First, Frozen Head is reasonably close to my apartment. In the range of 40 miles. Second, it's even closer to work - I'd say 20 miles. This makes it an excellent target for some after-work hikes in the future. Wish I had realized this before!
Some techno-geekery follow the photos, but I know that the two people who actually "read" the blog are really just here for the pretty pictures. So here they are. Check out the album for my usual amazing captions. I also recommend the album to really get some of the closeups that I didn't want to crop.
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| From Frozen Head - 2010-06-05 |
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| From Frozen Head - 2010-06-05 |
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| From Frozen Head - 2010-06-05 |
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| From Frozen Head - 2010-06-05 |
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| From Frozen Head - 2010-06-05 |
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| From Frozen Head - 2010-06-05 |
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| From Frozen Head - 2010-06-05 |
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| From Frozen Head - 2010-06-05 |
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| From Frozen Head - 2010-06-05 |
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| From Frozen Head - 2010-06-05 |
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| From Frozen Head - 2010-06-05 |
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| From Frozen Head - 2010-06-05 |
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| From Frozen Head - 2010-06-05 |
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| From Frozen Head - 2010-06-05 |
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| From Frozen Head - 2010-06-05 |
So those are the pictures. I ended up spending a ton of time at Emory Gap Falls (the second one you encounter on the trail). Unfortunately there were some rude, noisy people who kept walking into my shots, so I took a short offshoot trail up around to the top of the falls and did some eating, relaxing, and shooting up there until they took off.
Kinda goes to show that the unexpected annoyances can sometimes turn into unexpected benefits. While up there, I got most of the shots of that first snail, as well as some of the spiders. Probably never would have seen them if I wasn't looking to kill some time waiting.
However, the other hikers were still annoying.
Critter count:
Spider: numerous
Millipedes: numerous
Centipedes: many
Crayfish: dozen or so
Large salamander: 1
Tiny salamander: 1
Fishes: dozens
Large game: none :(
Snakes: none :(
GPS output of hike
Now, for the promised techno-geekery. This time around I decided to try something new. Obviously, I carry around my Garmin 350 a lot when I'm taking photos. It turns out there are a ton of programs out there that take the .gpx files you can export and then geo-tag your photos! The only requirement is that the time on your camera is relatively accurate. I used gpicsync to do that for this hike. I have to say, I'm very pleased with it. It adds the GPS coordinates to each picture you take, and then programs like Picasa can easily plot those on a map.
So, if you go to the album, you'll notice that this time there are a bunch of little icons in the lower right on that map. You can click "view map" and it will pull up a bigger map, with little thumbnails of my pictures almost exactly where they were taken! Pretty frickin' cool in my book. It's another step for post-processing, but it's a lot cheaper than the $200 GPS I could buy that plugs into my camera. It probably took ~20 mins to tag all 300 photos I took, but gpicsync spent a good chunk (maybe most) of that time making backups of my originals.
Anyway, that may not be quite as cool for the types of photos I took today, but I think it will be really handy on longer trips, or tooling around cities and such things. I think it's even cool for these sorts of hikes, but maybe you don't.
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