ben.parmeter

Yup. The rumors are true. We bagged the summit of Whitney. This last weekend marked my third successful summit of the tallest mountain in the contiguous 48 states. And I have to admit, it was a lot easier than I remembered the last two times I summited. I’m not saying it was a walk in the park by any means, but it just didn’t seem as difficult this time around. It’s understandably easier than the first time I summited in one day, but the last time I really remember it being worse. I think it was the fact that the altitude affected me more the second time. I dunno. Everyone made it and I’m proud of the entire crew. We had a great time despite the chilly nighttime temperatures. I’m particularly proud of the leaping photo that Erik took of me at the summit so I made that my thumb for this post. Note if you click on the photo it opens up a larger version over the top of the page (thanks to the newly installed wordpress plugin shutter reloaded).

I have a whole raft of pictures available on my gallery here. And I’m even planning on putting together a short video of the trip. Stay tuned for that.

I also did some more creative stuff with Google Earth this time. They have that feature where the mountains are extruded in 3-D for some landmarks. And it just so happens that Mt. Whitney is one of the areas that is 3-D. Awesome. You can check out some of the shots starting with this one here.

For those of you who are GPS folks, I’ve made my Mt. Whitney Trail GPX file available here. Perhaps someone can utilize this for a future trip. There are some data errors in there, but for the most part it’s reasonably accurate.

I’m famous! Well, maybe not famous. But my name is etched below the photo on this little website here and also on this little website here. Remember the photo from a couple of posts back? My brother, true to his word actually got it published to Forbes Traveler and somehow it got picked up on MSNBC as well, and you can see my name right there under the photo. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not about to quit my day job to become a photog. But I have to admit I was full of pride when I saw it.

I have the pages cached as jpegs forever right here.

Pat, Cynthia and I bagged the summit of Pyramid Peak (in the Desolation Wilderness) this weekend. We wanted something intense (perhaps even murderous) with plenty of high elevation as preparation for the Mt. Whitney trek coming up soon. Pyramid Peak gave us the challenge we needed with an approximate 7.5 mile round trip and an elevation gain of 4100ft. (summit at 9983ft.). The first mile is a real challenge and took it’s toll on all of us. You can really feel the lack of air at that altitude and I think it was a good prep for what’s in store for us at Mt. Whitney. The day after, I’m a bit stiff, but feeling much more confident that I’ve got the chops to hack it at 14,000ft.

Check out the gallery of photos here which includes the an altitude chart, topographic maps, and satellite imagery.

I got an e-mail from my brother last night asking if I had pictures from various rock climbing hot-spots in the U.S. including Mt. Whitney, Yosemite and Smith Rock. He’s working on the art for his article on a major travel website. I poured through my photo archive looking for pictures of the specific climbs and could only come up with a few. I had several of Monkey Face at Smith Rock so I picked a choice photo and provided that to him (which he said may have a good chance to actually make it on the site – woot!). I also skimmed through the Whitney trips looking for a good picture of the Keeler Needle. No such luck with that search. But looking at all those pictures of the previous 2004 Whitney trip got me really excited about the upcoming trip. The scenery is beautiful, and is like no other hike I’ve ever experienced.

I “re-posted” the pictures from our 2004 Mt. Whitney Expedition here. You may not get the same kind of rush from looking at these that I did, but if you’re one of seven folks in our crew that hasn’t been on the Whitney trail before, I hope this spurs some anticipation excitement.

I went wheel’n this weekend with a few friends. We took out Justin’s heavily modified ’72 Blazer and Anthony’s heavily modified 200x Land Rover Discovery to the Tahoe National Forest. Fun ensued. Check out the photo evidence of the high sierra hi-jinx here. It was super awesome.

All my thanks go to Pat for showing me how to get the data off of my Garmin ForeTrex 201 and insert it into Google Earth. It produced beautiful products like this and this of both the Deschutes day hike in Oregon and the Cathedral Lake backpacking trip in Yosemite. I’m going to use this on all my future trips.

