Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Mountain Biking

Tim and I have been enjoying our bikes down the street at Soaring Eagle Park. On Memorial Day, we decided to try to make a little video. That basically consisted of us riding around until we found a mud puddle or bridge, setting up the camera and riding past it. We’re clearly not very great at this yet, but we have a good time. You can tell us apart in the video because Tim has the blue backpack and I’m the guy with the Under Armor pants and white shirt.

You can watch the flash version below or download the full video.

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benmartens May 30, 2008 Outdoors

Rattlesnake Lake Hike

After I skied on Saturday morning, I met Rachel and Tim at Rattlesnake Lake for hike #10 from our hike book. As you can see from the GPS track below, we walked down to the lake since we had never been there before. The lake looks a bit low and the map seems to confirm that as it shows we were supposedly walking in the water.

Looking up from the lake, it's easy to spot Rattlesnake Ledge jutting out from the mountain. The hike from the lake to the ledge isn't too difficult. The trail is wide and very full of people. It gets a bit annoying at times, but we made great time up the mountain and passed a lot of people. After a quick stop at the crowded ledge, we continued up the mountain and left the crowds behind.

From that point, the trail gets more difficult and there were only a few hikers. We had plans of going all the way to the top, but after we realized there was snow on the last mile, we decided to turn around. Our footwear wasn't ready for that much snow and we would have ended up with cold, soaked feet.

The hike was fantastic and has jumped up near the top of my list. If you go on the same hike, bypass the first ledge and go up another 0.5-0.75 miles to find another smaller ledge that will be much less crowded and offer even better views.

Saturday was good practice for my Camp Muir hike which is coming up on June 6. Mike and I have scheduled vacation for that day, and I rented randonnee ski gear. Hopefully the weather is as beautiful as it was today!

There are pictures in the photo gallery and more panoramic photos. There is a bug in the photo gallery which doesn't let me put these panoramas there, so I'll leave them in this post. I think they help to communicate the vast views better than the single photos.

benmartens May 28, 2008 Outdoors, Panorama

Geohashing

Rachel and I have been chatting about trying to do a little geocaching instead of regular hiking. Today's XKCD comic presents an idea called geohashing. There is a formula to figure out a geohash location. The inputs to the formula are the date, that date's (or most recent) Dow opening, and the integer lat/lon of your current location. The formula includes an MD5 hash and is pictured below. There is an app already written to calculate each meeting spot and there is a wiki with more info.

I'm not going to bother to explain what all that means, but if you need more help, you can click on the links for extra learnin'.

benmartens May 21, 2008 Geek, Outdoors

Sunday Ride

Rachel and I hopped on the motorcycle on Sunday and went exploring. The first interesting site was the split in the road pictured below. You can click on it for the full view. The road splits and both directions have a Dead End sign. I feel like this is a good cover for a motivational book, or maybe there's a sermon topic in there for you Pastor Scherschel.

All of our exploration ended in either dead ends or dirt roads. (Jay, if we had your Jeep out here, we could drive on dirt roads to some incredible places.) We backtracked back down to the main road and headed for Snoqualmie Falls.

I've been to the falls a number of times, but it's still one of my favorite places to show people. It's my way of saying, "See how awesome Washington is? This place is 14 minutes from my house!"

The near-record snowfall in the mountains coupled with the record warm temperatures has created a very fast melting snowpack that is sending flash floods down the hillsides. I was shocked at how much water was flowing over the falls. I've never seen anything close to it. Check out these comparison shots. I think it will be easy to tell which ones were from the weekend and which were from a previous summer.

 

I don't have a comparison shot for this last picture because the river is so high that all of these rocks are underwater. The normally calm river where people go tubing has turned into raging rapids.

Speaking of record snowfall, Alpental is staying open for another weekend. What an incredible ski season!

benmartens May 21, 2008 Motorcycle, Outdoors, Panorama

Topographic Wallpaper

Export a JPEG from TOPO! It seems to have a problem if you try to export the entire state, but you can split it up into fairly big chunks.

Download GIMP

Choose Image > Guides > New Guide By %.

This splits up the photo for printing, and you can break up your photo into A4, easy-to-print sizes.

