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.

Way cool article about clocks

I ran across this a few months back. This is truely amazing stuff. Looks like Mr. Spock's 'tri-corder' on Star Trek that can see through walls, rocks, and buildings isn't so far-fetched after all. Clocks may be the 'sensor' for such a future gadget:

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/12/time_nist

My white water rafting websites

For the record, here’s the story on how my three whitewater rafting websites came to be. The idea for the first website, http://www.whitewatercampsites.com/ started years ago on our first Main Salmon rafting trip. My friend Julie won the permit and I accompanied her to the permit holder meeting in the little ranger office at Corn Creek. We bid for and got Alder Creek as our first campsite. Back then the rangers didn’t consider group size as carefully as they do now. While we won Alder Cr. fair and square, the head guide for a large commercial group asked us to give it to him because they were such a large group. He didn’t offer anything in return, but the guy was pleasant, sincere, and made a good sales pitch. He suggested that a great alternative that would more closely fit our group size was Fawn Creek. Fawn was not reserve-able, but sounded nice, with a stream running through the beach. Others in the office nodded. So we caved, just to be nice, and not get our first Main Salmon trip off on a contentious note.
They launched before us and later that day, as we floated by Alder, which is a major beach with afternoon shade (the temp was something like 106F that day), watching them all playing in the water and enjoying that massive beach, we realized that we had gotten the raw end of that deal. Oh well, onward to Fawn. But the situation became worse when we arrived at Fawn about 2 minutes after another group, and our plan fell apart. Fawn did look great too, but it was not to be ours that night. So we wandered downstream until eventually taking the campsite now known as Grotto. We were totally cramped that night, and kicked ourselves for a few days about giving up Alder to such a flaky “plan B”. Being our first river trip on the Main Salmon, we didn’t know what the various sites looked like. We just stumbled along and got stung. So that was the spark that eventually led to my rafting trip campsites website. A year or two later some guys at work showed me some code they were using for posting their own online photo albums (this was ‘do-it-yourself’, before Flickr and other social networking sites). I grabbed a copy, doctored it up, and launched the website. If you go there, and open the first “Past Cover Photos” page, way down at the bottom is the photo of Magpie Creek camp from that same Main Salmon trip, that was the first cover photo.
At the time, I thought that was a pretty striking picture! Looks pretty drab now, given all the other cool shots that people have sent me. The site has come a long way since. Over the years dozens of folks have sent me photos and I’ve added many hundreds more of my own. Today, there are more than 400 campsites on rivers throughout the west, thousands of photos of rivers, campsites, and folks having a great time on rafting trips. And many people have added their own comments about various campsites,which is what I really like to see.

It’s been a labor of love and I go there myself before each trip to help me figure out our itinerary. I know a lot of people do the same, and I get a few 'atta-boy' emails that are really satisfying too. It’s been a lot of fun on my end and I’m glad it’s worked out so well. For those curious, I make about $1 per day in Google advertising. Before I put the ads in, it was a nagging question. Now I know the answer. No big deal. But ads do pay the domain and hosting costs.
My goal for the future of the campsites website is to apply the new Microsoft Silverlight 2.0 technology to present the photos in a much more vivid and immersive fashion. That’s the goal for next year, anyway. All the photos are out there in their full resolution, so it's a resource that deserves to be exposed in as cool a way as I can do it.

Whitewater trips ahead!

At this point, my whitewater rafting season is shaping up nicely with 3+ rafting trips looking like this:

May 19 - Middle Fork of the Salmon - high water trip, most probably doing Marsh Creek (and Dagger Falls). Depending on cancellations, this may evolve into a back-to-back with a Selway or another MFS and/or back-to-back-to-back with Main Salmon. So, the very best outcome could be as many as 300 miles of white water in one continuous dose! Can't wait! I've not done Marsh Creek before and it is possible this trip could involve two laps of it! Yikes. Also, expect lots of wood in the river(s) due to last year's fires and previous blowouts above Pistol Creek.

July - tbd, depends on picking up a cancellation somewhere (and that I live through May), or off to Montana for a 'guys' trip flyfishing on the Blackfoot or Rock Creek.

August 9 - Lower Salmon - should be a pretty crazy time with an unknown number of members of Yahoo idahowhitewater group. This is the rafting equivelent of a giant blind date. We'll see. Could go well or could just suck. But I doubt it will suck. If nobody can stand each other, we'll all just slink away and do our own thing.

Sept 8 - Green River - Desolation Canyon. This will be our big family trip of the year. Great food, good wine, let the Margaritas flow! Lots of fun times with the kids and their significant others.

Santa was very understanding this year (or fed the addiction?), so I'm taking my new Aire Jaguarundi out somewhere this weekend as a bit of a shakedown for the May MFS trip. I'm building a new cargo frame for it (for Lower Salmon and Deso) but will be using an older frame with the new tubes and new oars on the May trip. The Jag pretty much completes our little flotilla, bringing the boat count up to 3, plus one IK. So we now have passenger capacity for at least 8 adults and 600 quarts of cooler space, two big dryboxes, and 5 rocket boxes. We do camp in style!

The new raft frame has been the major project this winter, in addition to the two new websites. Looking back, it's been a busy winter. But I got a lot done, and now the fun begins. I'll probably post some photos of the new frame and reasons for the design.

Following yesterday's climate change comments, I notice that there is more news out there today on Solar Thermal. This time Google doing the funding. I sure hope this takes off. My hope for us all.

