New EarthCache Developed: Hill City Fold, Black Hills, SD

I've mentioned a couple of times previously that I spent the month of June out in the Black Hills of South Dakota, teaching field camp for Wheaton College at their Science Station.  It was a great experience and hopefully I'll get to give it a go again in the future.  I've also written recently about EarthCaches, a program between the Geological Society of America and Geocaching.com.  While in the Black Hills, I logged a number of EarthCaches and also recorded information about a couple of places in order to place some new ones.

The first one I've set up is a roadcut on Highway 16/385 near Hill City, SD, within the Black Hills.  The roadcut exposes a fantastic example of a fold.  EarthCaches must have an educational component, and for this one I ask the geocacher to identify whether the fold is a syncline, anticline, inclined, or recumbent, so the geocacher has to learn something about the axial plane of a fold and be able to recognize it in the rocks.  So, forgive me if I don't post a picture of it!  The cache description contains enough information for geocachers to know what these terms mean, so by observing the fold in the field this ought to be easy to answer this question.

I also ask the cacher to measure the horizontal length of the fold as exposed in the roadcut.  One of the easiest ways to measure distance over land is with a GPS, which every cacher ought to have with them in the field.  In order to navigate toward a point of interest, geocachers often enter the coordinates of a location into their GPS to set a waypoint, tell the GPS to "GoTo" the point, and the GPS will then tell them how far away the point is.  This obviously makes it easy to see your distance to the point decreasing as you get closer.  I have cachers use this technology in reverse - establish a waypoint (POI) at one end of the roadcut, tell the GPS to "GoTo" that point, and then they themselves physically walk away from it to the other end of the roadcut.  When they reach the other end of the roadcut, the GPS will tell them how far they've gone.  This exercise hopefully helps cachers to learn to use GPS technology in a way they might not have thought of before.  After all, why would I tell the GPS to "GoTo" a point, but then I myself "GoAway" from it?  It isn't an intuitive use of a GPS but works really well.

The new EarthCache was just approved, so we'll see how long it takes someone to visit the site and log it.

EarthCache

I've long been a fan of one of the lesser known types of geocaching, the EarthCache.  Unlike their more well known counterparts, there is no container of tupperware hiding in the woods.  Instead, the cacher must visit a location for its geological significance and answer a few questions in order to log the cache as a find.  I've logged a bunch of them and set up three of them myself at some of my favorite geological spots.  I guess they bring together two things I'm passionate about:  Earth science and education. 
Last week I returned home from being gone for a month, where I was teaching geology field camp for Wheaton College at their science station in the Black Hills of South Dakota.  While out there, I was able to find several EarthCaches.  So far I've only logged a few of them, and I've got about a dozen or so more to go.  It can take a bit of effort to finish them all up, which is why a couple of other geocachers I know have said they hardly ever log them.  But I find them much more rewarding than the regular geocache. 
I found two locations while out there that will make for excellent EarthCaches.  I don't want to give too much of them away before I submit them, but one is an unconformity in the Black Hills and the other is a fault in the Bighorns.  More to come maybe after I get them submitted. 

Mt. LeConte Hike & EveryTrail.com Website

Last summer, June 2011, I climbed Mt. LeConte with my two brothers-in-law.  We were on our annual big family vacation, that year in Gatlinburg, TN.  It was something I had wanted to do for a while.  I love mountains (always have as long as I can remember) but I've never climbed very many of them.  So at some point, I decided this trip was the one to register this peak.

Mt. LeConte (~6600') is one of the highest peaks in Great Smoky Mtn. Natl. Park, and it is the tallest in eastern TN from immediate base to top.

We decided to go big - there are several trails one can take to get to the top, and we picked one of the longer routes.  One of the longer trails takes you past Rainbow Falls, which is the highest single drop waterfall in the park, and that sounded like a good spot to see.  The Rainbow Falls trail starts out at a small parking area and is about 7.5 miles long at ~10% grade, so it's no small walk in the park.

Hike up Mt. LeConte via Rainbow Falls Trail

We hit the trail at ~8:30 AM.  Rainbow Falls was a bit of a disappointment because there was very little water flowing over it, and it doesn't seem that you can get very close to it.  I'm sure it would be a whole lot nicer if there had been more water.  Near the top of Mt. LeConte there is a lodge, basically a set of very rustic cabins that you can stay in for an arm & a leg for a night (no electricity & no running water).  At ~$120/night, I guess you pay for the experience (and not the service!).  Maybe someday when I've got more money.  Once at the lodge, we ate our lunch & checked out the main general building, which has some old frontier days stuff around that's neat to look at.  But the lodge is not at the peak, so after a bit of rest & food, we headed on up the trail to get to the top.  Just before getting to the peak, there is a spectacular overlook facing to the South.  The peak itself is kind of unusual - there are no great views at this point, it is just a spot off the trail to the right where there is a huge pile of rocks.  I guess you're supposed to bring a small rock with you up the mountain and make it a bit taller.

