Months of anticipation were finally satiated by our arrival in Antarctica last night! Following numerous flight delays to our previously scheduled December 28th departure due to foggy conditions in McMurdo, we were finally manifested on an LC130 instead of the C17 and the wheels left the tarmac at 1:23pm bound for the Great White South. The propeller-driven LC130 is significantly smaller than the jet powered C17 and is fitted with skis in order to simplify landing conditions on the Ross Ice Shelf near McMurdo, but with a resultant increase in noise and a longer duration flight. None of that mattered to me though; I was on an adventure and completely relished every aspect of the journey.
The two dozen passengers sat in jump seats along the inside walls of the plane’s fuselage which in combination with our extreme weather clothing (ECW) heightened the sense that we were embarking on a mission of utmost importance. We floated through the skies in the giant leviathan with roaring engines too loud for even a single conversation. The surreal experience eventually gave way to the realization that we were over the continent and closing in on our destination. Shoulders were pressed side by side as we busily fired off photographs of the fractaled ice below through the tiny port hole windows, and we even occasionally had the privilege of joining the pilots in the cockpit for a few minutes of 180 degree panoramic scenery. After 7 hours of flight, we were back in our jump seats and without a view of the approaching ground. The sound of flaps and landing gear deploying was accompanied by corresponding changes to airspeed and aircraft orientation, but it was always nervous not being able to see the ground throughout the descent. Finally, the plane touched down and the graceful landing was subtly punctuated by the sound of skis chattering on the snow. We had made it safely to Antarctica!
Minutes later, we had all disembarked and found ourselves standing with our very own feet on the Ross Ice Shelf just off the main continent and Ross Island. We slowly turned in circles trying to absorb the surroundings, but there was simply not enough time, so instead we boarded vehicles that would carry us 50 minutes across the ice to McMurdo. The Delta vehicle was an airport shuttle bred with a monster truck and was typical of the vehicle abnormalities that we were about to see throughout McMurdo. As we were cruising slowly down the flagged ice road, our driver suddenly stopped to give us a chance to meet and greet our welcoming party. Two Adelie penguins trotted along the ice in an uncharacteristic location displaying their adorable waddle/run antics. Without a doubt, we had arrived in Antarctica.
This holiday season, I feel great sympathy for Santa Claus and the extreme journey he takes around the globe each year as he delivers presents to all the children of the world. My own journey may not have been quite as arduous as Saint Nick’s, but traveling half way around the world for over 24 hours straight at Christmas time was still quite ambitious and worth every minute. Instead of finding neatly wrapped presents under a tree in my living room, my gift was a few days on the warm sand of New Zealand under the indigenous Kiwi Christmas trees!
This brief pit stop on the North Island was a great way for Lars, Sam, and I to take some personal time and break up the long monotony of air travel on our way to Antarctica. We arrived in Auckland midday on December 24th after losing a day at the International Date Line and proceeded directly to Waihi Beach at the north end of the Bay of Plenty. This sleepy beach town was in the midst of experiencing exceptionally nice weather which made the stunning coastline appear all the more breathtaking. The laid back attitude of the beach town was easy to adapt to during our first day, and we continued to enjoy this easygoing life on Christmas Day during a gorgeous hike up the coast to another cove and a tropical waterfall. Kiwi families were out and about on the trails and beaches after celebrating Christmas at home in the morning which was an interesting contrast to our usual expectations of a Christmas afternoon spent in the snowy North. Be sure to check out the photos below, or click here to open the photo album in a new window.
Colonial British countries, including New Zealand, have instituted a holiday immediately following Christmas called Boxing Day. Apparently this day’s name is derived from boxing up donations to send to charity after experience great wealth the day prior, but I think it is more likely just a great reason to keep the holiday season momentum going. Our last full day of vacation was spent celebrating Boxing Day with throngs of tourists and locals alike at a curious natural feature up the coast on the Coromandel Peninsula called Hot Water Beach. The ocean’s edge in this location just happens to coincide with a geothermal site that heats subsurface water and drives it up to the surface much like the thermal pools in Yellowstone National Park. However, the exact locations of the hot springs are limited to a few hundred square meters and are only accessible within 2 hours of low tide, so when tourists descend on Hot Water Beach, they do so in throngs. And when you add the fact that it was Boxing Day when we visited this attraction, you can only imagine the mad scene that ensued. In fact, the experience was both simultaneously hectic and ordered in the way of a beehive. After I caught a few waves on a rented surfboard, I perched my GoPro on a precipitous cliff high above the scene and captured this panoramic time lapse that does a nice job of conveying the natural and cultural oddity of Hot Water Beach.
We knew that our days on the beach were limited, and this morning we parted with the Bay of Plenty for a quick, 1-hour flight to Christchurch on the South Island which is our launching point to Antarctica. Upon arrival at the Christchurch airport, we were greeted by a representative from the United States Antarctic Program (USAP) who briefed us on our schedule for the next two days and warned us that aftershocks are persisting from last week’s earthquake. The news was not meant to be frightening, but it was a somber reminder of the natural disasters that have struck this city twice in the past year. Although we had heard of the damages the city had sustained, we boarded a bus to view them first-hand. Initially, we concluded that perhaps the damage was not as bad as reported, but upon further exploration, we came across a city that looked war-ravaged with closed streets and fatally compromised structures. The downtown was barely passable as a place worth visiting at all, but farther away, the smaller buildings showed less damage. Unfortunately, the city’s namesake church was irreparably destroyed in last year’s earthquake when its high steeple toppled to the ground, and now construction towers scrape the sky in its absence. On a more positive note, the Canterbury Museum survived these recent natural onslaughts, so we are planning on a quick visit to it and the adjacent, lush botanical gardens tomorrow morning prior to our departure to the cold, white South.
In 24 hours, I will be stepping foot on the most remote, the highest, driest, windiest, oddest, and of course, the coldest continent on the planet- Antarctica! Stay tuned!
Today marks the 2011 Winter Solstice which means the days are getting longer in the U.S., but in my case, the days are about to get much longer. Rather than a paltry 10 hours of daylight per day, starting today I am embarking on a journey that will be providing continuous, 24 hour-per-day sunlight! If your physical geography lessons are still fresh in your mind, then it won’t be too difficult to solve the puzzle of how I am about to affect this change. That’s right, I’m going to Antarctica!
