Friends in Warm Places
January 30, 2009

A very fun thing happened at work the other day. I received a big envelope with some sort of soft, squishy feeling contents in it. It was from a school in Tallahassee, Florida that I had never heard of before. I ripped open the top and inside I found a very nice scarf and a stack of letters and drawings...cool! Well it turns out the scarf wasn't for me it was for our Headquarters snowman! He's been adopted by Ms. Garrison's kindergarten class at Springwood Elementary. They noticed he was looking a little cold the other day and decided he needed a little love. All the kids wrote letters about "Snowball," they named him, and they all drew pictures of the scene from the Headquarters Webcam. We are going to hang them in the hall for the rest of the park staff to enjoy. As soon as the package arrived I called the school and made sure the kids were all watching as we went out and put the scarf on. While I was talking to the teacher I could hear all kinds of activity in the background. The kids were pretty excited apparently...we were too, probably more so. It turns out that Snowball has been teaching the kids about geography and weather. Yesterday the local newspaper came up to do a story about Snowball's new scarf. I'll post more about that when the article shows up. What a great treat to know that something as simple as a snowman can reach out across the country and have an impact.

Speaking of webcams, we have received a lot of email about Lake McDonald this year. Lots of people are interested in why it hasn't frozen over. Typically it doesn't. It's too deep and generally the wind makes it too rough. Well...take a look at it now. It's not completely frozen over but we finally have a good shelf of ice extending from the shore. Seems like just the right combination of conditions came together the last few days. Even the orange buoy is hardly visible as it lies trapped in a case of ice. The marks that look like someone drove on it are probably just some kind of compression features made as the ice was moving and freezing. It is definitely NOT safe enough to drive on and we don't recommend any travel on the ice section at all...that goes for whoever tried to ski on it. Yikes, that could have been a cold, wet day for someone!

Bill Hayden

Back at Work Again!
January 20, 2009

Well after a long holiday break and an unexpected trip to the Seattle area, I'm back in the office again and trying to catch up. On my last blog entry I mentioned how the Two Medicine Camera was down and we didn't know when it would be back online this winter. That was right before I hopped on the plane and headed west. No sooner did I get to Seattle and check my email when I discovered that someone had gone in and reset the Satellite and presto the cam started sending spectacular images again. It's a bit like when the Mars Rover stops working and then comes back online. We all heave a big sigh of relief and send out grateful thanks to whoever it was that went in and got us up and running again. Maybe I should leave more often and post ominous notes about the cams.

Also while I was out of the office something happened to the Apgar Mountain Cam. Apparently there was a nasty power bump again. That has happened before and the cam's software suffers a bit. You might have noticed a gray screen for a day or so. For some reason those power hits seem to disable the automatic haze control on the camera. I was able to walk my co-worker David through the process, over the phone, to tweak the settings as much as we can from the office. The haze control is turned to manual and we turn the values all the way to maximum. It's only a temporary work-around and it's not good for the long term health of the cam. I'll make my same prediction again and say that we don't know when we will be able to get up there to fix it...hey that worked before maybe it will work again.

Bill

PS - The snow is really nasty and crunchy right now and terrible for making or repairing snowmen. We will get on it as soon as we can.

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Good News - Bad News
January 6, 2009

We know what the problem is with the Two Medicine Webcam. The satellite connection in Two Medicine is offline. The power outage in mid-December must have effected the satellite. When the power came back on (and apparently it is on) the satellite did not reboot itself. It's likely not difficult to fix, except for the fact that the area is inaccessible, except by skis or snowshoes. Currently there are no plans for anyone to go in there. If one of the staff does make it back in, they will probably be able to reset the satellite fairly easily.

So it looks like we are going to be offline there are Two Medicine for some time to come.

Bill Hayden