Outing: Manning Park 2
As you may recall from an earlier post, I’ve been spotting places in Manning Park that I want to go back to explore and photograph. My first return trip was a partial bust – I got some nice snow pictures but I wasn’t able to get up the mountain road I wanted to explore because it was closed.
Now I’ve gone back a second time. The snow was gone, and the road was open. Here’s part of my GPS log showing just what road I mean:
[gmap width=’90%’ file=’http://www.soleillapierre.ca/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/alpine_meadows.kmz’ zoom=’12’]
The first 5 miles of the road, leading up to the viewpoint are paved but narrow, with no guard rails. It was a little tense going up and down this road for someone like me who gets vertigo on dropoffs and is afraid of falling off.
The viewpoint was nice but nothing special relative to other mountain viewpoints; you could still see a lot of buildings and hear the road below.
Continuing on to the end of the road, another four miles on a rough, washboarded gravel road, brings you to the Alpine Meadows recreation area. There are lots of open meadows at the top of the mountain here, with delicate wildflowers that bloom in the summer. There are easy hiking trails all around, as well as longer trails heading off into the wilderness for overnight hikers.
I arrived too late in the season for most of the flowers though there were still some left. The meadows were still quite nice as were the views. I found a bench to sit on and eat the picnic lunch I had brought. I had a great view to the east with only miles of empty air in front of me, no signs of human presence, and a profound silence. The breeze would occasionally sigh through the trees, but when it was still it was the quietest place I’ve ever been. Not even the rural area in Manitoba where I once lived ever got this quiet.
You can’t get true silence in the city. It’s amazingly relaxing when you do find it. I must make a point of seeking it out more often.
Photo gallery here.
Some things I love about the prairies
You don’t feel boxed in by the mountains.
You can see what the weather is like fifty miles away (and therefore what it’s going to be like for you later on).
You can enjoy a violent thunderstorm without necessarily having to be in it.
And you occasionally get some soothing desktop wallpaper out of the deal:
Driving up a mountain
On my recent road trip to Alberta, I stopped for the night in Sicamous. There’s a forest service road that starts right in town and goes up to the top of nearby Mount Quest. It’s an easy way to get a nice view, so I thought I’d mention it – stop by if you can. Not recommended for low-riding cars though; there are some spots with deep ruts.
Here’s the view from the top, stitched with the software that came with my new camera since AutoStitch can’t handle large images. That’s the town of Sicamous on the left. The wood in the foreground is of unknown purpose, but I gather hang-gliders use it as a lanuching point.
Here’s where I took the picture from, as seen from the town:
On the way down, I noticed some land for sale signs down the other branches of the logging road. It’s a flat-topped mountain, so it makes sense they could develop up there, but it makes me sad to think of the mountains getting encrusted with the same butt-ugly cookie-cutter housing developments that most cities and large towns are getting these days.
Here’s the GPS log of this side trip, so you can find the road: Mount_Quest
[gmap file=’http://www.soleillapierre.ca/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Mount_Quest.kmz’ width=’80%’]
Today’s Adventure: Manning Park first pass
I’ve been itching to get out of the city for a while, and a long weekend is a good chance for that. I’ve had my eye on Manning Park for a while – ever since I noticed on Google Earth that there appears to be a road going all the way up one of the mountains off Highway 3. I figured there would be some good views from there, as confirmed by finding other peoples’ photos from that road.
I had also noticed some nice scenery in the area last time I passed through, on my way home from vacation in Calgary a couple of years ago. But the scenery is very weather-dependent. I thought it would look good under snow or fog, or in the fall. So I set up an overnight job to record every image from the only road conditions camera in the park. Flipping through them this morning it looked like the park got a good snowfall overnight but the road was clearing up nicely, so off I went.
It was overcast but dry most of the way, but as I reached Hope I ran into a serious hailstorm. Small pellets, but lots of them hammering my windshield. I had to slow down due to poor visibility, the road being covered with ice pellets and slush building up on my windshield and hood too.
Opon reaching the park I was rewarded with nicely snow-covered trees, clearing skies and clean road. But I was disappointed to learn that the lookout road is only open July to September. I couldn’t find that information online anywhere – shame I had to drive 150 miles to learn it, but I’m still glad I did.
So I went to the Lightning Lake day use area and did some trudging around in the two feet of snow. Got a handful of OK pictures.
See also today’s 365 entry.
Then started heading back. By the time I reached the Hope Slide area I met that storm again, only now it was a blizzard. I was driving through whiteout conditions for a while. It was gorgeous.
The sky mostly cleared up and the sun came out at Hope. Took the Lougheed Highway home from there for a change of scenery. End of story.
I really enjoyed this outing and I spotted a bunch of beautiful pictures that I couldn’t get because there was no place handy to stop on my side of the road. I must go back and do this stretch of road again in the summer (to get the lookout) and proper winter to get the things I spotted along the road.
[gmap file=’http://www.soleillapierre.ca/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/20100403.kmz’]
Travelblogue: experimental results
So I’ve just finished my first experiment with blogging a vacation. It was rewarding for me, but there are a bunch of things that could have gone better.
I didn’t deal correctly with the days I lacked network access. I should have been writing the text for those days locally on my machine for later posting; writing it a couple of days after the fact is not good because I tend to forget details and allow “future” events to shade my phrasing.
Making a post takes a lot longer than I expected; I could barely manage one per evening, and that meant there was no way I could catch up with my backlog until I got home. Writing the text is the easy part; even with proofing end editing that takes less than an hour. It’s assembling the other media (maps and photos in my case) that takes a lot of time. For the maps, my GPS logs had a lot of redundant data in them so I wanted to trim some of that out before posting to make the embedded maps in my posts more responsive. For the photos, many of my posts included stitched panoramas and I was also doing some HDR and timelapse movie experiments, and all that processing takes time. Even without that, locating the best photos to post out of hundreds per day takes time.
And there were plain old computer problems, too. Google Earth’s path editor sucks. I need a better tool for editing my GPS tracks. Autostitch frequently barfs when I try to create panoramas; I can’t really blame it given what it is, but I haven’t found a better tool yet. And since my laptop only has half a gig of memory, it’s common for Autostitch to spend hours chewing on one panorama, and flipping though my photos to find ones to post is also a slow process.
The software problems were exacerbated by the laptop touchpad; ignoring the secondary mouse button, there are four things you do with a mouse: move the cursor, click, double-click and drag. Since my muscular control is not perfectly precise, the touchpad generates random combinations of these four actions whenever I try to move the cursor or drag something. That makes mouse-based editing work really frustrating and also creates errors. I really want to find one of these or something similar to use instead, but they seem to be hard to find.
So, my takeaway lessons from this are:
- Avoid falling behind. Always write the text (and if possible, choose the pictures) the day of, even if there’s no network access to actually post them. Posting existing content after the fact is less of a sin than writing the content after the fact.
- Get a better laptop and a better pointing device. A lot of my workflow frustration would have been alleviated if I could have worked at my normal pace without introduced errors and long waits.
- Get better software. Life is too short to put up with software that sucks. In particular I need GPS manipulation software, panorama stitching software, HDR compositing software, image->movie conversion software, and fast slideshow or light table software.