It is going to be a topsy-turvy trip akin to Alice’s fall down the rabbit hole during which my 24+ hour travel will result in a complete loss of a calendar day (only 364 days in 2011 for me) and an almost immediate transition from winter to the Austral summer where I will be hanging by my feet upside down on that quirky side of the planet. Apparently, our old friend Coriolis will make the toilets flush backwards and the sun will traverse the sky counter-clockwise. It truly will feel like a upside down, mixed-up Wonderland.
This incredible opportunity presented itself this summer when my friend and colleague at LASP, Lars Kalnajs, asked if I might be interested in joining him and another friend and colleague, Sam Dorsi, on a campaign to install and test ground ozone monitoring stations in remote locations on Antarctica. First off, if these names ring a bell, it’s because these two guys are the same characters with whom I launched 3 balloons to the edge of space in 2010! One of the most important lessons I learned from those adventures is the incredible importance of working well with others in challenging situations; and I knew that if I had an opportunity to work with them again in the future, I wouldn’t blink an eye. So when this proposal was put on the table, my answer required no deliberation: Of course I wanted to join this expedition to the far reaches of the Earth!
The details of this scientific enterprise will be addressed in future posts, but I’m sure you’re wondering where exactly we’ll be going, how long we will be going, etc. Our research campaign will be based out of McMurdo Station which is the largest such research station (~1000 people), which by extension also makes it the largest settlement in on the continent, since Antarctica is a continent of science only! The launching point for McMurdo is 6 hours north in Christchurch, New Zealand, but international flights only go to Auckland on the North Island of NZ which are 14 hours from LA which is 3 hours from Denver. As you can see, it is quite a journey just to get to Antarctica, but compared to the epic journeys of the early polar explorers, this trip is a breeze. The additional complications of the holiday season helped dictate a slightly early departure from Denver with the added benefit that we will get to explore a sliver of New Zealand over the Christmas weekend before getting down to business on the icy continent. After the quick holiday, we will hop our flight down to Christchurch where we will deal with the final logistics before boarding a C17 military transport on December 28th for the actual flight to the ice. Upon arrival at McMurdo, more logistics and training will ensue before we can finally begin our work in earnest. We will then spend 5 weeks preparing the ozone instrument stations and deploying one per week in remote locations in the vicinity of McMurdo. Then finally in mid-February after the scientific campaigns have been completed, we will fly back to Christchurch where I will vacation with the Kiwis for a few weeks. Finally, in mid-March I will return home to Colorado.
My departure from Denver is imminent, and I must admit that the build up to the trip is like nothing I have ever experienced. I have pored over books and movies of the great white South, and have pictured myself a thousand times on the exotic continent of Antarctica. In my mind, this is the trip of a lifetime and is like going to the Moon or Mars to me. And like the pioneering polar explorers, the Apollo astronauts, and the Mars rovers, I aim to document my experience to my full capacity. My gear packing is short on clothes, but long on electronic gadgets. I have no fewer than 6 GPS devices, 5 cameras, 2 panoramic time lapse rigs, and a fully autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with onboard video that I will be exploiting to the fullest to capture my experience of Antarctica. This adventure will certainly be the essence of my website title as I share my stories and explore technological means of sharing those stories.
Although I am skeptical of its performance in Antarctica, I will be checking in periodically using my SPOT Messenger which will update the map below. So sit back, sign up to follow this blog (top right of the webpage), and enjoy our expedition from your favorite easy chair!
For the second Saturday in a row, I had some fun mounting my new GoPro Hero2 onto something unique in order to capture a cool vantage point. This time, I attached the camera to my stock Bixler remote control (RC) airplane and launched it into the wild blue yonder! If it seems like I’ve done this before, it’s because I flew Gumby on my old EasyStar plane just before Christmas 3 years ago. And if you remember that video, you also remember that the quality was far from perfect due to the live streaming downlink I used at the time. Well now that I have a high-definition GoPro, there’s no excuse for grainy video anymore, but as I found out, the quality still wasn’t quite perfect. I shot all of these clips in the 1080 30fps mode with full-width 170 degree field of view and you can certainly see the significant fisheye distortion along the horizon lines, so the next time I fly, I’ll try the slightly narrower 127 degree field of view which should significantly decrease the distortion. Another minor gripe is that the vibration of the electric motor resulted in a slight “jello-effect” if you look closely, but I’m hoping that the anti-vibration plug accessory will cut down on that on future flights. On the plus side, the plane flew extremely smoothly and there was no need to stabilize the video digitally in my video editing software. Overall, I’m thrilled with the footage from my first 4 flights and can’t wait to fly again!
And if you’re interested in how I mounted the camera, it really couldn’t have been easier. I reused the display mount from the packaging and simply trimmed it to fit within the cockpit area. In order to attach it, I wrapped two of the 2-sided velcro straps around the camera plate and the fuselage and voila, instant GoPro mount for my RC plane!
I finally bought a GoPro helmet camera and have been dying to try it out. Unfortunately, it’s been a little too chilly to kayak and I’m not quite ready to mount it on my RC plane or quadcopter, but I’ve always wondered how River Dog sees the world. So this morning I had a little fun playing with the new camera and then figured out how to use my new PowerDirector video editing software. Check out the morning from River’s perspective:
Although this is my first GoPro helmet-cam, it isn’t my first helmet-cam, nor is it my first GoPro. Over a decade ago, I rigged up a helmet-cam by mounting a spy camera in a headlamp with wires and batteries that hung off my head and led down to a full size camcorder that was stashed in my backpack. At the time, it seemed pretty innovative compared to the previous standard of mounting an entire camcorder to your helmet! It also isn’t my first GoPro. Before they became the unanimous leader in point-of-view (POV) digital cameras, they sold inexpensive waterproof film cameras at whitewater rafting gift shops. It’s impressive to see that waterproof enclosure design has barely changed in all these years while the digital technology of today was unthinkable a decade ago. So far I’m really impressed with the Hero2 from GoPro, and I’m thrilled to add it to my camera quiver! You will be seeing lots more footage from in the coming months and years!