Finally, use Image > Transform > Guillotine.

benmartens May 19, 2008 Projects

Paintball

Over a month ago, we semi-randomly picked a weekend to play paintball. What a day it turned out to be! We had record setting 90+ temps and blue skies. Eighteen of us (mostly Microsofties) headed to Eastside Paintball for a day o' carnage.

Beware all who travel to Eastside Paintball. Tim and Denis were really the only people who had vehicles that looked at place on that road. As I carefully picked my way through the pot holes, mud spots, and big rocks, I could only imagine how much Greg was going to be gunning for me after driving that road in his Porsche. Oops.

Thanks to everyone who came out. I think we all had a good time and I hope that we can do it again soon! Pictures are available in the photo gallery.

benmartens May 19, 2008 Outdoors

Published Author

I've finally finished the book project. All in all, I'd say it took about 40 hours to get these six books edited and published. These new books are pretty substantial and have 450-600 pages each.

If you're ever looking to publish any type of book, I have nothing but the highest praise for lulu.com. I don't know how they can provide a service like this for such a low price. These six books cost just under $150 and when you think about how difficult one-off custom printing like this is, that seems like a steal. The whole website and process of creating the books was smooth and ridiculously simple.

Hopefully they stick around for a while so that I can continue to publish books for the coming years.

benmartens May 15, 2008 Projects

Summit Registers

Since we found that summit register on top of Cougar Mt., Rachel and I have been wondering where those books are kept. The register at the top of Mt. Rainier is kept in the National Park Archives.

Until the 1930s, the park did not maintain formal park summit registers. During the early years, many different mountain climbing clubs maintained registers at the summit. The Mountaineer’s collection of registers is located at the University of Washington. The Mount Rainier National Park Archives contains summit registers beginning in 1932.

Registers continue to be added to the collection. If you are searching for a very recent signature, please be aware that there is a time lag in getting registers to the archives for processing. Though some summit register pages are damaged and some volumes are missing, the registers are still an excellent record of Mount Rainier summit climbs and provide the reader with an opportunity to "read the thoughts of the climbers."

To initiate a summit register signature search, please be prepared to provide as much information about your climb as possible: the number of people in the climb, if you were in a guided party, how you wrote your name, etc. Providing the exact date of your summit climb or as close as possible to the date of your climb, is the most important information for ensuring that your signature has a chance of being located.

http://www.nps.gov/mora/historyculture/museum.htm

An email to the King County Parks and Recreation website revealed the destination of the Cougar Mt. registers:

The books are read and stored at the Cougar Mountain Regional Wildland Park maintenance office. Staff tells me they are very interesting reading. If you would like to review any of them, please call the maintenance office at 206-296-4145.

This seems like a good book opportunity to me. Imagine how many funny, inspiring, heartbreaking tales are recorded on those pages!

benmartens May 8, 2008 Outdoors

Cougar Mountain

On Sunday, Rachel and I met at the Cougar Mountain trailhead for an afternoon hike. The weather was perfect for hiking – 65 and sunny. The hike came from a book of local hikes that Tim bought last summer. It's the first one in the book (seemed like a good place to start.) While there wasn't a lot of great scenic views, it was a good workout and a nice chance to chat for a few hours. We made the 6.2 mile hike with 1700 miles feet of cumulative elevation gain in exactly three hours.

I was pretty excited to reach the peak and see what was in store. Unfortunately, I still don't know because there is absolutely no view. It's just the highest point on the hill and it's surrounded by trees so you can't see anything. There was a couple up there who had just moved to Seattle from Chicago. We shared a laugh about the anticlimactic summit and then they took off.

Rachel grabbed the notebook out of the tuperware box and proceeded to read through entries from previous hikers. Along with various comments about people who claimed to have peed on the pen, there were some interesting notes. The first was something to the effect of: "Been here for three months. Running out of food and water and the squirrels have stopped talking to me." The longest entry (three pages!) was from a 24 year old girl who was in love with her 57 year old professor. She was on a hike to figure out what it all meant and straighten things out in her head. I feel like she probably failed.

I'm hoping that there will be many more hikes this summer so I have started a hiking photo gallery. Pictures from this hike are available in the gallery.

UPDATE: Thanks to Dad for catching my units error. It's probably not that surprising if you remember that I worked for Lockheed.

benmartens May 6, 2008 Outdoors