The AlpineInker : Alpine

Rough Winter

Ken Hinckley — Tue, 13 May 2008 02:35:00 GMT

I spent the weekend at Snoqualmie pass. Winter has certainly not yet relinquished its grip on the Cascade Crest. Here's some of the sights done AlpineInker style.

Here's a car that someone left parked for the winter. That probably wasn't a good idea. It's been crushed like an empty can of cheap beer. When this much snow piles up, it pancakes down - hard as concrete and twice as heavy.

Despite what these pictures suggest, quite a bit of the snow has melted. I could not see any daylight at all out my shattered kitchen window the last time I was there. The bottom of that window is about 15 feet above grade level. We lost a window on the north side of the house too. First time that ever happened...

It's been a rough winter in the Alpental valley.

Winter 2007-2008
Date of First Measurable snowfall 10/19/07
October snowfall           2
November snowfall      24
December snowfall    180
January snowfall        149
February snowfall        90
March snowfall          101
April snowfall              61
May snowfall               1
              Total         608

That's 50 FEET of snow kiddos!

Even the highway web-cams have suffered! "I fought an avalanche and the avalanche won. This camera was so badly damaged we can't repair it until this summer."

Mother's day was no exception. More snow.

Here's my wife taking the twins for a walk. Today they learned a new word: Snow!

Rule #1: No parking. Rule #2: NO PARKING!

This is, or rather was, my kitchen window...

...But there's no place I'd rather be.

Photographic Interlude #1

Ken Hinckley — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 10:23:00 GMT

I snapped this photo years ago near Shaefer Lake in the glorious Cascade Range.

The needles of the larch incandesce with the sunlight of an entire alpine summer in the days before they must fall dead to the ground.

Pile It On!

Ken Hinckley — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 11:09:00 GMT

Well, InkSeine is finally out the door, and you can install it here. The Microsoft Research web site also has posted a feature story about InkSeine.

We're getting a ton of helpful feedback, particularly in the GottaBeMobile forums thread for InkSeine. Keep it coming! It is really helpful to us to see what parts of the application people get excited about, or frustrated with.

My inbox is also quickly piling up with layer upon layer of comments, questions, and ideas. Feedback is accumulating fast and deep, and I like it that way!

In fact, Mother Nature has provided me with a perfect analogy for this situation:

What is that, you might ask? Well, that is all that's left of my poor cabin. That snow berm on the peak of the roof is about 12-15 feet high. It has been a very wild, stormy winter on the Cascade Crest. In a previous post, I reported 234 inches of snow in 40 days. Well, after brief respite in January, another 90 inches fell in six days. And then another 95 inches piled on top of that.

These non-stop storms led to the best excuse I have ever seen for a webcam not functioning correctly:

So there you have it. I want my InkSeine Inbox to feel just like that-- with ideas, reflections, questions, and complaints about what we could do better -- all piling up as much as possible!

But if you get an out-of-office message from me that looks like this error message, then you'll know all those great emails floating down from the sky have finally avalanched out of control on me!

40 Days and 40 Nights… Of Snow

Ken Hinckley — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 10:05:00 GMT

I visited Snoqualmie Pass this weekend, just 1 hour east of Seattle. Life in the mountains here at just 3000 feet of elevation is dramatically different than the maritime climate of Seattle.

The Alpental ski area, about 1 mile north of the Pass, has received 234 inches of snow (i.e., 19 ½ feet, or 6 ½ meters) in the last 40 days, according to the records of a local resident who keeps a running tally of the snowfall.

So what does all that snow look like? To give a sense of scale, here's my car dwarfed by the colossal snow banks. The other is the barely visible roof of my cabin, festooned with unstable snow mushrooms... The entire building shakes when one of them lets loose from the roof.

Noah's ark would do me little good in these conditions. Our solution was to concoct a sled to carry the twins around. So I spent my weekend as a glorified mushing dog, competing in the "Identical Iditarod." We were not beating anyone to our destination, but we certainly had the cutest brood on the trail.

Now that's traveling in style.