Autumn seems to be drawing to a close in Colorado, and I am happy to have completely wrapped up the reconstruction of my front porch. This was yet another of my many New Year’s Resolutions for 2011 that I’m proud to have finished. As you see in the photo album, I replaced the worn out decking with beautiful redwood and opted for the heartwood which is all red for a very clean look. I finished it with a teak colored stain that blends well with the brown building colors, and I fastened the boards from below which results in a smooth top surface and extra protection against rot, since water doesn’t pool in each of the screw holes on the decking. The railings were also rotted, so I replaced them with durable redwood which was painted brown to conform with the condominium colors. As always, the project required much more energy and time than I expected, but I love the finished product.
To continue with my recent theme of technology articles, it seems appropriate to touch on another interesting photographic method-- time lapses. You’ve seen them on TV more times than you can count, but I doubt you have ever created one. Depending on the hardware you have, it may be a simple or complex endeavor, but it can be quite fun and can potentially reveal something that would be difficult to observe otherwise.
One of my favorite time lapses is shown in the video below and reveals significant motion of an iceberg in Alsek Lake in Alaska over a the course of about 2 hours. This scene is particularly interesting to me, because as I sat on the shore of this incredible lake with my friends for several hours, we would occasionally note that the massive icebergs had moved significantly right before our eyes without any perceptible motion. So in the remaining day light hours, I captured this berg’s motion and confirmed that it was indeed moving quite a bit right in front of us.
We’ve all seen beautiful panoramic photos that capture sweeping landscapes and have probably experienced 3D tours on real estate websites that let you look in different directions around the rooms of the house. Although these technologies are widespread, they are not widely used by the layperson to share their own experiences of the world. Given my interest in exploring different ways to tell stories digitally, I thought it would be worthwhile to explore the realm of digital panorama creation.
The basic process of creating panoramas can be summarized in a few steps, each of which I will explore in more detail:
Capture the scene by taking multiple overlapping photographs
As part of my effort to explore the many ways that digital media can be used to share stories, I have invested considerable time and energy creating small videos that I have posted to my YouTube channel. These videos have ranged from my favorite clip of a humpback whale to Gumby flying my RC plane to time-lapses of space-borne scientific instruments to photo/video montages of my kayaking exploits. But no matter the subject, the fact remains that being able to quickly and repeatedly generate content is the best way to share the story behind the video. In order to accomplish this throughput, I have used Windows Live Movie Maker as my video editor for the past several years. It is an extremely simple, yet robust, free video editor for Microsoft Windows that is analogous and quite comparable to iMovie for Mac computers. But after a while, simply being able to generate content consistently was no longer enough. After spending all of that time creating videos, I realized that there were capabilities that simply did not exist in Movie Maker and so I set about to find a better solution.
We all knew that 2011 would be a year for the record books in the Colorado kayaking world, but none of use knew exactly how it would turn out. After an absolute whirlwind the past several months, I finally have a few moments to recap some of the most memorable trips from this exciting kayaking season! During the month of May, I spent almost every waking minute that I wasn’t working on my van installing the turbo charger and the solar panels, so I didn’t have much to show for kayaking, but on Sunday the 22nd, I had the opportunity to join some friends on the Upper North Fork of the Poudre River which is a beautiful wilderness run that cuts through the rolling grasslands north of Fort Collins and just south of Wyoming. We had plenty of adventure including extraction of a kayak that was pinned on a log above a class V waterfall. The day was beautiful and the photos actually do the scenery justice quite well, so be sure to check them out in this photo album.
Some projects take a little longer to complete than others, but what matters is that they are actually completed. Shortly after finishing the installation of my new floors early in the year, I decided to tear down my fence and build a new one. At the time, I thought it would take a weekend or two, but the fence posts were a nightmare to replace, then I installed the turbocharger and solar panels in my van, and finally set about kayaking 100 days! So it wasn’t that I was lazy, I just had other activities that were higher priority than building a new fence. All summer long, I kayaked every spare minute and my little yard remained in shambles with posts sticking high out of the ground. I finally returned to the fence project after a 5 month sabbatical and set about rebuilding it every day after work with my headlamp lighting my work well into the evening. The fence has been completed for 2 weeks now and I’m thrilled with the results. Take a look at the embedded photo album below to see the whole process from old to new, or check it out in a new window.
Challenges define who we are in life. Whether they are brought about from unforeseen external circumstances or are conjured in the imagination on a snowy night, challenges take us to places that test our character. And the way we respond to these tests ultimately shapes the people we become. In some circumstances, we succumb to the circumstances and come away feeling like we have lost part of ourselves. But when we make the deliberate choice to rise to the challenges, we grow mentally, emotionally, and physically. This growth is like the branches on a tree that year after year add to the shape and ultimately to the definition of who we are. The very fact that we have shaped our own growth and definition is deeply satisfying and ultimately provides meaning in life.
The month of April has passed 2011 by, and I’m glad to say that I made it out kayaking quite often despite the low flows. But don’t be fooled, according to the experts (see map at right) we are in for a banner year of river flows. I’ve even heard that the snowpack for the Poudre River hasn’t been this high since 1983! So with all that water soon to be on its way rushing down the mountains, it’s even more important to be comfortable in my boat and ready to go!
If you’ve been reading this blog, then of course you know that I started out the month with a great weekend down to the Arkansas River. That was followed by a very low water (60cfs) session in the Golden play park prior to the CW Spring Dinner that featured Ben Stookesbury. After that, another warm evening at Confluence in Denver let me continue to get used to my new Villain ‘S’.
Two days later, I was working my way down Waterton Canyon for the second time this year, but in my new Villain instead of my typical SuperStar playboat. We all had a really great day, and I managed to capture some nice photos with my new Panasonic TS3 waterproof camera, so I created a quick slideshow video and posted it on Youtube.
The following weekend, a crew of 25 people was destined for an overnight trip down Westwater Canyon, but as the weather turned sour and the flow increased to a little over 10,000cfs, the team dwindled all the way down to 9 hearty souls. As it turned out, the weather was never too bad for our day trip and the higher flow was still just good ole’ fun on the water. But for me, the thing that made the trip really memorable was that Robert and I took a two-person kayak, the Jackson Dynamic Duo, down the river despite the fact that we had never paddled one before. Both of us were confident before we set out, and after a few practice rolls, we crossed our fingers and headed into the rapids that turned out to be much more punishing for the person who got stuck sitting in the front- not me! After our quick jaunt through the canyon, we met up with the rest of our crew and a hotel (well, Super 8 actually) party ensued that was a throw back to all of our younger years. On Sunday, Scott, Bart, Robert, and I paddled from the No Name exit down to the South Canyon exit and even managed to get in some Duo surfing at the Glenwood Wave! Check out all the photos in this slideshow video .
