Red Yeti's Blog

03 Apr, 2010

Well, despite the fact I’ve still got several half-written GR5 write-up postings… Here’s the start of the Big Walk 2010 postings: Corsica, the GR20. It’s around 190 kilometres long with 12,500 of height gain (and loss).

We decided that we’d have to do it when we also decided that we’d have to walk the GR5;  as we listened to a Cicerone sponsored podcast with Andy Howell interviewing Paddy Dillon.

We’d considered going straight on to the GR20 from the end of the GR5 but realised that we’d rather just take our time meandering about on the GR5 instead. Which was certainly the right decision. After all, it’s not about how far you go or even where you end-up; it’s about the journey itself.

Although the GR20 is often described as “the toughest waymarked route in the world” it has to be noted that’s “waymarked” route (I think Paddy mentions exactly that in the podcast). By the sound of it, many “walkers”, including us, do more technical scrambling routes in North Wales, albeit for far shorter distances. None the less, it’s probably not the long distance route to be starting on as a novice walker, unless perhaps you’ve done some scrambling.

Once again we’ll be using Paddy’s excellent Cicerone guide book and taking  a TopoGuide number 67:  GR20: À Travers la Montagne Corse (from The Map Shop – as usual). The TopoGuides worked out very well on the GR5 since four of them cover the whole route. I’m also getting a couple of 1:100,000 scale maps to paw-over whilst planning and to get a feeling for how the whole route fits into the island.

It looks like the most practical way to get there will be to fly into Nice and then take either a ferry or a local flight over to Corsica. Which will mean we’ll be effectively picking up the walk from the point where we left  it last summer.

As last year, a couple of the Usual Suspects from other Big Walks will be joining us for the first sections before leaving us to complete it at our leisure.

Paddy outlines the route at fifteen days of actual walking. Add on another day each side for travelling to and from the start and finish points and you’re a couple of days short of a whole three working weeks. So we’ve decided to stay for those extra days to give us contingency on the route itself as well as some time to explore the more inhabited parts of the island once we’ve finished.

I’ll probably make most of the postings for this walk retrospectively since, on the one hand, I’ve not even finished the GR5 set and on the other, I like recording not only what our planning was but perhaps more importantly how that planning actually worked out in reality.

Excited now…

21 Mar, 2010

The volcano that sits beneath the Eyjafjallajökull (glacier) has started to erupt.

Which  is interesting since it appears that it’s emanating from Fimmvörðuháls; the col that we crossed on the last day of the Iceland walk (pictured above).

Apparently the “What to do if there’s an eruption” signs were well worth reading after all.

There’s a good picture and balanced article on Al Jazeera and not bad reporting but pretty poor picture on the Times Online.

Others are more sensationalist of course and no better pictures that we could find for the moment.

The fact that it’s coming from the col rather than actually beneath the Eyjafjallajökull is good news for Iceland since it’s less likely to cause massive flooding.

Of course it’s very early days, but at the moment it would seem likely that the route to extend the walk past Þórsmörk (Thorsmork) to link to Skógafoss on the coast may be out of action for a while.

Still, if the dreadful, derelict old hut near the col is destroyed that will be no great loss! I just hope the new one survives…

20 Mar, 2010

Did you know that hard drives are rather like light bulbs? They have a finite life and are simply not expected to last forever. At some point, the hard drive inside your computer will fail.

If you are reading this blog, you probably have pictures from your walks and climbs in beautiful mountains. If they are only stored on your computer’s hard drive, you would lose the lot.

By not backing-up you’re simply gambling that the hard drive will fail after you’ve moved on to a newer machine, whether it’s MS Windows, a Mac or Linux.

Losing my pictures would be awful but there’s plenty of other data I’d rather not lose; emails, letters, source code, old academic work. Horror stories of losses abound on the web and I personally know people that it has happened to.

If you backup already, to DVDs or an external hard disk perhaps, but keep that backup in the same building as the computer, you have no protection against the worst case scenarios of fire/theft. I’ve heard it said that people who lose their house in a fire or other disaster come to terms with the loss of everything, except for their pictures.

Backing up on to DVDs or even better, on to external hard drives is a great idea. Nothing is faster for restoring a backup from than a disk in your hand. But you still risk finding that the backup disk has simply died. They all do, eventually.

As long as you have broadband, online backup is a no-brainer. It’s easy to set up, cheap, and once it’s done, it’s done. No need to remember to start the backup, or swap the disk. Nothing more to do – ever.

