Tag Archives: Going To The Sun highway

The Last Hurrah

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On the Going To The Sun highway, just a little ways from Logan’s Visitor Center there is a valley that will take your breath away. There are many valleys in Glacier National Park but this one is spellbinding. It has all the features that make a valley spectacular. Towering cliff walls, verdant green trees reaching up its sides, an echoing view that recedes back into the distance. Plus a small stream called Lunch Creek that runs down out of the mountains to drop into quickly onto the valley floor below.

Who or what was lunch is not explained. This is a place where you can let your imagination run wild. Personally there’s a preference for mammoth grizzly bears and Mountain men with damp powder but then that’s just me. Your mileage may vary.

While there a constant stream of clouds formed over the mountains in the background and flowed down through the valley sometimes obscuring it completely. Then the wind would kick up and run them out only to complete the cycle over and over again. The emerald greenness of the valley did nothing to discourage intermittent snow squalls that sometimes brought the visibility down to zero. But the ground was still too warm and the snow never had a chance.

It wouldn’t be long though. There was a bitterness in the wind that would not be denied. Soon the snow would stick, so this was pretty much the last hurrah as far as Summer went. The road, Going To the Sun, would be closed before long and then there’d be the long wait as we slogged through Winter before we could get back up there and see the valley again. Start crossing the days off your calendar. You don’t want to miss this sight.

Blues and Purples and Greens

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OK, you know it is July right, and we’re heading into August, not typically your coolest month of the year. Some people say it is unseasonably warm even if it is summer. That’s the kind of understatement that makes it very clear we were once a British colony. It’s kind of like saying that Donald Trump is somewhat opinionated. We for one are comforted by our governments pronouncement that there is no such thing as Global warming, as otherwise this heat might cause us to despair.

Given all that we are still freaking hot. Even up here where The Institutes main headquarters are located, halfway to the sky amid the cooling breezes of the upper stratosphere, one feels like a guppy placed out on the blacktop to wait while your bowl is being scrubbed out. We feel like we could be quite sharp with whomever it is that schedules summer heat.

It is not unusual then that we turn our thoughts to cooler places. Not places like the Arctic, which as you know is melting away, and you have to use sunscreen to be safe out on the ice. What is wrong with a world where you have to put sunscreen on so you don’t sunburn to death while you’re standing on an ice shelf. That’s sort of a rhetorical question so no answer is expected as it is too ridiculous to contemplate anyway.

We’re thinking of places that aren’t so ludicrous. Places where you can walk into the cool shadows of giant cedar trees, where the deep spaces are filled with emerald green moss, and water drips quietly down the face of deep purple walls to splash into tiny pools of cobalt blue water.  A place where the silence is barely broken by a bird call or the slight rustle of branches swaying high above you. A place like this.

As you come down off the Going To The Sun highway on the western side, there is a hidden trail that leads into old growth cedar trees called the Trail of The Cedars. It is a wooden walkway elevated above the forest floor, with twists and turns and places to stand and look at incredible views that surely Tolkien must have used to create Lothlorien, the land of the Silvan elves. One of those places is located at an abrupt turn of the trail where you cross over a wooden bridge and can peer down into this hidden grotto.

The feeling of the cool moist air that floats out of the grotto to envelope you in its delightful mist is an experience that is as profound as is it is enjoyable. It is so enjoyable in fact, that we here at The Institute are in delicate negotiations with the National Park Service to move this grotto and its stream to The Institute grounds where we can keep it safe from any natural or manmade disaster. We do this with no thought of personal gain or benefit, but simply as a service to the American people. So far they have been tough negotiators but we are nothing if not persistent so our hopes are high at this time.

You too can visit this place if you are pure of heart and don’t throw anything in the pool, because if you do you are immediately transported to Death Valley in your skivvies. With no sunscreen. Rocks melt in Death Valley. Be warned. Just go to Glacier National Park and look for the small sign that says “Trail of The Cedars”. Be prepared to be stunned. Most people aren’t used to this much beauty in one place.

Going To The Sun

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Valley7037-7050Panoclick to enlarge                                                                                         © Dwight Lutsey

Since we are waiting for the 8000+ images taken of the North American Indian Days event to come out of The Institutes proprietary image developer. The one we had constructed under the auspices of our own Hardware Development Group (TI-HDG) and specially built to handle large jobs by a triumvirate of IBM, Apple, and ACME Pixel  Burner and Screendoor factory to finish the initial processing, we thought we would share another shot from Glacier National Park.

This is a 14 image panorama stitched together in Photoshop under a license with Adobe systems and The Institute, which has been carefully monitored by our own staff of  panorama techno nerds using our own casually leased monitors throughout the process. At the risk of boring you stupid with the technical details we realize that are at least three of you out there that actually care about this technical stuff, so we decided to share the details to enlighten the unenlightened and to fill up page space as we don’t have a lot to say about this image otherwise.

The original images were taken with a professional digital camera set to stun and the resulting pixels were ported to The Institutes own diesel-powered mainframe computer where they were checked for robustness and cohesiveness before being divvied up into equal quantities and parceled out to the 14 techs used for the initial joining process.
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The next step is the labor intensive part of the procedure where the individual techs who have each been given the amount of pixels  to complete one image, lay out the pixels one by one in numerical order on a large clean white piece of poster board. When one image is fully laid out the next tech steps up and begins to lay out his pixels adjacent to the first image so that the pixels touch at the long edge of the orientation. Then a specially formulated glue developed by The Institute and the Amalgamated Glue Workers Union under the watchful eye of NASA, because this is Space like science we’re working with here, and each individual pixel is glued to its matching neighbor on the other image until the two images edges are joined. This entire procedure is then repeated until all 14 images are joined into the one big image you see on the screen today.

The resulting panorama must be left on the poster board for at least 3½ hours for the glue to set and another 5 days for it cure properly so that the images do not separate when you lift them off the paper. At this point the utmost caution is required as the image has the consistency of a freshly molded sheet of very thin jello. This is the hard part. The waiting, because you really want to pick up the image and hold it up to the light to see what it looks like. But just like a fine wine, no image can be picked up before its time, otherwise it will fall apart and you have to start all over again. There is nothing more discouraging than to see the thousands upon thousands of pixels drip off the page and gather together like beads of mercury to fall off the table and scatter to the edges of the room. Grown men have cried at this sight.

Usually the whole process is worth the time and expense, not to mention the nerd power tied up in the project, but it still must be used sparingly. You don’t want to waste this on taking a panorama of your sock drawer. This is the valley seen from the Going To The Sun highway just before you get to the visitors center, and it carries Reynolds creek downstream toward Heavy Runner mountain way off in the background there. Now you could have taken this image as one shot with your smart phone, without going through the panorama business, but had you done so everything in the picture would be itty-bitty scrunched up, tiny little pixels and you wouldn’t have been able to see nothing. Just a bad picture, even though your friends would probably say it was beautiful, trust me, it isn’t. They just say that because they’re your friends and they like you.

OK then, we expect to have images popping out the developer soon so we can begin posting them for you to see everything that happened at the North American Indian Days celebration. Hang in there.