I went over to the Adirondacks last Wednesday and came back with 1900 photos. Most of them were taken by my Gigapan imager, and half of those are duplicates that will never again see the light of day. Before I even got to New York, I took 126 handheld photos from the Lake Champlain ferry, 48 of which got stitched into the three-row panorama below of the new Crown Point Bridge, still under construction. Back on August 26, the day the central “network tied arch” was lifted into position, I came to repeat the gigapan I took of the old bridge. But the place was crawling with gawkers, and the men in hard hats would not let me get to the place from which the earlier panorama had been taken. So I left defeated. If you missed it too, you can relive the raising of the arch with the fully archived construction webcams, but you have to click through a lot of photos to get to 3:30 PM on August 26 when the action started.
The primary objective of the day was to take a gigapan from the Nubble, the hill Galen and I climbed in August. I didn’t have the Gigapan imager with me in August, but I made a handheld half-spherical panorama, and I took a quick handheld panorama of the southwest face of Giant Mountain. I was curious to see if I could detect any new landslides on that face since tropical storm Irene dumped 6-8 inches of rain in the area. Other Adirondack peaks have fresh slides, but I did not see any new ones on that side of Giant. At least I now have a good record of the current status of the slide scars on Giant to compare after the next big storm. The gigapan below can be seen in its full 360° glory in Google Earth (if you want to load the KML into GE). Click “GigaPan” in the lower right below to see the panorama at gigapan.org with a full description.
.
About 10 years ago, lots of big eastern hemlock trees fell across the trail I followed to the Nubble, and trail crews have cut the trunks to clear the trail. It is hard to count the rings in the field, so I took multiple photos of each log end, usually as close as my D40’s kit lens would allow, and stitched them together to make fairly high resolution images. This allows more accurate counts of the rings, and it appears that all of the photographed hemlocks established between 1600 and 1650. The poster below includes parts of five log ends all of which allowed ring counts quite adequate for this purpose. It generated some discussion on Twitter about whether this stand should be considered old growth. The question is still open. Last year I made a gigapan of the forest near this trail if you want a sense of what it looks like.