It can take quite some time to back up initially; days or even weeks if you have a lot of data. But so what? As long as it doesn’t need looking after, it doesn’t matter. And once it’s been done once, only the changes are uploaded.

Its not expensive – especially once you consider how much you’d pay to get your photos back if you were to lose them.

There are many online services and I’ve tried several of those that get better reviews.

Overall I’d recommend Jungle Disk (see below) but I must admit to having been impressed by both CrashPlan Central and BackBlaze.

Edit: 23 May 2010: It struck me that whatever online backup solution you use, the passwords MUST be kept off-site somewhere so that you can access the backup from scratch on a new machine (say, in case your place burns down!). The best way to do that is probably to print them off and keep them somewhere with a friend or relative you trust.

I’ve been using Jungle Disk backed by Amazon S3 (not Rackspace Cloud Files) for several years and can’t find anything that ticks all the same boxes.

But my criteria are perhaps more demanding than some. Apart from checking for data-corruption, encryption and the high bandwidth that any good backup provider will have, I also want data stored in more than one geographic location looked after by a company that’s large enough to be unlikely to go bankrupt.

Amazon S3 writes every file to multiple different geographic locations (and then immediately checks each one to ensure the write was correct).

Most people would probably be happy with BackBlaze or CrashPlan (not Mozy – see below, or Carbonite – which I won’t waste anyone’s time even mentioning further).

The only thing that puts them in front of Jungle Disk is that they require slightly less set-up and they offer a fixed price per month option. Whereas Jungle Disk varies in cost depending on how much data you store. Though for storing less than 10gb of data, Jungle Disk is comparable per month – they just don’t do yearly billing unfortunately. Meaning a forex charge on your card every month if you’re outside the USA.

So, assuming you’re not quite as paranoid as I am, and can live with the small risk of the datacenter being wiped out in a far-fetched disaster (and so aren’t going for Jungle Disk+S3); which one would I recommend?

Probably BackBlaze. Although I prefer CrashPlan’s interface, I prefer BackBlaze’s use of a large, trusted datacenter.
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25 Feb, 2010

I must admit I wasn’t sure that the Terrocs would be up to the whole walk. I’d already talked to Outside Hathersage about getting some sent out to us if we needed them. But in the event, they did the whole 732KM without a problem.

Well  okay the Five Fingers did five days of duty, but the Terrocs were also out on several walking weekends before we left so I reckon they can claim the full mileage.

They’ll be around for a few more trips yet by the look of them. Since we’ve return I’ve put a couple of spots of McNett Seam Grip on each one where the stitching has become frayed but apart from that, they did the job nicely.

The one thing that let them down was that the right shoe has a rather fat seam right where my longest toe is (my second toe). But that was easily solved with a bit of wool stuffed into it. It “felted” to form a comfortable pad that I dutifully put back in place, every time I put them on, for about six weeks.

I was very lucky that Rachel was carrying some (that she never used – amazingly!). She’d bought it very cheaply from Boots (a chemist – not a shoe shop) in the UK. But I know that there’s a firm called hapihike that do a more expensive version, available online. I certainly plan to carry a small wad of wool in my first aid kit from now on.

Would I take Terrocs again? Only if I can’t find an even lighter, comfier shoe in the mean time!

23 Jan, 2010

As I mentioned before, we both love wearing the Vibram Five Fingers. And we still do in fact. But there was a real gotcha that I came across whilst on the GR5 which put the whole trip in jeopardy for a few days.

Ten days into the walk, I developed a spasm in my left calf that stopped me in my tracks. I’d worn the Five Fingers for five of the previous days but had stopped using them a few days before as I realised I was bruising my insole.

The bruise was caused by wearing the Five Fingers since my left arch arch collapses.

My right arch doesn’t collapse anymore – wearing Terrocs and Five Fingers seems to have strengthened it. It certainly used to collapse, I had to get the “Custom Fit” Superfeet insoles ten years ago. When I was re-assessed by a Superfeet Fitter last year (many years of trail-shoes and some time in Terrocs) I found my feet were hardly collapsing at all. So much for the strange idea that “once your arches collapse there’s nothing you can do about it” that I’ve heard and read several times. So much for Conventional Wisdom.

But my left arch still collapses. So as I took a step and my left foot happened to land with a small stone under the arch, I would initially feel nothing (the stone fitting into the arch).

However as soon as I weighted the foot and “stepped through” with my right leg, the arch would collapse, crushing the toe-flexing tendons of my left foot between the stone under the arch and the bones.

