Studio711.com – Ben Martens

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

Tulip Festival

The Skagit Valley Tulip Festival is a pretty big shin dig in these parts. Imagine 100,000 of your closest friends driving up I-5 and then getting off on some tiny exit to sit in traffic in fields. Usually Tyla and I head up there on the motorcycle with ~100 other riders for the annual Tulip Ride, but we missed it this year because it fell on our one year anniversary. So this year we headed up there with Tim and Chelsea and had a blast! When we’re there on the bikes, we’re going on a prearranged date and we have a schedule to stick to. This time we waited for a glorious sunny day and took our time.

While I’ve seen the fields before and it’s not really anything new, I was very excited to take the camera out for a spin. I still wonder how many spectacular pictures I’m missing, but I do feel like I’m getting a few more keepers as the weeks go on.

You can view them in the photo gallery under Tulip Festival. The six newest photos are from this trip. I’ll spoil the surprise and add my favorite one to this post, but head into the photo gallery to see the rest.

PS. If you have an eye for photography and have suggestions about how I could have improved any of these photos, please let me know! Don’t worry about offending me. Whether it’s bad composition, post-processing, or anything else, I want to know!

benmartens April 26, 2011 Photography, Travel

Anniversary Trip

For our first anniversary, we headed out to San Juan Island to stay at States Inn & Ranch. It’s not your typical bed and breakfast, but it was perfect for us. As the name implies, the inn sits on a working ranch, and we were able to roam wherever we wanted. Tyla spent hours and hours watching and petting goats, pygmy goats, horses, sheep, alpacas, chicken and a llama.

We got the explore the island a little bit as well. The remnants of the Pig War fought between the British and Americans are still visible on the island. In fact, the British camp is the only place where the National Park Service raises a non-American flag.

All in all, it was a very relaxing trip punctuated by great food and lots of animal interaction. The California room where we stayed is visible in the picture below. it’s on the second floor and has enormous windows. We had a great view!

I’ve uploaded our favorite photos into the photo gallery under the tag San Juan Island. A few of them have gone into my dSLR Favorites gallery as well.

benmartens April 13, 2011 Travel

South Shore Train Crash NTSB Report

If you don’t know that I was in a train crash in 1993, you should get caught up by reading this blog post. If this had happened 10 years later, the internet would be full of stories and photos about the event, but as it is, it’s almost impossible to find anything. Back in college, I wrote to the National Transportation Safety Board and requested a copy of PB93-916304 NTSB/RAR-93/03. It came to me as 25 photocopied pages. The quality isn’t great, but it’s the best I have to work with. I scanned the whole thing in so you can download the PDF and read it for yourself. (UPDATE 2023-07-17: I see the NTSB has posted it on their website now.) I know many of you won’t be interested in this, but I’m posting it mostly so that other people can find a copy of it if they need it.

These two photos from the document are the only ones I have. (Maybe Mom saved some newspapers?) I’m not positive, but I believe the top picture is the first of three cars on our train and the bottom picture is the third of the three cars.

benmartens April 11, 2011 Commentary

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

Deep Snow Safety

It’s time (or too late) for a Public Safety Announcement about deep snow safety. When I moved out to the Pacific Northwest, I learned about something called a tree well. Because of the large pine trees we have around here, snow doesn’t accumulate around the base of trees as quickly as it does on other parts of the hill. Also, normal snow gets packed down by skiers while snow around the base of a tree remains light and fluffy. What you’re left with is a black hole waiting to suck you in and kill you faster than you can ever imagine.

The typical scenario is that a skier falls on a run and slides head first underneath a tree. They fall down into the light powdery snow with their head near the trunk. The more they struggle, the more they become encased in snow and very quickly they suffocate and die.

This was driven home by the recent loss (?) of a Crystal Mountain local. He was an expert skier who didn’t show up at the bottom of a run with friends. Patrol and volunteers have been searching for him for well over a week and have not found him. It’s very likely that he fell into a tree well and won’t be found until the snow melts.

When there is any kind of deep snow, “ski and ride with a friend” is not an optional piece of guidance. Even if you’re with a friend you need to keep a close eye on each other. The last person in any group is always the most vulnerable. A tree well can kill you in a matter of minutes, faster than your friends can climb back up the hill even if they’re lucky enough to see what happened to you. The only real way to be safe is to avoid tree wells entirely. Ski in control and keep a wide berth from the trees.

For more information about tree wells, visit http://www.treewelldeepsnowsafety.com/

benmartens March 15, 2011 Skiing

Windows Media Center LCD Arduino Project

JimM got me interested in Arduinos. They are simple electronics boards that contain almost everything you need to get started with your project. When it arrived in the mail, I connected it to the computer via USB, opened up the development environment, uploaded a small program to the board and boom, I had a blinking light. Simple, yes, but the time to results was extremely low.

