2019.10.27. Buckhorn Mountain from Big Quilcene

10/27, Sunday. Sunny and calm. 5 of us met at Northgate P&R and then went to pick up a 6th person. All plus a little dog piled in Michelle's "bus", took the ferry at Edmonds. It was less than half full. As we approached Kingston, the sun was rising. Good timing. We met our 7th hiker and his dog at Upper Big Quilcene TH. Started hiking towards Marmot Pass shortly ~9:10am. Elevation ~2470'.

Cold (~1°C) at the TH. The trail is in great shape, gradual incline, soft (dirt not rocks), no snow, nor mud. Some rocks when crossing a talus field. Only when close to the final meadow, there were a couple of short stretches that had black ice (very slippery). We waited for everyone at a small waterfall (40 min in), at Camp Mystery, at the talus field (1:40 in).

Reached the pass at 11:50 (~5.5 mile in, 6000'). We regrouped and had a long lunch facing east (where we came, view of Puget Sound and Glacier Peak) below the pass (for no wind).

Turn north and up a boot path towards Buckhorn Mountain. About 1 mile and 1000' go to. The first half is quite steep, then it levels out. The higher you go, the more mountains you see. After cresting the butte (see in the photo on the right), you descend before the last scramble to the top.

The very top has a fat rock, but it's small. Can fit 4-5 people. More room below this rock. View is incredible. Canadian mountains, Baker, Glacier Peak, Rainier, Adams, Helen, many Olympic peaks, and Puget Sound. We regrouped here, and enjoyed the view for half an hour.

Coming down after the scramble is fast. Towards the last mile, Raven, the dog, decided to chase something and ran up the hill, abandoning his owner. The rest of us hiked back to the parking lot, only then I heard what happened. We waited for ~1 hour, asking everyone who came out of the trail if they had seen a dog and a guy. Raven has a collar with GPS, and vibration. Finally they came out, all was well. Got on the 7:45pm ferry. This time quite full. Back at the P&R at 8:20pm, a a very busy parking lot.

2019.10.26 Park Butte and Scott Paul

10/26, Saturday. Left in the cloudy morning, full sun once we were on hwy-20. A little breezy.

Saw this grouse hunting "mailbox" at a turn on Bake Lake Road. It had no wings or tails, but an empty soda can and some debris.

A nice bridge a few steps from TH over Sulphur Creek. After ~2 miles, snow and mud, and a few easy creek crossing and the main Rocky Creek crossing, we took to the left for Park Butte / Railroad Grade trail. About 0.4 miles, enter Morovitz Meadow, there, another trail junction. We took to the right on Railroad Grade trail (also the climbing route). Had lunch on a low ridge, with excellent view.

The original plan was to hike the loop of Scott Paul. So we returned to the junction at mile 2. After a short decent, the trail bends north with a great view of Baker and the impending crossing of Rocky Creek. Here, boot tracks stopped. No one had ventured here since the snow. The 2 platforms of the both ends of a non-existing bridge is a clear sign where to go. After crossing the bridge, we made our way up. Trail is covered with snow, but can still make out where it is for awhile. Not sure what lays ahead, and the short day light, we decided to turn around and go to Park Butte instead, because of the steady stream of hikers heading/headed that way. That trail is well trodden.

Back at the 2 mile junction, heading up to Park Butte Lookout. All along very scenic. The 1/2 mile was very windy. When I got to the lookout, there were 1 dog and 6 people there already, playing a board game. This sign of wifi is hilarious.The view on the deck is superb. But you have to walk around to get all 360° view. A guy with his dog decided to camp below the lookout next to a tree.

Sunset when we got back at Schrieder Meadow. Couldn't find a good spot to take a photo. A little swampy, a couple of ponds. 2 hours drive back to Seattle, no traffic. Wet boots and dirty gaiters.

2019.10.19. Mozart's Requiem - Seattle Symphony

10/19, Saturday. Seattle Symphony.

