Lots of new technology

Yeh, it’s been awhile since I updated this blog. But I’ve got great excuses! You see, lots of new technology has come out of the woodwork this summer and I’ve been seriously preoccupied working with it. First off, earlier this summer Google announced their new Google Earth Plug-in. I’d been waiting for such a mechanism for a long time. Up until the plug in appeared, you pretty much had to run the Google Earth client. Now, I can host Google Earth in my own web pages and control the user experience, and direct the way you see the rivers. So I quickly went to work creating this site http://www.whitewatercampsites.com/3D/pgRaftingRiversInGoogleEarth.htm# which hopefully will grow into a means to navigate the campsite photos directly from Google Earth.

So I’m busy gathering GPS coordinates for all the campsites, rapids, and other points of interest. This winter I’ll try to stitch the GE markers to my campsite albums as cleanly as possible.

So, that was technology fixation #1. And soon after that, Google announced the beta of their new ‘Knol’ feature which is intended to compete with Wikipedia. The shine is coming off Wikipedia because the authors are anonymous, people are questioning the fact that they cannot tell where the info is coming from and thus the bias, and the ‘clean-up’ crew of volunteer authors might be getting tired of continously correcting the additions. In contrast, the Knol approach is to demand that the authors be fully identified and verified. So you know exactly who is writing what on each Knol page. I'd known about Knol since last winter, but when the beta was announced I just had to start creating Knol pages for whitewater rafting. I already had lots of content on my http://www.multidayrafting.com/ site, and Knol pages may be the better way to expose such information. So I’m gradually migrating it to a series of Knols. It may or may not come to anything, but if Knol catches on and wins the war of public opinion, then it will be THE place for information about everything. Here is the front door: http://knol.google.com/k# Just search for rafting or whitewater.

Next technology to demand attention was DeepZoom and the MultiScaleImage control in Microsoft Silverlight Beta 2. This is truly awesome technology. The best example I’ve seen is a page that Kelly Blue Book has put up here http://www.kbb.com/kbb/PerfectCarFinder/Default.aspx. On the KBB page, scroll down until you can see “Perfect Car Finder: Photo Edition” and click on the red button titled “Start Now”. You will be prompted to install Microsoft Silverlight Beta 2 if you don't already have it. Definately go for it. While it will take a few minutes, the results will be worth it.

When the page finally comes up, you'll see photos of nearly 400 automobiles. Each photo is a ‘deep zoom’ photo, meaning you can use mouse clicks or your mouse wheel to zoom into the photo so deeply you’ll be amazed. (The prototypical example is the Hard Rock Memorabilia site, Google it. On that site I swear you can zoom in far enough to see the fingerprints on the old guitars!)

Also check out the sliders on the left side that allow you to select price range, style, etc. of the cars. Moving them cause the photos to be filtered and re-arranged into a group as you move the sliders. It's all a very cool use of this deepzoom technology. If you don’t have a wheel on your mouse, clicking on a photo zooms to the photo you click on a ways (you need the wheel to go deeper) and Shift+click will zoom back out. Drag the mouse around to reposition yourself in any photo or the entire mosaic. You can guess what I’m planning to do with deep zoom and my websites!

On top of spending time with these new technologies and web pages, we’ve been preparing for our Lower Salmon float, leaving tomorrow, in fact. This is the "Burning Foot Float". It should be interesting to see who shows up. I know for certain that some will, so it won’t be a bust, and the weather is looking great and not as hot as it could be. In getting ready, I had to also finish up the new multi-day frame for my Aire Jag. It came out pretty good. The welds and some geometry could have been better, but it will serve the purpose. I’ll post photos of the construction and the frame in-use on the LSR after I get back.

Finally, this summer has involved a lot of yard work. And that includes creating a 30-foot stream water feature in the back yard. It’s pool and drop, and drops 18 inches in those 30 feet. So let’s see, that’s about 264 feet per mile! Definitely class V!!! Now, if I could only find a scale model raft. Hmmmm….

Photos of flips in Dagger Falls and new Middle Fork features

I just got back from the Middle Fork of the Salmon by way of the Lochsa. I'll do a real trip report as soon as I can because there was plenty of adventure on this one. In the meantime, here are a few photos of the flips in Dagger, the torn Ocelot, the upper Middle Fork fire damage, and Lake Creek. Flow when these shots were taken was about 6.1 ft at MF Lodge.