Obviously this made them quite painful. In fact, to my surprise, a visible bruise developed after five days of walking in the Five Fingers.
At that point I decided to swap back to the Terrocs for a few days. In fact I wouldn’t return to the Five Fingers for the rest of the trip. Though I carried them since I dearly wanted to go back to them if I felt I could!

However, because the toe flexors were painful the Soleus muscle in the calf tried to avoid moving them by tensing up (purely a sub-conscious reaction).

But of course I was moving them with each step, so the Soleus was trying harder and harder to stop them until eventually it went into spasm.

It was like getting severe cramp in my left calf whenever I tried to weight it.

Luckily, with three days of rest, and holding the leg in the freezing cold outflow from a pipe in a mountain stream for five minutes in every fifteen, it healed enough to allow me to hobble on. (As I mentioned before, the cold treatment caused great concern with many French people, until a pair of French Physiotherapists arrived! Beware the well-meaning advice of those who don’t actually know what they’re talking about… especially in the mountains. I might post a couple of observations on that one day – it’s an interesting area!).

I was also given some anti-inflammatory cream (Srilane idrocilamide) and pain killers by some very kind French hikers in the La Balme hut (one was a doctor so asked me a couple of questions to ensure I wasn’t being given something that might kill me).

None the less, I didn’t take the pain killers since I didn’t want to mask what the leg was telling me and then further aggravate it. I also avoided using the cream until we hit Briançon a couple of weeks later where I was able to check out its contents on the Internet. The Srilane cream appeared to help but since it was generally healing anyway it’s hard to be sure. But at that stage I was confident I wasn’t re-injuring it and just wanted to keep it calm enough to complete the walk.

It then continued to improve as we walked, with only one extra rest-day in the old town in Briançon when it whinged a little, which was certainly no hardship. And by the end of the walk I could do 25+ kilometres (16+ miles) days without feeling a thing. Further proving that it was the above situation causing the problem (i.e. since I’d stopped wearing them – it improved despite continuing to walk on the leg).

Would I wear Five Fingers on a Big Walk again? Absolutely.

I wore them for five days and they were very comfortable, collapsing left-arch issues aside. Importantly, my right foot was fine and LB’s feet were fine whilst she continued to swap between hers and the Terrocs (wearing the Five Fingers for around 30 percent of the trip in total).

The only reason I had a problem was that, after years of wearing “normal” footwear, my left foot is not yet strong enough. Once it is – comfy long distance hiking joy awaits…

As I wear the Five Fingers more I expect that the arch will strengthen and cease collapsing. Meaning that I can wear them, or perhaps the new KSO Treks, on the next Big Walk.

23 Jan, 2010

It’s been a while – but heck, developing this lot took me until some time in November. And then I was waiting until I’d had time to play with AutoPano… then I was busy writing up the diary – but that’s a whole other story. Today – at last – the pictures!

We came back with fewer than we expected. Since we were rather concerned that we’d have to spend days and days just deleting the duds, we deleted many of them in the camera, as we went. Which really paid off. I only came back with 1600 images and LB 900. They’ve been pruned down considerably and then pruned further for different audiences (with different levels of interest) using Picasa’s excellent “Albums” feature that lets you create virtual folders of the images and then upload them, so you don’t end up with multiple copies of each image on your machine. (Note that Picasa is an application – it runs on your machine where you can edit and organise your images – it’s not a web site. But, somewhat confusingly, there is a Picasa web site that it can upload your images to).

One hot tip if on a trip with others – get everyone to synch the clocks on their cameras so that if you want to put the images into one album, they all sit in the right order.

On that note, I’d avoid using any “Time Zone Offset” feature of a digital camera in future and instead just set it directly to local time. Having that feature set on LB’s camera effectively meant all her images were out of kilter with mine since they were time stamped in GMT with a local offset that seems to be ignored by image library software. Edit 25/02/2010: Apparently the timezone is not a standard EXIF field – no wonder it doesn’t work properly!

I further compounded the problem by somehow knocking the date in my camera back by a whole day a few days into the trip!

Luckily both Lightroom and Picasa can change the dates in image files using one image as a base-line and setting every other image relative to it.

Without Lightroom and Picasa it wouldn’t just have been a harder job to polish up the images – it wouldn’t have been possible to create a collection of images that invoke the memories quite as well as they do. They’re both excellent pieces of software.

Picasa is all most people need for photo editing and library. It’s also free. Whereas Lightroom isn’t free and does take some practice to get the full power from it (and what power!), but I discovered something that I simply wouldn’t be without if using Lightroom: The Missing FAQ by Victoria Bampton. So many questions, so well answered.