Toru Takemitsu           -- Requiem for String Orchestra
Karl Amadeus Hartmann    -- Concerto funèbre
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart  -- Requiem, K.626 (completed & edited Masato Suzuki)
Conducted by Masaaki Suzuki

Noah Geller, the concert master of Seattle Symphony, is the soloist in the violin concerto. The four soloists for Mozart's Requiem are: Soprano Joanne Lunn, Mezzo Roxana Constantinescu, Tenor Lawrence Wiliford, Baritone Morgan Smith. I found the tenor's voice weak. I like the other three. I didn't care for the first two works, especially the Requiem by Takemitsu, very atonal. The funeral concerto has some very high pitch minutes, probably hard to do. Mozart's Requiem is definitely tonight's highlight.

2019.10.19. Talapus Lake in the rain

10/19, Saturday. Rain. After dropping some empty isobutane canisters at REI (the store was very crowded due to the garage sale), did a short hike to Talapus Lake. Muddy, and wet. Snow about half way up. Found 2 mushrooms along the trail, but neither in good condition. Rained constantly, until we drove into the city. Sunny :(

2019.10.18. Iceland's First Lady Eliza Reid at SPL

10/18, rain. Eliza Reid spoke at Seattle Public Library about Iceland's literary scene, part of a week-long Taste of Iceland celebration (which I didn't know until this evening's introduction). Reid co-founded the Iceland Writers Retreat. She showed two short videos, one about the writer's retreat, one in general about the country's literary traditions. The government provides financial support for writers, enables the flourishing of literary endeavor. Later Reid talked with Juan Carlos Reyes, then Q&A. She is very comfortable at speaking, easy going, straight forward.

2019.10.17. John All - Icefall

10/17, Thursday. Windy. John All spoke at Fjarraven Speaker Series on his research and his 2017 book Icefall. He and his students study the aerial images, and collect ice/snow samples at various elevations, to correlate the cause and effect of human impact (civil war, clear cut, agriculture practice, burns) and climate change to the environment in Peru and Nepal. Seems straight forward and simple, but difficult to execute. I asked him about car exhaust in Peru. He said that his data show that agriculture practice has much larger impact to the high altitudes than urban exhaust. In Q&A, he also talked in more detail about his fall, Everest climb, and potential local project in North Cascades.

Pali Hotel next door provided 3 kinds of appetizer and some drink. Very windy today.

2019.10.12-13 Mount Maude

10/12, Saturday. 10 of us (8 women, 2 guys, 2 no-shows) met at Northgate P&R at 5am. Shazia, also an event organizer of this group, is the last one to arrive. We (1 truck, 2 SUVs) didn't drive out until 20 minutes later. Sun rose as we approached Stevens Pass. Reconvened at the gas station at Coles Corner. The road to Spider Meadow / Phelps Creek TH is rough, high clearance vehicle recommended. About 10 cars in the parking lot.

After a long introduction and everyone's most recent tough trail (I was the only one who didn't mention a climb), we marched onto the trail, or rather a flat and wide logging road. ~3.5 miles and only 200' gain from TH, we reached the junction of Leroy Creek trail. A needed bio-break for me, as my tummy was bugging me. Up to the right, ~2100' gain in 1.5 miles, especially steep the first mile. However, because Shazia was lagging behind, Alex made her lead in front. This rendered the hike very relaxed. I didn't even sweat, while still wearing a fleece jacket. In fact, I only realized the steepness when hiking down the next day. Maggie complained a few times because she was getting cold due to the slow pace. We didn't arrive at Leroy Basin until ~1:45pm, 2 hours behind schedule if we were to climb Seven Fingered Jack in the afternoon.

At ~6200', Leroy Basin has quite a bit of snow. We encountered snow from ~5500' and up. I managed to find a good campsite without snow among a few short larch trees, away from the rest 7 tents who were clustered together in the open. After setting up my tent, I headed up the wide gully between Seven Fingered Jack and Maude, with some water and a rain jacket. Alex gave me a walkie-talkie. He actually radioed me a couple of times when I was in the trees. Going up the gully on rocks appeared to be easier than in the trees, where the trail is. On the way back, I decided to look for the trail, got somewhat bushy at times. I hit the trail not far from the camp.
After a very early dinner, and a few pages of my library book, the sun came out. So I walked up the west slope to wait for sunset. Gave up after an hour, clouds were too thick. I hung out with the group till ~6:30pm, when half of us went to bed. Alex planned to head out at 6:00 the next morning. I hung my food on a dead tree, and fetched water for tomorrow, set alarm, and read till ~9pm.

