Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Outdoors

Alder Lake State Park

I headed out with the Brandt family to Alder Lake State Park for the Fourth of July weekend. It wasn’t our first choice since we got a late start on reservations, but the campground actually was pretty nice. The biggest downside was that it was close to Hwy 7 which is the western entrance to Mt. Rainier, but the traffic died down a bit at night and the fan in the camper drowned out the noise.

Our campsite was just a short walk from a boat launch into Alder Lake and Oskar made good use of that with a lot of swimming. Tyla and I even joined him for a bit. The water is pretty cold since it flows straight off the Nisqually glacier on Rainier, but we had a good time.

On Saturday, we braved the crowds and headed up to the Paradise visitors center on the south side of Rainier. It was pretty easy to spot the extra dirty snow on the Nisqually glacier from a big rock slide they had last week. (Video is posted on YouTube from hikers.)

On Sunday night we headed up the road to Eatonville to check out their fireworks display. After a couple conversations with the police, we ended up getting booted off the school grounds viewing area because pets were not allowed. We watched from the parking lot, had a great view, and beat all the traffic leaving town.

All in all it was a great trip. We couldn’t have asked for better weather and camping was a great way to celebrate one of the first weekends that has really felt like summer!

Photos are posted in the photo gallery!

benmartens July 8, 2011 Outdoors

Kanaskat-Palmer State Park

We have had quite a few new young couples join our church recently, so we decided to put together a camping trip. Unfortunately I picked a weekend when not a lot of the new people could join us, but we still did get a good crew together for a fun weekend.

Logan, Megan, Micah, Tim, Chelsea, Tyla and I headed south to Kanaskat Palmer State Park. You may remember that I camped there about three years ago. This time we got two sites to hold all the tents.

Camping this time of year is a bit risky because of the weather, but thankfully the rain held off for the most part. It broke up our Friday night fire around 1am, but we were probably overdue for bed anyway. Saturday was spent exploring the campground, playing ladder golf and generally being lazy.

Photos are posted in the photo gallery. Check the dates on the pictures to see where this trip stops and the last trip photos begin.

benmartens June 15, 2011 Outdoors

Grand Coulee Dam

It inevitably rains in the Puget Sound area over Memorial Day, so this year we decided to head east of the mountains. For those of you unfamiliar with Washington geography, the Cascade Mountains run down the state and create two very different environments. The west side is dominated by the ocean weather so it’s very mild year round with lots of rain. The east side of the mountains is a certified desert with extreme temperatures. You’re almost guaranteed to get sunshine. So with that knowledge in hand, we looked into a trip to the Grand Coulee Dam.

Unfortunately Tyla and I came up with this plan with her family very late and only had a couple camp sites to pick from. I picked a spot at Sun Banks Resort mostly at random. You know how you have that one horribly wet camping trip that will forever make you say “well it least this trip isn’t as wet as THAT one”? I now have a similar comparison for loud and tiny campsites. Our site was maybe twice as big as their camper. Our fire pit was about 8 feet from our (thankfully friendly) neighbors. And the rest of the campground was populated by college kids drinking and partying nearly around the clock with brief breaks for vomiting. I’ve never seen that many beer bottles laying around a campground. The only good thing is that we were on the end of the campground in a group of sites that were a little bit separated from the main party and we bordered the lake. That being said, I felt pretty dumb for picking the site but it could have been worse.

On Saturday we checked out the dam and the Visitors Center there. We found a spot for Oskar to swim and basked in the sunshine. We capped off the day with a short drive back to the dam to watch the laser light show. You should probably see it once but be warned that it’s 40+ minutes long. We were all fighting sleep by the end.

We started off Sunday with a trip back to the dam to take a tour. There are a lot of restrictions post-9/11, but we went down into the third powerplant and they drove us across the top of the dam. I’ll probably make a second post full of the facts we learned on that trip. It’s an incredible piece of construction!

After lunch on Saturday, we headed out on a hike that I picked off the web. At 4 miles and 600 feet of elevation gain, it seemed pretty simple once you got past the “0.15 miles of rock scramble.” Once I saw the hike, I should have turned us around. That first bit was pretty treacherous, often requiring getting down on all fours to make it up the sandy and rocky “path.” Nancy and Logan made it up the first part and then turned around. The rest of us continued on but turned around before making it to the top as we were running out of water and energy. Plus we knew that going down would be even harder than coming up. Unfortunately that was very true.