Keep in mind that this is Dave Nissen (of Madcatr frames), one of the best cat boaters out there, and this boat is fully loaded for a 6-day MFS trip.

Dave was climbing the footbar and thought he could save it until the tubes fell back into the current which swept the back end out from under him. But he was back in the cage in about 5 seconds:

Next up, Barry Brazzell:


Notice that Barry took almost the identical line as Dave. Go figure. Next came Chuck Morgan. Chuck blew an oar up under the footbridge and was a bit distracted. He appears to have gotten spun a few degrees clockwise by the lateral as he came down the drop and that made all the difference. Amazingly close to Barry's line!

Next up, Ralph Pond in a 15ft Wave Destroyer, which lived up to it's name. As you see, Ralph was farther to the right:

This is the 18 inch hole torn in Chuck's boat just below Velvet. Chuck had a tough two days!

While the inner bladder had *only* an 18 inch tear, the outer shell sustained a 32 inch rip! That's a lot of baseball stitches:

Sadly, this is one of the 'prettier' vistas left on the upper 25 miles of the Middle Fork:

This is the hole that now exists below the Lake Creek fan, in the right (now main) channel.

This is the view looking upstream from slightly above the hole:

Here's the view downstream from above the fan. I've marked the location of the hole. We ran left side of the right channel with no problems.

My new Aire Jag in action

Photographer Steve Lapenske took this photo of me on my new jag on the Green River Cleanup. That big black mass over my right shoulder is a bag of garbage. Bring it on!

Marsh Creek in less than two weeks!

My first experience with Marsh Creek is now less than two weeks away, with launch scheduled for May 24th. It will be ten guys and nine catarafts for 5 nights on the Middle Fork of the Salmon, and then move on to the Lochsa for a couple days. About 10 days total. This trip should make for some great photos with 9 cats on the beach at each camp. I really can hardly wait. Not only will this be the first time I’ve been on the Middle Fork in a couple years, but the whole Marsh Creek experience, launching from the highway bridge, and running Dagger Falls, etc. Just a lot of adventure to look forward to.

The flow will be anybody’s guess. The Middle Fork is currently running between 4-5 on the lodge gauge, with a big snow-pack still left to come off. I only hope with the hot weather predicted this week in Seattle that it doesn’t go completely sky-high like it did in 2006 at the time we launch. I don’t want my first Marsh Creek/Dagger experience to be at 9’. But a good peak between now and when we launch might clean out some of the wood from last year’s fires. But then again, that wood could get plugged up at Pistol Creek. My fingers are crossed big-time. It will be an adventure, for sure.

This is not the trip I was thinking I was going to take. The first one (actually several back-to-back) fell apart a week ago due to the permit holder’s health problem. So thankfully I got invited on this other Middle Fork trip. I’m doing a little packing almost every night. There are always lots of little projects to do for the first trip of the year. For instance, last year we had some problems with our huge kitchen shelter (“Big Top 440” model). The shelter would lift off the 10’ oar we used as the center pole in wind gusts. So we started jacking the oar up off the ground on a stack of ammo cans and such to lift the shelter higher and in doing so, create more tension and down-force. So this weekend I cut up an old Carlisle oar blade, and glued it into about a 4.5’ piece of ABS tubing. Should work pretty slick; remove the blade from that center oar, insert this thing, it snaps into place like the blade, and presto, a 14’ center pole! ABS doesn’t weight very much. But it looks kind of goofy – I’m gonna call it the ‘null blade’. Snap it onto your oar shaft and you can row in circles forever!

Aire Jaguarundi is quite a boat!

Floated the Green River Gorge last Saturday as part of the Green River Cleanup. Lots of people, lots of rafts, and lots of fun. I've floated the gorge about 30 times in the last 10 years and it's a treat every time, rain or shine. The new Jag was a kick too; a great addition to my boat collection. Mine is the new, improved ( 2007+) model. It tracks much better than my 14X24 Sotar, and even surfs better. Not quite as fast to spin, but that's to be expected due to the 16X24 size. The new hull shape and rocker make it a very sweet ride.

This was the try-out for running the Jag with my old frame (a 12-year old Ron McLay design) as I will be running this configuration in a couple weeks on the Middle Fork. So I tried out both 10' and 8.5' oars during the run. Both had advantages, but I think I'll take the 10 footers when running with a load. I can't say enough about the Jag. I'm just very glad to have it, and just pleasantly surprised at how fun it was.