Once the images were developed…it was time to work on the panoramas…

In the past I’ve used the Autostitch (free) for making panoramas but both Duncan MacArthur and Antoine, who we met along the way, mentioned AutoPano Pro (not free!).

It’s incomparable. It makes creating panoramas incredibly easy. Though I would say that I disagree with the instructions and personally prefer the results I get from developing in Lightroom first before using AutoPano. As does Duncan – who am I to argue!

Of course I got more and more interested and ended up buying the Giga version to get AutoPano Tour and then the KRPano Viewer on top of that (of which – more below).

You’ll notice the images are geotagged; you can see where each one is taken as you view them. As we walked we used a Spot tracker to record our progress. We logged in once during the trip to download the tracks (since they are only saved on the Spot web site for 30 days). Luckily we downloaded them in all the formats available because the following recipe requires a gpx file, though I’m sure you can find converters for the other formats online.

So, here’s my recipe for geotagging a set of images with very little effort:

• Get GeoSetter (it’s donation-ware, and well worth a donation in my opinion).
• Navigate to the images in the main view.
• Select them all (Ctrl+A).
• Hit Ctrl+G to bring up the “Synchronise with GPS Data Files” dialog.
• Select “Synchronise with a Directory containing Data Files” and navigate to the directory where you have the GPS track logs.
• Select “Interpolate regarding Shoot Time with Last or Next Position” to have it take a good guess at where you were.
• I also set the “Maximum Time Difference Between Take Dates and Track Points” to 10 hours: 36000 to get the best chance of a guessed position even when the image was taken well after I turned off the tracker. I could then edit it later (see below).
• For “TimeZone” I left it at “Local Windows Settings” and that worked fine. But try it on a copy of some of the images and check to see if the timestamps are okay afterwards (Picasa shows them under the image).
• Hit “OK” and then save all the changed files (they appear in red until saved, when they turn blue). Note that the JPEG images are not re-compressed – so there’s no loss of quality. Only the EXIF data is updated (I checked this myself with a binary file comparison tool – what can I say – I’m an IT consultant…).
• I then selected a couple of days’ worth at a time in Picasa and went to “Tools” -> “GeoTag” -> “GeoTag With Google Earth” and scrolled through them all looking for any anomalies to edit.

The whole task took less than two hours, even though I was working it all out from scratch, for nearly a thousand images.

So, enough about how they were created, here are the images from the GR5 Honeymoon:

GR5 Honeymoon Super Fast Forward

And, the panoramas generated from AutoPano Tour (currently packaged as part of AutoPano Giga) and then turned into Flash presentations using KRPano Viewer:

GR5 Honeymoon Panorama Flash Presentations

Currently there are no instructions for AutoPano Tour (they’re writing them!) so in case it helps anyone – here are mine:

• Make sure it’s Registered (My version keeps un-registering itself – which is annoying)
  • “Register” menu (top-right) will be visible if it’s not registered!
  • Browse to the license file and open it
• Drag in each panorama and arrange in some sort of logical pattern
• For each panorama, using the Panorama tab:
  • Set the JPEG quality to 9 (makes a reasonable difference in file size but seems to affect quality very little)
  • If you want better quality output, up the Partial Panorama Width, 5000 seems good
  • Pressing the “Calculate Optimal Size” button makes it the best resolution possible (at the expense of increasing the size of course!)
• If you want, create hotspots in each image, using the Hotspot Editor (I think this works best if you have doors in the images to move between)
  • Select the image
  • Full screen button (in the Hotspot Editor)
  • Use the right and left arrow icon (far left) to move the editable area and place your hotspot
  • (Right click them and select Delete if you make a mistake)
  • Back on the main window, drag each hotspot to the image you wish to link to
  • Press Ctrl+A to select all so that you can see all the links and check it all flows properly
• Adjust each image’s Field Of View with the 3D Editor
  • Full screen button (in the 3D Editor)
  • Get the FOV as you want it by clicking and dragging with the mouse and using the mouse-wheel to zoom
  • Right-click -> set as start position
• Project Properties tab
  • You probably don’t embed all files (it makes a monolithic file to download instead of loading sections on demand)
  • Tick Embed XML
  • Select simpleWithFullScreen.html
  • Select the starting panorama
  • Set the rest of the settings as you like!
• Export…
• Upload somewhere!

The friendly dialog box on my site that appears before the panoramas load I wrote myself – the code is easily whipped from my site if you want it! (Though you may have a fun time of it if you’re not fairly familiar with JavaScript/JQuery…).