Finally, the month concluded with Flatwater/Movingwater Weekend (FWMWW) which is the practical, outside portion of Colorado Whitewater’s Beginner Kayaking Class that Robert and I taught this year. We had a fantastic group of new boaters and not so fantastic weather for being on the water the first time, but they all did incredibly well and the weather even managed to do better than the forecast had predicted. By now, I think you know what to expect- that’s right, another slideshow video, so have fun watching!
It began with a sketch on a whiteboard just under a year ago, and today the device is functioning beautifully in my van. Granted, I only worked on this project for about 2 weeks last year before kayaking dragged me away from it and during the past 2 weeks, but it is still gratifying to finally have this project up and running after a year of contemplating it and finally resolving to get it done!
The Westfalia camper package in Volkswagen Vanagons is one of the coolest little toys you can imagine. It’s like having a house on wheels with a footprint no larger than an ordinary car. Or as I like to think of it, it’s like having all the subsystems from a satellite in the back of my vehicle, except for the fact that I can modify them electrically and mechanically without going through a multi-year design and approval process. When it comes right down to, I love to camp in the van, but the ability to modify it to suit my needs is the kind of play that really makes the van a hobby unto itself.
After I completed the engine conversion 2 years ago, I decided it was time for some proper refrigeration of beverages. You see, the original Dometic 3-way fridge was a neat little piece of equipment, but I spent substantial time tweaking and monitoring its performance only to realize that it just couldn’t cope with the heat of the summer. The mountains on my frosty Coors Lights just weren’t staying blue, and if there is one thing I can’t have, it’s a warm Coors light. After much research, I invested in an ARB Fridge/Freezer that is rated to maintain subfreezing temperatures in 90deg heat while consuming very little power. First off, let me say that the fridge is incredible, and it really does do everything they claim. But the fact of the matter is that power has to come from somewhere, and in my case, it came from an increasingly large and complex auxiliary battery system in the van. Then you combine this complex system with the notoriously unreliable Vanagon starter that masquerades its degrading performance as a battery problem, and you wind up with good ole’ Pat scratching out his remaining hair over the course of the past year trying to figure out what was happening in the van’s electrical system.
I believe that there are two ways to solve problems. The first and most conventional way is to simply attack the problem and try to get things done. It might be not be fun, but you end up arriving at the answer. I think of this as “work”. And work just isn’t that fun. The second, less traveled path, is to put a smile on your face and explore the problem for what it is. This approach not only gets you to the answer, but it takes you to many other cool, rewarding places along the way. I think of this as “play”, and this is the way I prefer to solve problems. So when I was faced with a difficult problem to solve in my van’s electrical system last year, I didn’t just take out a voltmeter and track down the offender. Nope, I decided that I would use it as an opportunity to explore the cool, new world of Arduino microcontrollers with the hope that I could design a system that would provide far more insight to my van’s power system than any normal person would ever think is possible.
It was April 23rd last year when I sketched out a block diagram of the van’s power system and started trying to implement the system in the Arduino with the help of my good friend’s Lars and Sam (who also helped me make my tethered balloon system a reality). In essence, the Arduino is a small microcontroller (super simple computer) that I am using to read the analog voltages from the 3 batteries. Since I wanted to be able to monitor the voltages in real-time, I added a Parallax 4x20 character LCD and a momentary contact switch to change the display views. Finally, in order to debug any problems with the electrical system, I wanted to understand what was happening to these various batteries over longer time periods. The simple option would have been to write down the 3 voltages on a regular basis and try to figure out what was happening, but in today’s age of technology, manual data logging just seems so outdated. So to accomplish the data logging, I added a microSD memory card to the Arduino with Sparkfun’s microSD shield. The coding of the Arduino was extremely simple apart from a bug in the LCD code I downloaded and an initially poor choice in the SD code that I used which was remedied with the newer code on the Sparkfun site.
Yup, it’s almost a year later but I have the battery monitor installed in my van now and it’s working! Rather than try to describe the system in detail here, I put together an in-depth video that walks through the whole system and shows off all the cool features. It’s not a short video, but if this is your kind of thing, you might actually enjoy it :-)
Finally, if you’re a geek who wants to take a look at what the battery voltages look like when the van is started and stopped, then this plot is for you.
Sure, I could have solved the problem the straightforward way, but then I never would have explored all these cool new worlds. By the way, I still have a smile on my face :-)
There is something special about the first boating trip of the year. For me, it seems to come earlier and earlier each year, and prior to this weekend, I had already been on the water 6 days including Confluenza on the South Platte, my adventures in California, and Waterton Canyon. Last year, I kicked off the season with Scott and Robert with a fantastic trip down to the Arkansas River Valley for the closing day at Monarch ski mountain followed by a day boating down the Royal Gorge. This year, Scott and I decided it was time to do it again, but Jennifer joined us in place of Robert and we decided to mix up the boating a little bit! It was also a great opportunity to test out my Panasonic TS3 waterproof camera that has Full HD video, although I decided to tone it down a bit with ‘just’ 720p video :-)
We skied at Monarch on Saturday in spring conditions and hopped in our kayaks mid-day to race down the mountain in the Boatercross event! Scott and I competed in a field of 40 boaters with heats of 4 people racing down a course that ended at a pool of water just before the finish line. The course wasn’t steep, but there was mayhem on the slope as we spun each other out in hopes of reaching the bottom first. After 2 rounds, Scott and I were eliminated and it was time for a beer and more skiing. Still, I’m happy to now say that I have kayaked down a ski slope! Check out a quick video clip of the second heat when Scott and I competed against each other.
After we wrapped up skiing, we headed off to the Salida play park for almost 2 more hours of kayaking. It was great to get out in my new Jackson Villain S for the first time, even though there was only 220 cfs. Apart from last year’s Pole Pedal Paddle event, I had never skied and kayaked in the same day, but Springtime in Colorado is really wonderful that way! We wrapped up the day with dinner at Benson’s and the always classy Salida East for car camping.