The white water rivers website

So my most recent website, www.whitewaterraftingrivers.com is a test-bed. I really much prefer Google Earth, but the Google Maps API allows me to host and interact with it from a website. The site is a good way to try out some user experience ideas that may make their way into the rewrite of the campsites website. While I make my living in the Microsoft world, I’m pretty disappointed with their Virtual Earth effort in comparison to Google Earth. Unfortunately, Google Earth is a COM app and, being a .NET bigot, I’d prefer to not ever have to work with COM again. Plus, Google Earth installs locally and, while you can feed it a KML file full of waypoints, the user experience is all about Google Earth. I want to have the map be a part of the experience, rather than the whole enchilada.

So, until the right solution comes along, I’m content to just assemble the waypoints for all these rivers and post them, visually, on the rivers website. I do like the terrain maps feature of Google Maps with the topographic lines appearing as you zoom in. But Google Earth is still the cool way to go - the goal to strive for. Maybe I’ll stumble into a way to have my cake and eat it too. In any case, I’m grateful to the folks who have been sending me waypoints for the rivers website. Once again, it’s a community effort. Having sites like this benefit us all as we explore the rivers of the west.

Having noted that I’m a big Microsoft fan, the irony is that I’m very impressed with Apple and Steve Jobs. I started my career long ago working on TRS-80 and then Apple II computers. I was a Mac guy long before I was a Windows guy. So it’s interesting to once again be a big fan of Apple (and glad I bought some stock at $125 earlier this winter). I can’t wait for June with the promise of a new 3G iPhone.

Next up, what’s it take to build a new raft frame? I'll go through my thought-process in coming up with the design for my new frame, and show some photos. And tomorrow is the Green River Cleanup and my first trip down the gorge with my new Aire Jaguarundi tubes. Weather should be fine, but the water level remains the question (every year).

Multi-day rafting trips website

My last post was about the origin of my whitewater campsites website. It was my first attempt at a website, and all things considered, it’s worked out as well as I could have hoped. After launching it, I went along for a couple of years, just glad to be posting new campsite photos. (In fact, that website has a 5 year anniversary coming up. Hmmm… I need to check on when that is.) Anyway, over the years I’ve learned a bit more, and as I looked back at the code behind the campsite site I began to sort of cringe. It’s pretty rough, and really needs a rewrite. So my next effort was to simply get better at Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and JavaScript. To do so, I created a website about a trip I took to Bangalore India. The site was just an excuse to practice, but the experience was one I’ll never forget. What a trip!

So, since I’m such a white water rafting nut, and fairly detail-conscious (you can’t be a software developer for 25 years without being pretty meticulous), my brother started getting after me to write a book. I wasn’t up for the hassles of publishing hardcopy, inventory, costs, etc. So I started thinking that another website might be in order. The sport of white water rafting has so many dimensions. The web is full of, in fact dominated by, web sites of the commercial outfitters. They play up the image of busting waves, paddle rafts full of screaming clients, go big or go home. There are a few hobby websites out there with a trip report and some links, and organizations like AW and regional clubs, and a bunch of link farms that just point to all of the above.

So my thinking went like this: I love a good rapid as much as the next person, but there are so many other aspects of the sport of whitewater rafting that I just crave too. I figured I could do a site that helps to show the other sides of rafting trips: camp life, the fun times we have just coasting along, the side hikes, the native American art, the scenery, the food, the specialized equipment, the camaraderie, having great fun with family and friends, the wilderness isolation and self-sufficiency… you get the picture… I could go on and on. I hope to add quite a bit to it over the next couple years. And of course I’d like to add some nice examples of carnage for all those who love a good photo of such. And there is a lot to say on taking high-water trips, so I’ll be gathering material and photos this spring. The multi-day trips are what it’s all about for me. Everything about them, even the long drives and hard work of getting ready, and cleaning the gear when we get home. It’s what I do, and I love it all.

But in the meantime, this weekend is our big club float of the season, the Green River Cleanup. It’s about a 4.5 hour float, and the scenery is outstanding. It’s just really a treasure, right in Seattle’s back yard, less than an hour from downtown. If you ever get a chance, do it.