hike Haleakala

Half of these images were taken on the hike I did with my girlfriend last year and half are from hiking it with my sister and brother-in-law this year: Haleakala on panoramio

Atlanta to Honolulu

I had my bluetooth gps receiver on for most of the trip both so I could see where I was during the flight and so I could save the gps track so I could geotag the pictures I took out the window. Unfortunately, the camera’s time and the gps receiver’s time were not the same, so once I compensated for the difference in time zones between the two devices (-11 hours), it still took some trial and error with google maps to guess at the correct offset (which was about 40 seconds). I synchronized the camera’s clock to my other gps receiver’s time in March, so with a few assumptions, the clock drift on an s80 is -40 seconds over 7 months.

The software I used was called “gps-correlate-gui” and it works quite well. You give it a set of images, a gpx file with a gps track in it, the time zone offset and an optional additional offset and it tags the images that correspond to being taken during the gps track and ignores the others.

Here’s a sample of the images from my flight that were geotagged in this way:

One photo of the Mississippi river.

There’s a photo of a nuclear power plant just South of Little Rock, Arkansas.

Some of the Painted Desert in Arizona.

An interesting shape that made finding the time offset in google maps a lot easier.

Some canyon shots.

Three pix of the Colorado river. The ones of the Colorado river were taken over lake Havasu, which is where the London Bridge is now. Of course, I didn’t know that at the time, and there was the bottom of the plane in the way at the time…

In California, there’s a few of Big Bear Lake, one of Marina del Ray and some of the Channel islands.

I didn’t have the gps on by the time I got to HI, so the 40 or so pix of Oahu as we were landing aren’t geotagged.

Let me just note that if I hadn’t had my gps on during the flight, I wouldn’t have known when to look out the window to take a picture of each interesting thing that went by. The plane I was on did have a map on the screen with our current location, but on a 9.5 hour flight, they showed three movies and two tv shows, so the map wasn’t on the screen very much.

Here’s the entire set of 49 geotagged pictures from the flight embedded in a map on panoramio. It only shows 8 images at a time, so you have to hit the next button (the one below those 8 images) to get to the next set of 8. You can also zoom in on the map and pan around, etc. Alternately, you can get the kml file for google earth here.

Maui – part 1

Yesterday, we hiked inside the crater at Haleakala National Park, from the Sliding Sands trailhead down to the crater floor and back up to the Halemau’u trailhead.

We parked the rental car at an elevation of 2436m, hitchhiked up to the trailhead at 2969m and started down the Sliding Sands trail. From the top, the first part of the trail is all downhill through a variety of terrains (sand, small crumbly rocks, big non-crumbly rocks, etc). The view would change every 10 minutes after turning a corner around one of the many peaks inside the crater and the new vista would require a new set of photos. Either the small crumbly rock trail was set on a slope of hundreds of feet of small crumbly rock or the trail was level but through a rocky wasteland. Round another bend and the colors would change again completely. More photos needed.

After a few km of hiking, we got to the crater floor, we went North on a different trail to see the “bottomless pit” (which is a 22m deep vertical lava tube). From the maps and descriptions I’d read before we went, I expected the crater floor to all be at roughly the same elevation, but it was not so. Up and down hundreds of meters, just to get around the small peaks inside the crater.

After all that, it was just hiking back to the car. We passed one of several cabins in the crater that you can try to reserve many months in advance. This last part of the trail was the only one with anything besides sparse vegitation. On the way back up, it was foggy and cloudy, so half way up the steep switchback cliff, we couldn’t see the bottom, giving it a feeling that if you fell off the side, it would be an infinite drop.

All told, it was a 18.8km hike, not including the 10km hitchhiked. I took gobs of photos. It was very pretty.

2008-11-13 update: uploaded some of the images from this hike to panoramio.