Sunday, we took our time in the morning to let the weather warm and enjoyed a lazy breakfast at the Boathouse. Around noon, we finally put on Parkdale at 340 cfs and played our way down the boney rapids for several hours. At the conclusion, a mild take-out party ensued in the warm afternoon where we discovered that the weather in the Front Range was not so favorable with snow and freezing temperatures! Eventually, we had to face reality, snowy roads, and the upcoming work week. But for the time being, we chilled out, sipped our beers, and enjoyed the first boating trip of the year…
Warm days are beginning to grace us along the Front Range of Colorado and with that comes my annual yearning to get back on the water in my whitewater kayak. Although I have kayaked and owned my van for many years, two years ago I made deliberate choices about both that have had significant positive impacts in my life. I decided that I would stop wavering on the sidelines of more serious kayaking and would finally apply myself to become an advanced boater. There were many things I did towards improving my kayaking throughout 2009, and I simultaneously chose to get my 1985 VW Vanagon Westfalia in proper working order so that I would have a kick-ass support vehicle for my adventures.
So in February of 2009, I embarked on my most ambitious mechanical project to date- a complete engine removal and swap for the old Vanagon. There was obviously the financial risk of plunking a few thousand dollars down into a 25 year old van, but even more so, there was the fear of the unknown. I likened the whole process to a human heart transplant. Surely without a heart, a person will cease to be. And without an engine, a vehicle will cease to be. It was certainly ambitious, but it wasn’t as if I were replacing a human heart with another human heart. It was more like I was replacing it with a bionic heart. My van was becoming like Steve Austin. Not only could I rebuild it, but I had new technology, so I could build it better than it was. Better… stronger… Faster…
Apart from prep’ing the 7300 mile, 2003 Zetec engine during a few evenings, it only took two weekends and the evenings in between to rip out the old heart and put in a new one. Granted, I had nice a warm garage and the help of another Bostig convert, but I was astounded that I was able to enact such a dramatic transformation so quickly. I thoroughly documented the whole experience in a series of blog posts and YouTube videos which have attracted tons of Vanagon fanatics who are also considering taking the plunge.
My 2010 kayaking season picked up right where 2009 left off. The 70 days of whitewater kayaking from the previous year gave way to to 82 days on the water that were kicked off in earnest with an incredible Memorial Weekend road trip to Glenwood Springs. Shortly thereafter, we found ourselves on record-high water on the Poudre River near Fort Collins as the rain poured and the river swelled all weekend. Our only respite from the incessant moisture was under the van’s awning and in its cozy interior that we packed 8 people into at a time! The kayaking season turned out to be one for the story books, and I excitedly chased water every single weekend and most weeknights throughout the state in search of one more perfect wave. The transformation I made to the van was apparent almost immediately, but the transformation in my kayaking and the confidence I have gained in both over the past two years is hard to state.
So like I said, 2011 is upon us and I am itching to get back out on the water! This year, I fully expect to kayak more than 100 days which will mean a lot cruising around in the van throughout Colorado. One of my hopes is to complete a route that I’m calling the Great-8 that follow rivers from Glenwood to Aspen to Marble to Telluride to Durango to Salida to Buena Vista to Steamboat Springs and finally to Fort Collins! I think it is the perfect Colorado whitewater road trip, but it remains to be seen whether it can be done in 9 days! Until then, wish me luck and if you see a bunch of kayaks on van down by the river, stop by to say Hi…
Today, there are more ways to share photos online than ever before, from Facebook to Flickr to Picassa to Snapfish and literally hundreds of more options. However, almost all of these online photo sharing tools have a few negative aspects in common. First and foremost, the provider of the tool makes the rules. That means that if Snapfish goes belly up, say buh-bye to all of your albums. It also means that they decide on the look and feel of the album- from the size of the images to whether metadata is displayed. Second, some photo sharing tools, such as Facebook, claim to own your photos after you upload them which is completely ridiculous. No matter how you look at it, what you gain in convenience with these tools, you more than lose in control over your photos.
Years ago, I used to to code photo albums by hand in HTLM, but since those early days of the web, I have found a stable, free photo album tool called JAlbum. It is an extremely flexible, easy to use tool that can be run locally on your computer or remotely on their servers. The basic premise is that you build a photo album which is static in its very nature. This means that the album is an entity unto itself that can be saved, copied, moved and as long as HTML remains in existence, will be a permanent, unchanging record of how you wanted your photos to appear in the album. Basically, it is the digital equivalent of the old-time, “real” photo albums that sit on your shelf at home. Contrast this with a transient, fleeting view of your photos that online tools provide. As far as I’m concerned, my photos-- my memories-- deserve better treatment than the online tools can provide.
As with any software tool, there are some tips, tricks, and workflow techniques that can really make the difference in JAlbum’s effective use. Since my usage of JAlbum tends to come in waves, it only seemed appropriate to document the steps and the configuration that I find useful.
Set the “My Albums location” under Tools->Preferences and then the Album tab. This is the location where JAlbum will create your albums. In older versions, it used to create the album in the same directory as the photos, but now that it can accept photos from many directories, it makes more sense to keep all the albums in their own separate location from the photos.
Create a new album if this didn’t happen automatically by selecting File->New Album Project
The Album Name will also be the directory name that holds the album in the album location that you set in Step 2, although you can override that location if you need to. Generally, I leave this alone.
Add some photos to the album by clicking on the “Add” button in the toolbar in the top of the main window.
Modify the album settings by selecting Album->Settings
On the General page, set the Output directory to a value of “.” Yup, just type in a single period into the whole line, which tells JAlbum to output the album files directly into the album folder instead of a subdirectory.
On the Pages page, set the “Image linking from thumbnails” to “Link to originals via scaled images”, since it is always nice to be able to download the original file, but it is much easier to flip through an album that has scaled down images
On the Images page, I leave the default values alone. In particular, I want the JPEG quality to be 100%, Thumbnail size should be pretty small at 130x130 pixels, and Images should be a medium size at 600x600 pixels.
Install and configure the BluPlusPlus skin. Skins provide a very customizable look, feel, and functionality to your albums. I prefer BluPlusPlus for its simplicity and its ability to handle metadata well.
