ski'n, bike'n & hike'n with the kids: BLM

Friday, September 1, 2017

The Great American Eclipse of 2017 - the Eclipse

Excitement was mounting...our party took two positions on top of the nearby outcrops; both with great 360˚ vistas.

plates holding the glasses makes it better for kids

the sun was coming through clearly - three sunspots easily visible

so cool

sunsunglass selfies

hope the clouds don't get thicker

closer...

still looking not too bad...

the wall of darkness comes

And here it is in slideshow form:

360 degree sunset colors:
And almost just like that it was over.

Camp life continued for three families. The rest reported 10-12 hour drives back home.

kids love those inflatable couches

The next day we packed up camp and rounded up the last traces of our occupation. We can honestly say that we left the place cleaner than when we found it thanks. You might think that's impossible, weren't we in a pristine area untouched by people. Oh no. Some yahoo(s) had left cans and bullet cartridge cases and broken glass up on one of the ridges. So when we policed the area and picked up every teeny tiny piece of foreign debris, we were making sure that our camp was indeed cleaner than when we got there.

and then we left

out traffic the day after the eclipse - can you say "Zip?"

Photo notes and lessons learned. The eclipse photos (and most others) were taken on a Panasonic/Lumix GH5 camera. The eclipse lens was a modest telephoto, 35-100 f/2.8 which is a great lens though a little short for this purpose. I originally thought I'd use a technique dubbed "Drift mode' which is simply this: to avoid futzing with a camera, you set it to take a high resolution video of the event which you can use to pull still photos from later. This takes advantage of the camera's ability to shoot 4k video. But then I heard that the GH5 can actually shoot 6k video (!) so I did that instead.
What I later figured out was that since I was never going to use the video as video, I should have simply done everything as long sequential photo shoot, taking a frame once a second (10 minutes at 60 photos per minute would have been 600 frames). Examining sun photos later also showed that the RAW files were much better than the JPEGs so I should have shot the sequence in just RAW + low rez jpeg. As far as audio, the winds picked up and the 6k audio is dominated by that. I could have simply recorded audio with another device like my phone. Live and learn.

Wednesday, August 30, 2017

The Great American Eclipse of 2017 - the camp

We went up two weeks before the eclipse to find a place with good camping. We found a spot that had TREES on a round formation called Pine Mountain, about 25 miles West of Casper. Sadly we didn't find a camp with trees that a low-clearance van could follow so we picked another spot. Here's one of the maps we made for people. Green X marked our proposed campsite.

How cool is this mountain?

the orange areas are Bureau of Lan Management (BLM), public lands. barring a special circumstance, they are free to camp on. the blue line is the exact center of the eclipse totality

Unfortunately for us, a local rancher decided they didn't like the idea of potentially having a lot of people camped nearby so they put up no trespassing signs - illegally as far as we could tell - with a claim about deeded land. So this is what we found when we arrived at 9:30pm on Friday night:

What to do? We had 32 more people coming up (B&T) had already found this sign and had camped elsewhere). Tired after a long day, we found we had cell reception and called the sherif's department (Natrona County). We explained the situation and asked if they had any way to corroborate or disprove the no trespassing sign's claims - they did not have that info so they gave us the BLM's after-hours number. We called them but the employee manning the desk also didn't have that information. We left our number and the coordinates and asked for a call back. It was late and we had to start work on Plan B, finding a new site.

Not that there was any doubt that we weren't going to camp there. A rancher that would do this would also be likely to be armed and belligerent. We just wanted to register our grievance with the BLM and see the jerk weasel who did it put on the radar of the authorities (*cough* Strohecker owned ranch nearby *cough*).

We drove up to another possible site and it was taken. We drove back the other way to another spot we knew and that was taken too. It felt like everywhere we went there were people. We were just exhausted since we have little kids and we're usually in bed by 9. We finally found a spot to camp and crawled into our bags at midnight. We slept like the dead.

asleep by midnight - a low point on the trip

The next morning, a quick jaunt in the car revealed that we had, essentially, found ALL the other campers in the area the night before. There were, intact, many more sites and since the weather was expected to be good, we could even camp right on top of hills...which we did. Party saved! Later we found out that T & B found a great camping spot with trees that we could have gone to if we had only known. Oh well, at least we wouldn't have to move to view the eclipse here. Besides, there's a beauty to being out in the wide open...that's our story and we're sticking to it.