7. So I moved on to using MS Pro Photo Tools, but it interspersed the metadata somewhat haphazardly between the IPTC and EXIF headers. Finally, I discovered that Irfanview can be used in batch mode to edit IPTC data and I’m happy with this new method.