But other than relaying that story, I also am writing this blog post because I've recently discovered EveryTrail.com, a website that is designed for hiking & other outdoor adventure.  EveryTrail lets you set up an account, fill out a profile, and then start loading up your trips.  Trips basically include a GPS path and a set of geotagged photos, as you can see in the map/slideshow above.  If you don't have a GPS track to upload, you can draw it on a map or just use photos, but obviously the GPS track is the way to go.  While on the hike up LeConte, I had my at the time brand new Droid2Global with me, so I used it to record the track & take pictures as we went.  I recorded the track using the MyTracks app by Google.  The track isn't bad, especially when you consider the amount of tree cover and the fact that the phone was in my pocket much of the time.  However, the track recorded is way too long, over 10 miles supposedly on a 7.5 mi trail.  It overestimates the distance traveled when it doesn't have good GPS signal and the calculated location is not known really precisely.  EveryTrail requires that you upload a "GPS file", which of course is not a specific real thing; I assume it can read most any type of file recorded by the various GPSr makers.  I saved MyTracks data on my phone as a .GPX file format, emailed it to myself, & it loaded up very easily on my home PC.  EveryTrail also offers mobile apps for Android & iPhone, but I've not used it much yet.  I had previously already loaded up the pictures I had taken into a PicasaWeb photo album.  That was fortuitous, because EveryTrail allows you to use your Google login to access your PicasaWeb folders, so importing my photos into the trip was super easy.  It will also allow you to use Flickr or YouTube or direct uploads.  One issue, however, was that when EveryTrail puts together a slideshow of your photos, it determines the order of the photos based on the timestamp.  Since some of my photos I took on the way down, that didn't produce a good slideshow.  There is no easy, obvious way to edit the order of photos in EveryTrail, but the workaround is to open up your photos on the website after you've imported them and change the timestamp to force them into the order that you want.  Supposedly you can add video files too, but it didn't seem to recognize mine as anything other than still shots, so I baleeted them from the final trip. Overall, I think it's a decent site and I'll probably continue to use it to record hiking trips.

GPS to fail with solar flares?

I just read an article on CNN talking about how solar flares might cause problems for GPS users.  I was pretty excited to read the article because GPS technology is something I'm very interested in.

But I guess I have to admit that the article left with with a "wait, what??" feeling.  I didn't get enough information from the article to really understand what was going on, only a vague feeling of "GPS might go kaputz sometime".  It boils down to a general warning that GPS may, or may not, fail for some unknown period of time, sometime in the future... I'm really hoping for more detail - when will these events occur?  How intense will they be, how long will they last, and what capabilities should I expect to lose?  Airlines, rescue squads, surveyors, and websites like geocaching.com could certainly benefit from these details.

Apparently a solar flare recently left the sun - the article gives a couple of links to some videos that are kind of interesting to view - and this flare may cause problems for all kinds of GPS devices.  The reason for this comes from research at Cornell University, where researchers detected a significant loss of signal (40-50%) during a solar flare in 2005.  The signal loss consisted of two events, one that lasted one minute, 10 seconds, and a second 40 minutes later that lasted 15 minutes.  The solar flare affected, apparently, all GPS units on the sunlit side of the Earth.  But even this article isn't clear on the implications of a 50% drop in signal for GPS users.  The CNN article also doesn't give any information about when this latest solar burp might reach Earth.

A loss of signal would certainly cause your GPS device to have a harder time calculating where you are, but what's not clear from these articles is how much of a problem this would be for ordinary GPS users.  Who needs to be concerned, and who doesn't, and when?  At one point, the author says to "have a backup navigation system handy, such as a printed map", which obviously suggests that us normal folks driving around might suddenly not be able to use our GPS units to get where we want to go.  Yet the Cornell Univ. research  quoted from 2006 states that "if you're driving to the beach using your car's navigation system, you'll be OK."  So should folks expect that they will need a map, or should they expect that their car GPS will be just fine?

Obviously it will also depend on the size of the solar flare; another point of the articles is that 2011 and 2012 are years where we expect some long, intense solar flares, due to the solar maximum.  These flares, according to the Cornell Univ. researchers, could be expected to result in a 90% loss of signal that could last for a couple of hours.  Now that sounds pretty serious and an event like that deserves some further investigation.  If that kind of signal loss is really to be expected, then specific warnings for certain time periods when such flares are expected to strike Earth are needed - now who's in charge of that one?  People rely on GPS a lot these days, for good reason - it's amazing tech!  I would hope for specific warnings when such signal loss should be reasonably expected; a generic one is somewhat useful but not as empowering to users.