The night wasn't cold. Near full moon. Bright.

10/13, Sunday. Woke up before my alarm. It was raining pretty hard with sleet. Just before 6:00, I walked to the group with just my umbrella. I was told to stay in the tent, wait for the rain to stop. A few minutes later, Alex came over and told me that we'd make another call at 8:00. The rain tapered off shortly after 7. We decided to give Maude a try. Took sometime for everyone to get ready. We started just before 8am.

The trail was obvious first, then, cairns, sometimes multiple cairns indicating different paths, sometimes nothing with increasing snow. Maggie has done the climb in the summer, so we knew the general direction. Larch was very good, all the way to the first low saddle ~6800'. There, the path turns from south to east, heading up, until a saddle ~7600', where you can see the east side of the ridge and Upper Ice Lake below (which we couldn't see until on our way back). The last push to the saddle requires some scrambling. No more trees, just rocks and A lot of snow.

Part of my group decided to turn back. Alex stayed with them. I almost went back. Sung lead the rest of us walk down the knee deep snow. It's fortunate that the snow was soft. Some of us took ice axes out. Note, we were all already wearing helmets, good to keep my head warm. We dropped more than 200' instead of what's shown on the map, until more or less flat, and then traversed the slope to the far side, and regained the ridge. In summer, you could walk along the ridge, but now there was cornice, below that, the snow was a bit hard. Sung made steps below the ice in shifting gravel. Luckily that it was wet and a bit sticky. We all made it through, and regained the ridge again in softer snow. From there on, is just rock, not too steep, but windy. Saw a pair of ptarmigans here on the way down, plump in their white coat. Erica saw one of them move out of her way and shouted "a bird". Otherwise, I wouldn't have seen them. Well camouflaged in the snow.

On the summit ridge, you cross to the west side again, and that was very windy. We couldn't see a thing on the top (9082'). I turned back down right away. It was 1pm. Fortunately, the clouds parted a bit on our way out, so we could actually see Ice Lake and the larch studded hills beyond. Beautiful.

Nita suffered from the altitude, was throwing up from time to time. Yuvaraj and I stayed with her, since we are slower than the other three. Sung radioed Alex about our progress at times. Towards the end, Alex came looking for us, while we were bushwhacking. The 4 of them who were waiting, already packed up. I filtered water for Nita, Sung (who gave her water bottle to Nita) and myself. Nita packed my tent. We were quite fast, and sped down Leroy Creek trail, and caught up the other 4 at the junction. Reached TH at 7:45pm, in headlamp. All safe.

Total 44K steps.

I had a great time. The temperature was warmer than I expected, everyone was helpful. Even though the weather wasn't optimal, the scenery was still breathtaking. I don't think I'd be able to summit Maude without the group.

2019.10.10. Corey Rich - Stories Behind the Images

10/10, Thursday. Adventure photographer and climber Corey Rich spoke and showed slides at REI Seattle, in promotion of his new book Stories Behind The Images. He talked about how he became a photographer. Very funny and candid, full of energy. His photos are stunning.

2019.10.10. BLC Justice Bus

10/10 Thursday. Mithun hosted a taco happy hour for the Justice Bus. The bus was parked on Pier 56, and we were allowed to get on the bus.

AIA Seattle’s Committee on Homelessness has completed a design project in partnership with the Benefits Law Center (BLC). The Justice Bus, designed by the Committee and built by Prestige Crafted, is the first mobile legal unit in Washington State.

2019.10.6. CUGOS fall fling

10/6, Sunday. Sunny. 8:30-16:00. CUGOS fall event. Organized by The Cascadia chapter of OSGeo, a day of presentations and workshops at CSE2 auditorium (4th floor) in UW. However, the workshops were scheduled at the same time, so I only could attend one. Here's the note I took. What I liked are marked with *

8:40 Geo Exploration Simplified with Elastic Maps*
Nick Peihl https://ela.st/cugos2019
SDE on geospatial data and visualizations at Elastic.

