New Book

PhotoTripUSA Publishing recently released Greg Vaughn's new book, "Photographing Washington, A guide to the natural landmarks of The Evergreen State", found here, which has a chapter on Mt. Rainier NP. It is an excellent book for the photographer visiting the state and wants an overview of the expanse of photographic opportunities.

I only glanced over the book to focus on the introduction and the chapter on Mt. Rainier NP, but I can say based on the sections I did read with familarity with the places he does a good job giving the places photographers want to see and photograph.

With respect to Mt. Rainier NP the book focusing on the common places, mostly the easy accessible visitors areas and stops with descriptions of the most common trails to what most people photograh in the NP, scenic landscapes and the obvious wildflowers.

The chapter is divided into 15 sections, but really 14 since on is on the Wonderland Trail which itself is the subject of several books, two excellent recent ones, not mentioned in this book. The chapter pretty much follows the roads in the NP with the northwest area.

The chapter starts with the Nisqually Entrance to Paradise, then proceeds along the Stevens Canyon Road to the eastside north-south highway (123-410) and then describes to places along on that highway to the White River Road to Sunrise to the Yakima Park area.

The chapter then describes the Carbon River and the Spray Park - Mowich Lake areas before adding a section on two west side opportunities, Gobbler's Knob (lookout) off the Westside Road and the Glacier view vista on the adjacent wilderness area south of the NP.

The chapter's real focus is really focus are those two interests, scenic views and wildflowers with good descriptions of when and where including trailheads and trails. The shortcomings of the chapter are the obvious details, which is expected since it's only 30+ pages with photos.

It also lacks what I would consider the obvious maps, but then the author mentioned the on-line and print resources for these, two of which I highly recommend two maps on the NP by Tom Haseltine, the south side and the north side which provide better descriptions.

But in the end the chapter is a great place for the first time or occasional visitor or photographer to the NP.

Webcams

I have updated the Webcams for those in Mt. Rainier NP to add the new one at the Carbon River Ranger station looking northwest across the Carbon River, or so it appears until I can get confirmation of the actual location of the Webcam.

In addition the NPS has upgraded some of those in the Jackson Visitors Center with new High Definition (HD) cameras for a wider, more detailed view. The popup windows for the images from these cameras and the one at Camp Muir are smaller than the actual image, but you can click on the image to enlarge it.

Outside of that, there's a lot of news for the winter season which I'm working to update the news, access and conditions Webpages, but other issues have intervined causing delays in the work. I apologize and will get things on-line soon.

Google Maps

Well, I've been late with work on the Mt. Rainier photo guide for a number of reasons, one of which I forgot, or it makes for a nice excuse, which is that Google discontinued their map api version 2 yesterday, Wednesday November 20th (2013) as promised.

I had hoped to find a Google Map API version 3 programmers, see work description to convert one of the existing maps from version 2 to version 3 (at $25 per hour, tenatively 4 hours maximum but negotiatable). The work is still open as I haven't found anyone and I've struggled learning enough to convert them myself.

Anyway, it turns out Google wrote and implemented a version 2 to version 3 wrapper for simple maps, like mine, so the maps will continue to work for awhile. And I will look at learning version 3 again, but in anyone knows a Google map programmer for a short work assignment, please let them know to contact me.

Anyway, I'll get back to the November-December updates soon as I'm feeling better to resume work again even with Apple's new OS-X 10.9 Mavericks which screwed up a lot of small things which I'm waiting for the expected 10.9.1 and 10.9.2 updates and Adobe updates.

Have a good Thanksgiving holiday.

Well, folks I haven't updated the Web pages for the Mt. Rainier photo guide for good reasons, which means the November-December news, access, information and reports pages aren't on-line yet as well as other pages I had planned to work on this month.

The reason is simple, I upgraded to OS-X 10.9 Mavericks, and while it is better in many cases, it's worse in almost as many cases, including that it either broke or created problems with a number of applications which I use to work on Web pages, namely Adobe's Creative Suite products.

In addition, many applications companies, including Adobe, haven't updated their applications to work with or work better with Mavericks, and until I can get updates to the applications, work is slow at best and stopped at worst. I am looking at using the older versions of Adobe products (have them back to CS3 or 4) which work with far fewer issues or problems.

In the meantime, it's wait for Adobe and others to get their proverbial heads out of their asses and fix their applications. They've had the developer versions of Mavericks for months ahead of time, so it's troublesome they've been negligent issuing timely updates.

Anyway, as Jimmy Buffett said, "That's my story and I'm sticking to it.", for now at least to see if anything happens soon or I just live with things until they are fixed.