My overall plan was to build a display for the Media Center PC in our living room. I wanted to be able to easily see when it was recording something or when one of the tuners was being used by one of the extenders. There are some premade solutions that would have probably worked, but this seemed like a great starter Arduino project and I would end up with something that was completely customizable.

In addition to the Arduino, I got a 20×4 character LCD screen and some small supplies like resistors, wire, buttons, and a potentiometer. This is the point where I should show a schematic for the whole thing, but honestly I never drew one. I built little portions of it as I went and ended up with something that works and hasn’t burned down the house yet.

Basically, the Arduino Uno sends power to the LCD and a 10K potentiometer controls the contrast of the screen. The board also sends the text for the screen through four wires along with a couple extra wires for enabling the screen, etc. The board powers the backlight for the LCD but I hooked up a resistor there to dim the backlight a bit. I had originally planned to have the backlight be controllable from software but I gave up after a couple failures trying to get a transistor hooked into the circuit. There is also a simple button hooked in, but I haven’t needed to use that in the software yet.

Once I got it all soldered together, I stuck it into a plastic hobby box from Radio Shack. I had to cut out a rectangular hole in the front for the LCD. That was done freehand with a Dremel and looks pretty bad when you get up close. Luckily it hides in the shadows and you can’t really tell. I have ideas to do that better next time.

The box now sits by the Media Center and is connected to the PC via USB. That cable provides power and communications. A C# application gathers status from the Ceton InfiniTV tuner and sets the display for the LCD in the box. (For the curious, there is a JSON interface to get to the InfiniTV status.) When a tuner is in use, the box displays the channel call sign and the name of the show that is being recorded. I get that info by mapping the channel number from the tuner to a call sign and then looking for the corresponding file in the Recorded TV folder. That file has the show name. When a tuner isn’t in use, it shows the temperature of that tuner. I’ll probably come up with something better for unused tuners in the future.

This was my first real electronics project so I learned quite a few things that are probably obvious to other people:

  • Use a bread board. Soldering everything to see if it worked was a pain.
  • Use header pins so you don’t have to solder directly to the LCD screen.
  • This whole thing could have been done in a couple minutes by buying a pre-made LCD shield that plugs in on top of the Arduino. I’m glad I did it manually the first time, but next time I’ll probably go for the shield.
  • Buy an introductory electronics book.
  • Take more pictures along the way! I was so excited to get this working that it somehow slipped my mind.

What’s next? I have quite a few project ideas but I think the one I’ll tackle next is making a tilt/pan mount for my camera that is controlled by an Arduino and will automatically take big panorama pictures. I’m also going to build an intervalometer into it for time lapse. This project will involve more buttons, motor control, and power from a battery.

benmartens March 11, 2011 Gadgets, Geek, Projects

Tuna Casserole

“Tuna” and “casserole” are not two words which usually excite people, but for some reason it sounded good one night. I must say, it turned out to be quite delicious. The recipe comes straight from allrecipes.com and I didn’t make many modifications.

Ingredients

  • 1 (12 ounce) package egg noodles
  • 1/4 cup chopped onion
  • 2 cups shredded Cheddar cheese
  • 1 cup frozen green peas
  • 2 (6 ounce) cans tuna, drained
  • 2 (10.75 ounce) cans condensed cream of mushroom soup
  • 1/2 (4.5 ounce) can sliced mushrooms
  • 1 cup crushed potato chips

Bring a large pot of lightly salted water to a boil. Cook pasta in boiling water for 8 to 10 minutes, or until al dente; drain.

Preheat oven to 425 degrees F (220 degrees C).

In a large bowl, thoroughly mix noodles, onion, 1 cup cheese, peas, tuna, soup and mushrooms. Transfer to a 9×13 inch baking dish, and top with potato chip crumbs and remaining 1 cup cheese.

Bake for 15 to 20 minutes in the preheated oven, or until cheese is bubbly.

benmartens March 10, 2011 Food

Bacon Wrapped Tater Tots

This is barely a recipe, but I’ll post it anyway because it was so delicious. Take a strip of bacon, cut off part of it and wrap it around a tater tot. I didn’t do this, but it might be a good idea to stick a toothpick through it to hold it all together. You might want to soak the toothpicks in water first so it doesn’t catch fire in the oven.

I used thick cut pepper bacon, but I think the thinner stuff would work better. Cook according to the tater tot directions and then finish it off with a blast from the broiler. Remove when the bacon looks cooked. You can spice it up a bit by adding a chopped jalapeno into the wrap.

I had some regular tots on the tray as well and they ended up cooking in bacon grease. Delicious but don’t eat too many or you’ll probably revisit them.

benmartens March 1, 2011 Food