Elastic map search: 18 zoom., GDAL support Elasticsearch Driver
ogr2ogr -f ElasticSearch
base map tiles: OpenStreetMap
backend database: https://lucene.apache.org
Pelias Geocoder
reference: https://www.elstic.co/products/maps

9:00 Challenges of building a traffic simulation on open GIS data*
Dustin Carlino, Project A/B Street
A/B Street is a traffic simulation game aiming to explore how small changes to road infrastructure could improve commute.
Take aways:
1. use separate phases (do not reparse OSM every run);
2. RawMap: stable IDs as we delete/split/copy things;
3. Cross-map IDs ...?

9:20 Programs for geomorphic analysis
Dan Miller, TerrainWorks, Inc; dan@terrainworks.com
NetMap Portal: a large library of analysis tools, all open source, and all in Fortran. Windows only
DEM processing: filtering, adaptive smoothing; multi-scale surface metrics; flow routing
Image processing: segmentation of water masks
Hydrology: network extraction; linked-node network
Floodplain delineation
Tree-fall
Landslide initiation and runout
Road network hydrographs and sediment flux.

9:40 Orcamap: an open-source mapping system for orcas
Scott Veirs, Orcasound
Dr. Veirs is chair of the marine mammal work group within the Puget Sound Ecosystem Monitoring Program.

Orcamap enables sighting and acoustic network coordinators to input, vet, and visualize observed locations of endangered southern resident orca in real-time.

10:00 break

10:20 Lightning Talks
⚡ Lessons Learned from Teaching GIS in Vietnam
Robert Catherman, Medrix
Author of open source GIS curriculum for ESL students Volunteer working with MEDRIX in Vietnam for 20+ years UW alumni in Atmospheric Science

⚡ Map Quality Measurement (MQM): US Cities Road Data Quality on OSM
Monica Brandeis, Critigen, Monica.Brandeis@critigen.com
https://osmquality.io
PHD on crowdsourced mapping projects after many years experiences in GIS and Remote Sensing fields.

MQM initiative started in 2018 to establish a standard methodology and metric to evaluate OSM road quality and prioritize map error hotspots in US.
MQM applies open source ‘atlas checks’ to OSM road data in 51 US cities, ranks them, and creates vector grid layers to show the map quality in each city.
The quality can be weighted by social-economic metrics (population density and car ownership) to re-prioritize map error hot spots.
Convert map data to Atlas data (a graph database)

⚡ One-line GIS; Spatial Analysis with the CLI*
Damon Burgett
Geographer at Mapbox who has worked in Satellite imagery, geospatial data processing, user facing APIs, and creative frontend client applications.

pip install fiona
mkvirtualenv tho
fio info islands/ne_10m_minor_islands.shp
fio cat islands/ne_10m_minor_islands.shp ==> convert to geo json
fio cat zip://islands.zip --precision 2 --dst-crs EPSG:3857
fio cat zip://islands.zip --bbox .... (bounding box)
pip install fio-area
fio area
fio calc sqmi f.properties.area

⚡ The Sound of Shapely*
Andrew Powers, CARMERA
Shapely, a python library for vector data, to build high definition maps at CARMERA.
poly.???
line.???
line.intersects(poly) ==> bool
line.touches(poly) ==> bool
line.crosses(poly) ==> bool

⚡ Software performance & the climate crisis - Thoughts on our thirst for speed and oil
Dane Springmeyer, Mapbox

10:45 OSM Water: How well are Minnesota’s water features mapped
Matthew Manley, GIS Data Analyst at Critigen
Water-related features are an often-overlooked part of the OSM model.
Our project will identify differences between OSM water features and NHD water features in the hopes of identifying how data evolves from the bulk import.
Bulk import (different time slices)
OSM inline style: Inland Water (waterway, natual, wetland, landuse)
Osmium Tool (Open Source OSM tool especially good for history data)
Tiger data (US Census Bureau)
Bing Maps (Microsoft building footprint data)

11:05 Geo-Machine Learning (geoML) & Model Democratization with OSM Data
Shay Strong, Director of Data Science and Machine Learning at EagleView. shay.strong@eagleview.com
Ph.D in Astrophysics from the UT Austin on planetary atmospheric modeling. Johns HopkinsApplied Physics Lab for both National Security and NASA spacecraft
She joined EagleView as an acquisition in 2017, where she leads the machine learning data extraction of information from imagery for insurance and governm

Leveraging OSM vector data and cloud compute, through programs such as the UW’s GeoHackweek, we are able to further the removal of the knowledge barrier f
Converlutional Neural Network.

