I've actually been hanging around Mammoth Lakes again for a few days now since Monday Aug 5 when I got to Reds Meadow after taking 11 days to get here from the South Lake trailhead above Bishop.
That was actually quite an eventful trek, and eventually I plan to post the "back-dated" details on this blog, but for now I'll just summarize to say I dodged some lightning over Bishop Pass, endured a full night of steady rain, got caught in a hailstorm, had my nose, lungs and photo-ops tarnished by smoke from the Aspen fire most every afternoon and some mornings as well, encountered dozens of southbound JMT hikers each day while leapfrogging a few times with only two northbound PCT hikers in this whole section, charged my camera batteries at "VVR" (Vermilion Valley Resort on Lake Edison) which is what allowed me to stay away from my car/civilization for 10 whole days.
But I still had plenty of good photo-ops to fill up all my CF cards forcing me to ration my memory use by scaling back from full res Raw files to half-rez "SRaw" files for the last three days.
Unfortunately I unknowingly also turned off generating jpg files when I made that switch on my camera, which later caused me some grief and wasted time here in Mammoth while trying to "recover" files I thought I must have overwritten at some point between copying them to my backup disk, and "reorganizing" them on that disk.
That wasn't my only technical problem though:
- The "selection" button on my camera continues to be intermittently unresponsive although I now understand the problem better: in dry, hot conditions it seems that some kind of damaged O-ring or something designed to function like a spring, becomes "mushy", and when I press the button while it's in that state, the button stays "depressed" for several minutes and during that time won't respond to further direct button presses, but will indirectly make "random" selections when I turn the selection-wheel that this button is at the center of, causing unintended menu selections and sometimes changes to camera settings.
- The on/off switch on my Holux GPS data logger broke: the plastic "knob" on the surface just slides loosely back and forth without engaging the underlying switch. I haven't tried prying it off altogether to try to directly access the underlying switch, because fortunately it is currently permanently in the "on" state, and I can just remove the battery at night or during extended breaks to keep from draining the battery. I've contacted Holux Tech Support and they referred me to the US distributer for possible repair ... I haven't yet followed thru with them other than to verify that when I bought the unit via Amazon, the order was actually fulfilled by this vendor.
- The proprietary "ezTour" software that comes with the Holux is frustratingly glitchey! There are unexplained very long delays (tens of minutes...) where the program becomes unresponsive (so says windows.) The program has trouble finding the right usb-com port number - the "auto-locate" option never works, and there seems to be some kind of hide-and-seek game going on where it waits until I manually select a port number, then activates itself on "the other" port number (usually between com3 and com4.) I can then cause the log data to download, and it gives a running count of the amt of data downloaded, and then it says the data is successfully downloaded, but before I can choose one of several options to save the data to disk, I have to wait a few dozen minutes of unresponsiveness while it does some processing to display the tracklog on a Google Map. (There is no option to skip this. I can then save the whole "project" which I assume saves the data in it's "raw" format that may be a semi-proprietary binary compressed format, or I can save it as GPX or NMEA or a number of other formats. But no matter which option I choose, the program then goes into yet another "unresponsive" state for another few dozen minutes - even when just saving the "project". Not very conducive to quickly getting back on the trail! Still, I've so far been able to eventually get a log file saved as a GPX that checks out using another small independent program that I've been using (ezGPS) just to check that I have useable data current to my last day of use - even after my current broken-switch workaround of removing the battery. So eventually I should be able to use these logs to geotag my picts (except for those early glitches that I've described earlier.) Oh, also, snooping on the internet I've read of another similar product using same chip-set, and learned of an open-source program able to read and control that chipset, (it uses GPSBABEL behind the scenes for data-format translations, possibly even for the chipset-reading - not sure at the moment.) I've downloaded it and tried it and it actually seems to be downloading the data, and I've got a "raw data" file stored, but for some reason wasn't able to produce a GPX from that program, not sure why. Will try again when I have more time to play. Am hopeful this could solve the "unresponsiveness" issue of Holux's "oficial" ezTour program.
- The valve of my Katadyne water filter "sticks" so that when I try pumping water it doesn't shut to switch the flow from intake hose to the filter chamber. I've tried "cleaning" it by more violently forcing water through that area where the "ballbearing-valve" is, and added fresh silicone grease to the O-ring on the plunger as recommended, though not to valve part because it seems to me there shouldn't be grease there... I'll play with it some more later but meanwhile can manually constrict the intake hose at the right time though that is very slow...
- still getting confused by the camera file numbering that "rolls over" after 9999, compounded by the various date fields in the file metadata (some of which change when files are copied, looked at, etc..) and which of these dates gets displayed and used to sort the folder lists on my Linux EEEPC and broken Dell laptop running windows XP, and on a few windows terminals at the library. (Missing my big laptop with Lightroom that I've come to rely on to firstly sensibly rename my photos by date-taken to avoid any serial-number-rollover confusion and date-field confusion, then add location data via my tracklogs, then exposure-adjust etc the images before evaluating/selecting/uploading them.)
All this is to excuse my lack of pictures to present, and why I am taking so much more time off-trail than I would like, while I doublecheck to make sure I've got all my photos backed up before I reuse my CF cards. Why just this morning I was thinking I was done but while trying to remind myself via my photos where I had stayed the 2nd night after Bishop Pass while starting to write this blog entry, I discovered I had about 1100 photos missing, which turned out to be on two CF cards that I had misplaced! Yikes! No technical glitch, that.
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