Select BluPlusPlus for the skin and “expedition” for the style on the left side of the main window
Now back to Album->Settings and there should be a BluPlusPlus page, which has several tabs of its own. On the Slide tab, enable display of some nice metadata by entering the following for the Slide Caption Comment:
Create the album by clicking on the “Make album” button in the bottom-left corner of the main window
After the album is created, you can “preview” the album which really just means that you are looking at the local copy of the album. Since the album is its own static entity, this preview should be the same as the “live” version, but it is housed locally on your hard drive instead of on a web server.
If you edit the IPTC metadata after you initially added the photos, you may need to delete the corresponding images in the My Albums directory so that JAlbum is forced to really read the metadata.
Finally, upload the album to a webserver to share with the world.
Keep in mind that these are the steps that matter most to me and that there are infinite ways to build JAlbums and that there are tons of online resources to help you figure out all the different steps. Have fun!
10,000 hours. 10 years. Either way, it’s a lot of time and it’s how much time they say one needs to commit towards an activity to become an expert. But even then, putting in time isn’t enough. According to Geoff Colvin in his book, Talent is Overrated, the key ingredient is Deliberate Practice. While the topic of deliberate practice is extremely compelling, I have discovered that the simple act of being deliberate is sufficient to lead a more productive, meaningful life.
Being deliberate means that you aren’t acting haphazardly, you aren’t swaying in the wind, and you aren’t blaming the world for your situation. It means that you have made a conscious choice to affect your own outcome from the smallest of situations to decade-long endeavors. It’s the difference between just getting by and having a smile on your face every day. And it’s what I believe is the linchpin to Victor Frankl’s logotherapy that was described in his seminal book, Man’s Search for Meaning. Because when a choice is deliberate, there is purpose, and when there is purpose, there is meaning.
It is always fine to believe in something based on what you have been taught, but I find it infinitely more convincing to grasp a concept based on personal experience. Last summer, I found myself kayaking 7 days a week during the peak run-off, and I couldn’t be happier as I pushed the limits of my body and engaged in the physical world. After a few weeks of this, I realized that the water levels would recede and with it my exciting participation. I was presented with a vision of gloom and I made a choice. It wasn’t a mind-blowing choice, but it was an important choice. As the kayaking season slowed down, I would ramp up running with a half-marathon goal for the autumn. And that is exactly what I did. My evenings slowly switched from Clear Creek outings on the water to south Boulder outings on the trail, and my enthusiasm never waned. The weeks and then the months passed, my days on the water became more rare, and my time on my feet increased dramatically. Even before the half-marathon came, I believe that I reached the apex of my running when was on the trail for 2 hours or more and was then hopping in my kayak for an afternoon of autumn boating. The feeling was truly glorious.
But still, I felt the winter months looming before me and a fear that I would descend into a lethargic slumber full of calories and television and lacking in warmth, exercise, and participation. Coming to this realization was half of the gift I received that autumn. Making a choice on how I would deal with the situation was the second half of the gift. Rather than letting the dwindling daylight and sinking temperatures pull me into a state of psychological, physical, and spiritual hibernation, I made the deliberate choice to continue to engage my mind and my body throughout the winter months so that as spring and summer approached, not only would I not be a portly, pastey Pat, but I would be leaner, stronger, and better educated than I had been 6 months prior.
My plan was simple. I would cross-train throughout the winter months in order to be in better shape for the 2011 kayaking season. Everyone says they are going to cross-train. No one, well almost no one follows through on it. This was before I read Talent is Overrated, yet I knew that I needed to do something different, something that would keep me motivated and going strong when it times were tough. There is a saying that, “What can be measured can be improved” and as a control systems engineer, I have wholeheartedly believed in this theory for more than a decade. I decided that I would formulate a series of different types of workouts and then I would track the frequency of these workouts throughout the winter.
First off, I decided that the best way to stay in shape for kayaking is to be in a kayak. Granted, I knew that whitewater kayaking on a regular basis throughout the winter wasn’t going to be practical, so I decided that my goal would be to get out in my kayak once a week, whether it was on whitewater, flatwater, or in a pool. Nice. Now I had a goal and was beginning to act deliberately. But being in a kayak once a week isn’t enough to escape the slob within me that was dying to escape during the winter months. Next, I found a half-marathon to run in mid-April which would require me to actively train starting in February and to maintain a base from November through January. Now I was getting somewhere. Then, I decided that if I were a pro athlete, I would train in the gym on regular basis in the off season with a focus on exercises that directly pertain to my sport. So what if I’m not a professional athlete, this is the good ole’ U-S-of-A and I can train like I’m one if I want to. I set about writing up a detailed workout plan with exercises that specifically targeted kayaking motions and then I expanded it to include a purposeful workout to do when I was in the pool in my kayak. Finally, I put together a spreadsheet to keep track of all my training activities as a function of time. Yup, it’s nerdy. But you know what, it worked. And it gets even nerdier. I had some Amazon.com credit burning a hole in my pocket, so I ordered a Withings WIFI digital scale that automatically posts body weight and body fat measurements to their website for logging and analysis. This tool provided yet another method of measuring my progress, so I could then manage it.
March is half way gone, I am near the 6 month mark in this experiment in which I have been the subject, and the question begs to be asked, “How successful was I?” Well, I ran the Highlands Ranch Backcountry Half-Marathon on November 13 which certainly set the stage for the first month or so. Then, I headed down to Costa Rica in early December for a week of fantastic paddling with my friends from Renaissance Adventure Guides. And then winter was fully upon me with no activities or strong motivational goals for months to come. But, things did not spiral out of control. Even amid the short, cold days, I felt the need to keep training and eating healthy. I think the numbers speak for themselves and so does the plot below that shows when I did workouts as a function of calendar date. I am writing this on March 17 and as of today, starting on October 1st, I have:
Kayaked whitewater 25 times and in the pool 7 times. Very good, but I definitely didn’t hit my goal of once per week.