Get vector data from OSM
Convert them to labels for a CNN object (using Apache MXNET)
Store in VOC style
Create optimized .rec files for porting into AWS Sagemaker.
Save in SWS S3 & EC2

11:25 Getting weird with geospatial data and the web
Damon Burgett, Geographer at Mapbox on Satellite imagery, geospatial data processing, user facing APIs, and creative frontend client applications.

The pluggability and flexibility of Open Source data processing and visualization tools enable left-field "misuse cases" for geospatial data.
This presentation will explore some of my successful and failed experiments, including: Encoding elevation data into pictures - Post-punk elevation visual

11:45 Virtual Raster Files (VRTs)* combine raster data and perform complex raster math using built-in Python
Justin McAllister, CTO of MicaSense, justinm@justinm.com
Justin manages development of new remote sensing technologies. 15 years experience in the drone industry and 5 years in the remote sensing.

set GDAL_VRT_ENABLE_PYTHON = YES in your environment
Use np.add / np.subtract / etc
seems faster efficient than carrying a lot of intermediates
watch out for your data type if different than float
gdalbuildvrt output.vrt list-of-inputs* (all files into the same layer)
gdalbuildvrt output.vrt list-of-inputs --separate (each files into a different layer in the order specified,)
gdalbuildvrt reflectance.vrt -separate blue.vrt green.vrt red.vrt
VrtDerivedRasterBand (C/C++ voodoo, Inline Pyton, xxx)
Tools: QGIS, Raster Calculator

12:00 Lunch

13:30 Using Redis for Geospatial Data*
Rock Pereira, Astratta.io
Astratta.io helps content marketers create video abstracts. PostgreSQL/Redis hybrid for long-term storage / caching of edits.

Redis is an in-memory, key-value database. It has basic geospatial functions that is useful for building real-time, location-based apps.
Redis is a Data Structure server. A sorted set of location.
Used in message broker (Redis has PubSub), Session management (shopping cars), Gaming, Time series logs.
os.system("redis-server --loadmodule ")
from redisai import Client, DType, Tensor, Backend
client.loadbackend('TORCH', '/home/rock/git/RedisAI/install-cpu/backends/redisai_torch/redisai_torch.so')

13:55 Dynamic EV Charging Infrastructure Prioritization*
Corwin Bell, Fehr & Peers
Fehr & Peers uses OSM, US Census, Seattle Data Portal and Python, ArcGIS to develop an Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment (EVSE) prioritization tool for Se

14:15 break

14.35 🛠 Editing OSM with JOSM
----------------
Clifford Snow, OSM Washington
JOSM is a java based OSM editor for Windows, Mac, Linux.
https://overpass-turbo.eu/

2019.10.5. Lake Ingalls

10/5, Saturday, cloudy. It was supposed to clear up in the afternoon. Arrived at TH just before 1pm, after correction my wrong direction at Cle Elum. It was almost sunny until we hit the trail. A long line of cars.

About a mile from the pass, it started to hail lightly. I didn't even bring a rain jacket, just a shell, but it worked fine. The larch in the Headlight Basin was just started to turn color. 2 weeks later than last year. Snow on trail, so very muddy. I put spikes on based on recent trip report. But opted not to use it on the way out. Too many rocks. The lake is not as pretty without the sun, nor the peaks which were hiding in the clouds. A lot of people. A few tents.

The sun came out for ~10 minutes when we hiked back to Ingalls Pass. Took most of my photos then. Very pretty with both larch and snow. As we hiked down to the TH, it snowed for at least 30 minutes.

Not as cold as last weekend. A fine day out.