A little good news on climate change for once

Ok, not rafting, but interesting and I’m in the mood to rant. Being a parent, I feel a fair amount of guilt at the crappy world my generation is leaving for our kids. While we aren't the only generation that caused the problem, we're the ones at the scene of the crime. Our parents were called the “greatest generation” for fighting and winning WWII. Meanwhile, the leak in the ship has been discovered on our watch. So I’m always looking for things to feel better about. Here are two technology news stories I’ve run across lately:

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/04/14/solar_electric_thermal/

http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=206801669&printable=true&printable=true

Taken together, these two bits of news are very encouraging. Hydrogen can be, essentially, a battery to store energy from the sun. Solar Thermal is far simpler, safer, and cheaper than alternatives, especially nuclear. What’s 92 square miles? About one big ranch in the Southwest, that’s what. So even if they’re off by a factor of 10 in estimating the real estate, what are 10 big ranches worth of land to power the country, perfectly clean and green, happily ever after? Use Solar Thermal-driven electrolysis to generate hydrogen and we’ll have wired and wireless power, from essentially, the only free lunch around. Where are the politicians on this stuff? Behind bio-fuels, that’s where. Let’s have the hungry set face off against the Mercedes set to see who gets the corn and see who wins? Jeez.

Goodbye ski season, hello whitewater season!

We left for Whistler after work Friday, driving through Everett, WA in freak snowstorm (Vancouver too). Both Sat & Sun were sunny, with the top 4000 vert feet of Blackcomb firm but carve-able, and groomed to perfection. What a blast and a great last weekend of the season. Even got a little boot-deep pow on one run down Blackcomb Glacier. Very cold the whole weekend, with high-temps around -15C up in the alpine. Finished off the season with a top-to-bottom-non-stop last run from the top of the Horstman Glacier T-bar, for the full 5200+ vertical foot last dose of my favorite mountain. Kicked myself the whole weekend for leaving the GPS home since the surfaces were outstanding for high-speed cruising. Global climate change treated Whistler very well this year. As of yesterday, April 20, they still had full coverage to within 100 vertical feet of Blackcomb base.

For anyone who doesn't understand the Whistler experience, here's a taste. (Some overactive marketing gland did this, but it's pretty cool.) Click the 'compare acreage' feature on this page and then select 'compare acreage' at the top of the little pop-up app and then select your favorite mountain:

http://www.whistlerblackcomb.com/mountain/maps/index.htm

Ok, that does it for the ski season. From here on out, I'm all about whitewater trips, my whitewater websites, and all things rafting.

Whistler one more time

Several rafting trips are taking shape for my summer and fall, but right now I’ve still got a little bit left of the ski season to enjoy. This Friday is another Whistler trip. Last trip up there was almost a month ago, so I’m due. But I’ve gotten a little rafting in since, which is good. Living in Seattle is nice like that. A couple weekends ago I did a “NW Biathlon” – floated the Green River Gorge on Saturday and skied Stevens on Sunday.

Another fixation: earlier this year I took my GPS to Whistler and was surprised to see that we travelled more than 100 miles in the two days of skiing, including lifts and runs. Pretty cool. Ya gotta love Whistler; the place is HUGE! But the cool part was that they were grooming the Dave Murry Downhill course for the world cup event held a month or so back. We hit it early and hard and got the GPS cranked up to 52mph!! Not bad, given that I’m 57 years old! Also not bad since I was on my beloved Dynastar Legend Pro Riders, which are VERY FAT! They look like those old Cyprus Garden-variety water skis, where they ski around doing human pyramids!

So the GPS sort of brought the idea to mind of ‘skiing your age’. Golfers make a big deal out of ‘shooting your age’. But I figure the numbers work in your favor with golf. So here I am, at 57. Can I crank it up to 57 mph? I gotta try, but it’s not happened yet. Conditions have to be perfect. It’s gonna get much tougher every year from here on out. I’m within striking distance, so that has got to be a goal for next year.

But it will be as much about the conditions as anything. And when they have the nets up on the downhill course, it gets you pretty stoked. The course by the way is pretty damn cool. The world cup kids were ranting about it. None of the teams have skied it in competition since something like ’98 when they held some early season world cup races at Whistler and got rained out on consecutive years. The course reminds me of wicked-big staircase. Real steep headwalls onto flats, which then lead to falling off the next headwall, etc., etc, until you need to have your knees removed from your shoulder joints. Oh yea, and there is one massive jump right above the finish. Those world cup kids are crazy. I scrubbed a bunch of speed approaching the lip of that jump, given that I’m old and wise!

This weekend is the second weekend of the Telus festival so it’ll be a pretty crazy place. All the people, all the music. My friends and I hang out at Monks where they play the music from our youth (Stones, CCR, etc.) It’s always fun to see 50-somethings dancing on the tables!)

Finally... or should I say "let's begin this thing"

Creating this blog has been on my list of things to do for awhile. I like to write. And as the blog title suggests, I'm pretty hopelessly addicted to white water rafting and more precisely, taking multi-day whitewater rafting trips. I'm also hooked on technology (I develop software for a living) so this blog will be a way for me to cache and pass along neat technology news that I stumble on. I'm also a life-long snow skier so between trips to Whistler (the non-rafting portion of my soul lives for Whistler) and my rafting adventures, I should have plenty of fun stuff to talk about. Lastly, I offer as evidence of my white water addiction, that I operate one of the more popular rafting-related websites (and have some more sites on the way) so I’ll fill you in on what’s happening behind the scenes of those websites.