We had barely started back down the trail when Tyla took a tumble. The squeamish among you should skip this paragraph. She caught her thumb nail on a rock and bent it back about halfway down the nail ripping the nail off the nail bed. Blood ensued as I whipped out my first aid kit and tried to remember the class Tim and I took. I got her bandaged up but then we had to get all the way down the trail and she had lost use of one hand. Thankfully we made it down without any more serious injuries.

Bear Grylls says that a very bad day is a series of small mistakes that you ignore. I was tired of ignoring small mistakes so I decided to put an end to it by taking Tyla to the doctor. If we were at home we might have tried to clean it up ourselves, but we didn’t have many supplies. The only doctor in the small town that was open on Sunday was the ER so that’s where we ended up. They cleaned it out well for her, gave her tips on keeping the pain away, and were very nice in the whole process. Thankfully there was no line so we got through pretty quickly. After hearing what they had to say about it, we probably could have skipped that trip, but I was happy to have finally erred on the side of caution for once and we both felt better knowing that nothing more serious had happened.

So I have to give a huge thanks to the Brandt family for hauling their camper halfway across the state, feeding us, and putting up with my bad choices! If I ever get to pick another campground, I’ll try to find a bigger/quieter one and you can bet that the next hike will be something we can all do without major risk of injury. Thank you all for being so nice about the whole weekend!

This post is already getting pretty long so I’ll save the pictures for another day. However, on the way out there I did mount the Kodak Zx3 to the windshield and make a timelapse video. I wanted to show everyone who quickly the weather and environment can change! In an hour or two, I can drive from wet, cool weather, over a mountain pass through snow and down into a desert complete with tumbleweed!

benmartens June 1, 2011 Outdoors, Timelapse, Travel, Video

Lake Serene

At the end of last week, Tim, Andy, Stephanie, Micah and I cobbled together a plan to go hiking on Saturday. Tim suggested Lake Serene up by his house so we grabbed our gear and set forth. This one is hike #35 in your textbooks.

The day was a bit wet and chilly, but we dressed and packed appropriately. The first mile and a half are a gentile incline up to the base of Bridal Veil Falls. The river comes down over 1000 feet in less than half a mile and the trail snakes right below the last free fall section. Somehow Tucker ended up swimming that pool for a bit, but even the misty spray was enough to suck the heat out of my body.

From there the trail started climbing steeper and it was quite rocky and wet in many spots. There have been a lot of blowdowns and slides along the trail but they were almost all moved out of the way by volunteers. Because of the steepness of the second half of the trail, there are endless switchbacks and stairs built into the hillside. This trail gets a lot of traffic in the summer. If those stairs weren’t there I imagine you’d have a big muddy mess.

We reached the snow with about half a mile left in the hike. It was 3-4 feet deep in places, but the path was well tracked so we didn’t sink in very far. We arrived at the lake to find it frozen as expected. It will be fun to do this again in the summer and see how different it looks. Mt. Index rises from the opposite side of the lake and adds a very imposing backdrop to the lake.

All in all it’s about 7.5 miles and 2200 feet of elevation gain. Poles aren’t required but were a big help in the muddy and snowy sections. Both hiking books that we looked at rated the difficulty as 3 out of 5.

I didn’t want to risk the nice camera in the heavy mist/rain, but I did bring the little point and shoot to document the trip. Photos are in the gallery tagged with “Lake Serene.”

benmartens May 23, 2011 Outdoors

Two Hikes

There won’t be a lot of hikes available for the next couple months as the snow melts so we’re stuck in the lowlands trying to avoid the crowds. A couple weeks ago, Tyla, Micah and I headed out to Squak Mountain. For those of you following along in your textbooks, this is hike #5. The hike winds around the least crowded of the Issaquah Alps and covers a lot of the estate of the founder of the KING broadcasting company. In fact, part of the hike goes right past the foundation of the old house and the large fireplace is still standing. The hike wasn’t that memorable, but it was nice to get out on a beautiful day and stretch the legs a little bit.

This past weekend, the three of us headed out again to hike along the De Leo Wall on Cougar Mountain. This one is hike #2 in the book and it was a bit more interesting than the previous hike. The trailhead was swamped with people but we left them all behind pretty quickly and found a bit of solitude. We never made it to the viewpoint because of some confusing signage and text in the book, but we did find the waterfall.