Worked out in the gym 31 times
Swam 29 times
Ran 55 times
Biked 7 times
Skied 7 times
When you look at the plot, it becomes readily apparent that I have been working out a LOT. Still, if I had been eating like a fraternity brother, I could have gained 20lbs in that time. Fortunately, I was eating more like a bride-to-be with small salads and WeightWatchers dinners being the norm on my menu. As you can see, instead of gaining weight over the course of the 6 winter months, I actually shed almost 10 pounds! This was the first time that I have approached my high school weight in 2 decades. (It’s worth noting that the 2 spikes in my weight occurred when I “let go” during vacations. On the one hand, it clearly demonstrated what happened when I was not deliberately choosing my food carefully each day. And on the other hand, it was a deliberate choice of mine to relax my dietary restrictions during those times, so I don’t feel bad about it at all.)
Okay, I measured and I managed and I was deliberate, and yet you ask yourself, “Why does it matter?” Simple- I’m much, much happier than had I not been deliberate. So now, every time I am presented with a choice- whether it seems meaningless or not- I consider what it means to be deliberate. And I remember that being deliberate is a sure-fire way to self-satisfaction. Or as we usually like to call it- happiness.
It is a truly sad day for hundreds of dedicated people who staked their bets in this high risk enterprise. We have collectively created something amazing over the course of a decade and lost it in an instant. However, we all knew the game when we got into this. It’s not for the faint hearted. As in life, you don’t get a second chance.
But right now, I remember that things aren’t so terrible. There was a machine- a robot of sorts on this rocket, albeit a very beautiful robot. However, there was no loss of human life, just a sizeable dose of disappointment. It’s important to distinguish what matters, and what really matters.
So now we sit tight. That’s all we can do in the very near term. There will be press conferences, there will be investigations, and for our LASP team leading the charge on solar irradiance measurements , there will be an adamant campaign to accelerate the bureaucratic wheels to get the TIM instrument into orbit as soon as possible!
One-two. Down, but not out.
Here is an interview I did today with the Denver NBC affiliate, 9NEWS, and the associated website link.
It seems that about every two years, I find cause to pack up my car and road trip half way across the country. It first began with my life changing 2 month tour of the West in 1999, then the big move to Boulder in 2001, followed by a quick jaunt to Yosemite in 2003, then a visit to my parents’ house in New York in 2006, and finally my trek to the Ottawa River and Cape May in 2009. So when I learned that NASA would not pay for me to see the Glory launch in person, I figured it was time for another road trip.
With a scheduled launch date of Tuesday, February 23, 2011, it only made sense to leave Boulder on Friday, 2/18 and return to Boulder on Sunday, 2/27. And since I was going to be near the Pacific, I figured that my kayak should come along. And as long as I was packing gear, my mountain bike would surely find good use at some point. Oh yeah, what about that dog of mine? “River Dog, hop in! Cause we’re off on a road trip!”
I set off right after work on Friday and cruised out I-70 amid reasonable ski traffic and some snow showers on Vail Pass. Five hours later, I had made it to Rabbit Valley and bounced along a 4x4 road to a desert campsite where I had tethered internet service on my laptop and a cozy bed in the back of my 4Runner- not exactly roughing it. Saturday’s drive began at 6am and took me across the snow covered passes of Utah and through the beautiful Virgin River Gorge on I-15 in Arizona and on to Las Vegas. All of that driving really took a toll on me and there was no real hurry to make it to California, so I decided to camp just west of the city at Red Rocks recreation area where I had been years before with friends for a Thanksgiving climbing trip. As luck would have it, Boulder friends of mine, Peter and Cathy, had just finished up a photography conference in Las Vegas and we decided to try to meet up.
Upon arriving at the Red Rocks campground, I found it just as windy as it was 7 years earlier. And despite the warmish 50 degree temps that were displayed on my dashboard, a quick hop outside my car revealed a biting cold that wasn’t conducive to relaxing in camp all afternoon. Fortunately, I had other ideas for the wind, and 10 minutes later I had my kite flying high above the campground snapping photos using the kite aerial photography rig that I had built a year prior, but never had the opportunity to use. The photos weren’t anything particularly special, but it was very cool to prove that the contraption worked as well as I had hoped.
I awoke Sunday morning to Peter rapping on my car window. Somehow, we had used Facebook to coordinate an impromptu meet-up 800 miles from home which truly amazed all of us. We spent the morning casually over coffee and Einstein bagel sandwiches and hatched schemes to use my tethered balloon aerial photography system on a zip-line to capture truly unique kayaking photos from mid-rapid locations. Then it was off to Red Rocks for a hike. Our nearly identical red 4Runners wound their way past the loop road and eventually onto confusing snow covered dirt roads that led to the trailhead for Black Velvet canyon. The trail led up into the canyon that is well known for its multi-pitch rock climbs, but after a mile, the trail petered out and the cold, wet streambed halted our progress. Soon after, we said our goodbyes and I set out on a pleasant trail run along the network of mountain bike trails in the area. An hour or so later and I was back in the car, headed for Robert and Colette’s house in Santa Monica.
Compared to the Colorado winter I had left, the Santa Monica weather was certainly warm at 60 degrees. So Monday morning, I dragged Robert and little Lenny off to the beach with me so that I could get into my kayak for a quick surf session. The waves were small, but I managed to stay out of the way of the surfers and was even joined by pods of dolphins during my time in the water at Topanga Beach. Lucky for me, Robert brought his video camera and SLR, so I was able to get some fun footage of me playing in the water. After we wrapped that up, we stopped back at their place for a quick lunch and to grab our mountain bikes. Off we went into the Santa Monica mountains for the next several hours on a fantastic ride with view of the city, the ocean, and the Getty Center. Not too shabby!