For those of you who want to try this at home, this may be useful. I installed GPSBabel on my Linux box today and was able to quickly grab data off of my Garmin ForeTrex 201 using the following:

gpsbabel -t -w -i garmin -f /dev/ttyUSB0 -o gpx -F out.gpx

(For windows users that have USB cables try :usb instead of /dev/ttyUSB0. If you have a serial cable, try COMx where x=the COM port you’ve connected your GPS device to.)

Then I installed Google Earth (used Automatix for Ubuntu), but unfortunately it’s an older version than what is available for Windows so the GPX functionality hasn’t yet been introduced. Fortunately, however, there is an alternative. Google Earth also accepts a KML (KeyHole Markup Language) format which is easily created with GPS Babel. Just type the following.

gpsbabel -i gpx -f in.gpx -o kml -F out.kml

Once you do this, drag the KML file into Google Earth and blam-o, you’ve got a map. I was perplexed at first because my data wasn’t showing up, but remembered later that Pat mentioned a time-slider bar. Sure enough, at the top of the screen is the time slider and all I needed to do was slide that baby over to the right. All the data, was right there. Enjoy.

8/2/2007 – UPDATE: I’ve added some altitude charts to the gallery here and here. Also, my brother Dave has put together a YouTube video of our Deschutes trip using pictures and video from both of our cameras.

You got your way Steve and Ragan. I finally posted pictures of our trip to Germany. It’s nine whole gallery pages of German fun. I may be missing a few pictures from the last day that I was roaming the city alone, but I may post those later. We’ll see just how ambitious I get. That’s it for now. Enjoy.

I finally posted the pictures from our rafting trip to the lower Deschutes river. The first half of the gallery are my pictures, and the second half are Dave’s pictures. So if you’re confused by the order of things, that should help explain it. Anyway, it was amazing. It was a great male bonding experience, complete with camping, beer-drinking, steak grilling, hammocking, hiking, snakes, and pure white knuckle fear. This trip was particularly great, because I got to spend some guy-time with my dad and my brother. It was a rare opportunity, because we all live so far apart. It was good for the soul. A huge thanks must go out to my Uncle Jim for organizing the whole thing.

I was a bit late in posting this set of photos, and actually got the Cathedral hiking pix up first. I guess I was just swamped with life for a while. At least I beat Dave, who promised to produce a video of this trip. I can’t wait to see what he does with that. He risked his camera getting doused and got some good footage of the rapids we went through.

Enjoy the photos. Until next time.

Have you caught on to the latest internet craze? I’m talking about the LOLCats. I am not usually one to jump on the bandwagon with these things, but after a recent trip to Yosemite I just couldn’t resist. Last weekend, a group of us drove up to Yosemite and backpacked up to the Cathedral Lakes area(check out the photos here). It was beautiful, with sawtooth peaks surrounding us and a crystal clear mountain lake below us rimmed in granite – there really is nothing like this that I’ve ever seen. The wildlife was incredibly tame, or at least it seemed that way because we had deer walking through our camp and a marmot who had no problem chomping on a tree only feet away from us. We must have been huffing too much deet, because I came up with an LOLcats reference for the marmot that had the group in stitches. Unfortunately, the mosquitoes managed to break our spirits and eventually drove us back down the trail, retreating to a lower elevation. Without further ado, starting a new internet revolution, I’m going to post the first lolmarmots picture. Comedy gold.

P.S. Stay tuned for a video of the hiking trip… that is if I get really ambitious and put one together. That also means I’ll have to learn how to use some type of linux video editing package. Any suggestions?

Many updates to the gallery this week! Yup – quite a backlog of updates.

I’ve got pictures from our trip to Oregon for my grandmother’s funeral where we got a chance to play in the snow. We visited Silver Falls State Park, had some tall mugs of hot chocolate and skated around on the slick walking paths.

I also added pictures from both my trip to Taipei, Taiwan and Beijing, China. There’s lots of stories to go along with those photos. Perhaps for another time though.

Lastly, I’ve added some pictures of the USA vs. Mexico friendly (USA wins 2:0) that I had the privilege of attending recently. Many thanks to the Mooney’s for hooking me up with tickets for this one. Steve and Ragan – you rule. Good to see the whole AZ crew from time to time.

So stop wasting time and clickety-click-click on to the gallery.