All in all these were decent hikes for early in the season but I won’t be itching to do either one again. The Squak Mountain hike was notable for some very bad guidance from the book. It usually does a good job of leading you along the trail, but Squak and Cougar are so riddled with a maze of trails that it can get pretty tricky.

Hopefully we’ll get some warmer weather soon to get that snow melting up in the mountains! There is still 10-20 feet of snow in most places up there.

benmartens May 19, 2011 Outdoors

Featured Photo

There is a relatively new (at least to me) website called dailyhiker.com that I’ve been following. The guys who run it are local to the Pacific Northwest but the blog covers hiking around the world. They ran a contest recently for the best lake photo so I submitted my photo of MattM skipping rocks into the Puget Sound (technically not a lake I guess) on last summer’s camping trip. I didn’t win but I did make it into the top 13. Interestingly it’s the only photo in that group that has a person in it. This photo was taken with our little point and shoot. I’m really looking forward to hiking around with the T2i this summer.

http://www.dailyhiker.com/news/best-lake-photos-from-readers/

benmartens March 17, 2011 Links, Outdoors

Mt. Rainier Sees Increase In Visits

We had some good weather to start the summer last year and it translated into a lot of visitors to Mt. Rainier. The 1.19 million visitors was up 3.5% from 2009 and it was the most since 2004. An article in TheSunNews.com speculates that it is a sign of the recovering economy. The article is full of quite a few interesting stats:

  • The 2010 visitor number equaled the 10 year average
  • 64% of visitors are from the Puget Sound area (estimated)
  • ~15% of visitors stayed overnight
  • Backcountry campers were down 5.5% from 2009
  • Overall, National Park visitors were down 1.81% from 2009

I accounted for a couple of those visits with the motorcycle ride around Rainier and the Camp Muir hike. I really want to get down there and do some more hiking (Mt. Rainier or otherwise) this summer.

benmartens February 23, 2011 Outdoors

Crystal Lakes Hike

When spring rolls around, I start flipping through various hikes trying to figure out which ones I want to tackle that summer. The first one I identified this past spring was Crystal Lakes. It’s not a very strenuous hike but it’s one of my favorite areas and ends up at an alpine lake. For those of you following along in your textbook, this is hike #66 in Beyond Mt. Si.

Free weekend days with no rain are getting harder and harder to come by, so on Sunday Tyla and I decided to go for it. It as rainy/misty/cloudy for most of the drive but it didn’t bother us on the hike. The hike itself is consistently steep as it climbs 3000 feet in about 3 miles. The trail is very smooth and well maintained though so you don’t spend a lot of energy stepping over roots and rocks.

We arrived at the lake and found a couple people there, but even though this is a popular trail, we saw less than a dozen people all day. We were able to see all around the lake (and even spotted some leftover snow from last season on the far bank.) It quickly got very cloudy/foggy and we didn’t have much of a view.

It was a very enjoyable hike though and we did get some good glimpses of fall color and at one point the clouds parted and we could see Rainier. The shore was very accessible all the way around. I’m tempted to go back in the summer and do some (chilly) swimming there.

benmartens October 7, 2010 Outdoors

Muir Snowfield Glissading

One of the great parts about the hike up to Camp Muir was glissading (sliding on your rear end) back down the snowfield. We carried trash bags up with us to help give us some extra slide and a little water protection. We all got pretty wet but it was a blast after all that hard work. I took some video of Andy and Andy sliding down. AndyM came up with the idea of poking his legs through the bottom of the bag to make some stylish shorts.

benmartens September 13, 2010 Outdoors

Camp Muir Timelapse Video

I’ve been playing around with a lot of time lapse ideas lately. I took some pictures for part of the return trip from Potholes which you’ll see soon, but on the hike up to Muir, I distracted myself by thinking how I could combine all the various data I had collected into one display.

In the backpack, the GPS was taking a recording every few seconds. I was also snapping photos every once in a while. To combine the two, I wrote an app to plot out our current location on top of a topo map and show a photo that was taken at that time (if one exists.) With the GPS data, I was also able to show our rate of ascent, the current elevation, the current time, and the latitude and longitude.

I combined that all into one application, wrote each update out to a new image file and then combined the image files into a movie file. It’s embedded below or you can find it on YouTube. It’s best when viewed in HD in full screen mode.

benmartens September 2, 2010 Geek, Outdoors, Timelapse, Video