Tuesday picked up right where Monday left off. After waking up, I did a great hill-run workout in Santa Monica, then we packed the cars and drove north through Santa Barbara before arriving in Buellton, which isn’t much of a town to visit in and of itself. However, there are dozens of vineyards in the surrounding hillsides which were lush with green color from the winter rains. We proceeded to visit 4 of these wineries that were down the road, including my favorite of the day, Dierberg-Starlane, then Foley, Babcock, and Melville. After all that wine, a good dinner was in order, so we wandered down the road to the Hitching Post 2 where I treated myself to the biggest and one of the most delicious steaks I have ever eaten. Then it was time to wait. It seems like I have been waiting for Glory to launch for a long time, and after dinner I had to wait a few hours before heading next door to the Marriot where all the Glory faithful gathered. Well, as it turned out, I was going to have to wait longer, because at 2am the launch was officially scrubbed. And that’s a story for another time…
Anyhoo, Robert and I were in wine country and had our bikes with us, so on Wednesday we hopped on them, cruised over to the uber touristy Danish town of Solvang, and proceeded to work our way along Alamo Pintado Road towards the sleepy little hamlet of Los Olivos. Along the way, we visited the idyllic grounds of Rideau vineyards, then Lincourt, and finally Blackjack where part of the movie Sideways was filmed. After a quick bite to eat in Los Olivos, we cruised down the spectacularly beautiful Ballard Canyon Road back to Buellton. Robert then headed back to L.A. and family responsibilities, while I moved on to more pressing issues like napping, retrieving already purchased bottles of wine, sipping cappuccino in Solvang, enjoying split pea soup for dinner at Pea Soup Andersen’s, and finally catching a movie at the local theatre next door.
Several days away from the ocean had me thinking of waves on Thursday, so after breakfast at Paula’s Pancakes in Solvang, I headed to Surf Beach on Vandenberg AFB which was the only location along the coast reporting any reasonable wave heights. Due to it being one of the only publicly accessible spots on the air force base, the beach has an isolated, wilderness feel to it with miles of untouched coastline that is occasionally marked by a radio tower or a rocket ready for launch. The waves were breaking not too far from the shoreline and were of a decent height, so I suited up in my kayak gear and headed out into the water. Unfortunately though, the waves behaved completely sporadically- crashing into foam piles, then disappearing, then reappearing. After 20 minutes in the water, I discovered that this section of ocean was just too haphazard for surfing and headed back to dry land. After hanging up my wet gear to dry, I met a veteran local who described to me that ocean currents converge from the north and south at this location which causes the unpredictable, strange behavior of the waves. Upon further reflection, I concluded that the beach actually had been named aptly- there was certainly a lot of surf in the water. It was I who had mistakenly equated that to “Surfer’s Beach”. Not a problem though, the sun was out and I had a beach chair and a book, so I settled in close to the sand to avoid the on-shore wind and dozed on and off as the pages slowly turned and River dog chewed sticks and played in the sand.
I like to paint a picture of complete relaxation, but honestly, I was feeling extremely disappointed by the launch delay, the lack of waves, and no purpose to my day. So I loaded my gear back in the car and headed south in hopes of waves and beach camping, but the waves weren’t there and the state park camping cost as much as the Buellton Motel 6. Rather than stay in a motel again, I gave Robert a ring and told him that I’d be crashing at their place again. Along the route to L.A., I decided to take a quick pit-stop in Santa Barbara which turned into an hour long run along the beach with River Dog (aka, the happiest dog in the world as he sprinted off leash through the salt water and soft sand) and then a visit to the Santa Barbara Shellfish Company at the end of the pier.
There have been a few meals that I have had in my life that will stay with me as memorable favorites, and I’m certain that was one of them. The “restaurant”, if you will call it that, lacks any pretentiousness as it does one thing and one thing well, which is serve up freshly caught shellfish. After all my years visiting Maine and the lobster pounds that make that coastline famous, I have developed a soft spot in my heart and stomach for this kind of dining. Where Maine has lobsters that I adore, the West Coast has raw oysters that are my hands-down favorite. My meal consisted of a half-dozen oysters on the half-shell, a cup of clam chowder, and a Double Barrel Firestone beer, and I could not imagine a better dining experience as I savored every bite and sip while watching the sun set over the Pacific.
It turned out that Robert was heading to the airport at 5am on Friday morning, so as a way of showing my appreciation for his and Colette’s hospitality, I offered to drop him at LAX and get a jump start on my day. Part of my grand plan for the trip was to kayak in the Sierras, so after leaving the airport, I high-tailed it north out of the city before its infamous gridlock set in. My kayaking destination was Kernville and I found my route taking me through Palmdale where I had visited in November for work. My day had little purpose other than driving for a few hours, but then I realized that if I could swing by NASA-Dryden, I could take care of some work in person that would be terribly challenging to do from half way across the country. So the rest of my morning was spent in an airplane hanger designing the mechanical interface for a new stabilizing platform that will catch a ride on the highest flying airplane in the world, NASA’s ER2 (equivalent to the U2 spyplane). The morning’s work recharged my batteries and I headed north to Kernville where I road-scouted the Upper Kern in the rainy weather and grabbed a bite to eat at the Kern River Brewhouse.
Afterwards, I motored down the road to Geno’s house in Lake Isabella. Geno is a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend and apart from the kayaking community, I don’t think I would find myself randomly stopping at someone’s house in the middle of nowhere to hang out. But true to the kayaking community, Geno turned out to be a great guy, and I hung out Friday night with him and his family as he told me countless stories about the impressive creaks of the southern Sierras. I awoke Saturday to snow on the hillsides and temperatures in the 30’s, but after a quick breakfast we were ready to hit the water on the Class IV section of the Lower Kern. Fortunately, the sun was out and the reservoir-fed water wasn’t too cold. We eased our way down the mostly flat stretches of the river that were occasionally interrupted by large pool-drops. It seems that I’ve spent most of my kayaking career discovering my own paths down rivers, so when all I had to do was follow another boater, I was amazed at how easy it can be. After a few hours on the water, I got my groove back and no sooner we were at the takeout. It was a short day, but it has inspired me to make it back to California on another road trip, and that’s always a good thing!
The next day and half were pretty uneventful- about 800-900 miles of driving through desert and snowy hills with an overnight stop in Cedar City, UT. I’ve said it before and I will say it again, you know that you can truly call a place home when you return from a trip like this and you are just overwhelmed with joy and contentment. It seems that is one of the big draws of travel- it makes you appreciate home.
This holiday season, I feel great sympathy for Santa Claus and the extreme journey he takes around the globe each year as he delivers presents to all the children of the world. My own journey may not have been quite as arduous as Saint Nick’s, but traveling half way around the world for over 24 hours straight at Christmas time was still quite ambitious and worth every minute. Instead of finding neatly wrapped presents under a tree in my living room, my gift was a few days on the warm sand of New Zealand under the indigenous Kiwi Christmas trees!
Autumn seems to be drawing to a close in Colorado, and I am happy to have completely wrapped up the reconstruction of my front porch. This was yet another of 
