Pine Trail and Hemlock Mountain : you have to work for the views

This is a named hike in Tom Thwaites’ book. The Blue and White weekend (4/25-26) was going to be one of my last in State College, and I wanted to go out and do something substantial. I can just say that all my expectations were fulfilled !

 

Personal Productivity: Being smart about choosing smartphone plans: Nokia E71

This post discusses various options for choosing a smartphone data plan. I do not use a lot of data and given particular brand of smartphone, it is possible to get a phone without the 30 $/mo. data plan. However, one has to pay a higher cost for the phone upfront. In this post, I examine various data plan-options for the upcoming Nokia E71x. I conclude that if one does not mind AT&T firmware on E71x, buying it from AT&T with a 2 year contract for 99 $, and having the 30 $/month data plan for 6 months (and subsequently switching to a lower 15 $/mo. data plan) is a good option compared to getting a locked phone and paying the 30 $/mo. data plan for 6 months.

 

Little Pine State Park : Panther Run trail loop

Directions: To get to Little Pine State Park from the south, follow PA 44 till Waterville and take a right onto SR 4001. Drive 4 miles to get to the State Park. If you are looking to do other hikes in the area, check out the camp office along the road for maps.

Views from the ridge

This trail starts off from Little Pine State Park, in “God’s Country” (Technically, Potter Country is referred to by that name, but hey, a thing of beauty is a joy for ever!). After a strenuous scramble, it affords the nicest ridge-line views of Little Pine Creek and surroundings. This part of the trail is the easily one of the best ridge-line walks in PA.

Layered sandstone

Myself & N on the trail

In commonality with other ridges in glacier-carved valleys, the ridge-line is strewn with sandstone boulders, which exist in a multitude of shapes along the trail. After almost a mile, the Panther Run trail meets the Mid-State trail, and the following 3/4 mile is typical MST: rocks, woods and some views.

Beginning of the end: The descent starts here

The rest of the hike consists of an ultra-steep descent into Panther Run (this is crazy . Using Google Maps’ topo feature, we estimated the steepest grade of the descent to be almost 20%. If you are hiking this, make sure you have TWO hiking poles and STURDY hiking boots. Coming down parallel to Panther Run, the trail took us almost 1 hour!

Myself @ Panther Run, we did cut across the trail to get to the stream

At the bottom, the trail’s slope becomes a little easier, and the gentle sloshing sounds of Panther Run offer a mental respite for the hiker.

Panther Run

This is not the end of the story, at the end, where Panther Run trail meets SR4001, the trail abruptly plunges steeply again. But this last portion is a little easier because of the trees and roots. A ~2 mile walk on SR4001 took us back to the boat launch area where we parked. In total, the loop is ~4 miles, and it took us ~4 h (with breaks for lunch, photos, descents etc.)

Between the trail and the road

All things considered, this is a difficult hike, and IMO, the difficulty lies in steep (and potentially dangerous) descents. However, the ridge-line walk on Panther Run trail/Love Run trail, and the gentle walks along Panther Run more than madeup for the effort.

 

LaTeX and figures in Windows XP

Recently my roomie showed me a presentation in LaTeX. This renewed my interest in this (About 2 years ago, I installed LaTeX only to give up). I went through the paces installing MikTeX as my LaTeX distribution and LEd and TeXnicCenter as the front-ends. I created a nice cover letter for a company as one of my first documents. My next task was to see if I can really write publication length articles in LaTeX, with figures.

The various options I explored for using figures (plots, charts etc. from excel/other software) in LaTeX in a Windows XP box are :

1. Excel – print plot – print to pdf – insert figure as pdf
2. Excel – print plot – print to eps (install a postscript printer) – further process in ghostscript with ps to eps command to get a better bounding box around your figure
3. Gnuplot - terminal epslatex – include the tex file
4. Gnuplot – terminal postscript enhanced eps – include eps file

Option #1 was clearly the easiest and so I tried it first. It worked with the latex->pdf convertor. The main downside to this is that my pdf printer (pdfcreator) was printing the whole page and my graph did not have a tight bounding box. Therefore, there was a lot of white space between the plot and the figure caption. This can be overcome by selectively trimming the edges with trim and clip, but I think it goes against the main idea of using LaTeX (we should be less worried about how the document looks like and concentrate more on the content). Therefore I explored Option #2 : eps printing with post-processing with ghostscript to get a file with a better bounding box. This option gave me better results than the pdf printing. The main disadvantages here were that the plots each had slightly different sizes (as in option #1) and also had different fonts from the rest of the document.

 

Water: the High Plains aquifer

The High Plains aquifer underlies one of the most productive agricultural regions in the US. This region is semi-arid and does not get much precipitation, therefore most of the water used for irrigation is drawn from wells. Ground water levels here have been dropping and I thought of doing a zeroth order analysis of how many years will the water in the aquifer last.

 

Bromide poisoning in Angola

Recent news about bromide poisoning in Angola piqued my interest in the chemical sodium bromide (NaBr). This article in pravda mentions the use of NaBr in Angola’s oil industry. The USGS fact sheet on bromine (Br) lists its uses in fire retardants, agriculture, petroleum additives, well drilling fluids, sanitary preparations, and as a intermediate in chemical syntheses. Apart from its use in the photographic industry, NaBr is also used as a oil well completion fluid and workover fluid. The function of the bromide ion is probably to prepare brines/fluids to match the physico-chemical characteristics (density, pH etc.) of the reservoir fluids. The USGS fact sheet on Br mentions that while chlorine and iodine may be substituted for Br in a few chemical reactions and in petroleum additives, there are no satisfactory substitutes for Br in oil and gas well completion and packer applications.

 

ICCDU-IX

I gave a talk at ICCDU-IX (International Conferences on Carbon dioxide Utilization -IX ) held at Kingston, Canada from July 8-12. I came across a lot of interesting presentations. Below is a summary of the presentations I attended:

1. Stern Review on the economics of climate change: looking at the costs of action vs. costs of inaction (doing nothing).

It concludes that the costs of doing nothing are far worser than acting to stabilize GHG concentrations.

2. Carbon tracker (Pieter Tans, NOAA) : gives CO2 fluxes by region (2001-2005). Measurement of CO2 in the atmosphere becomes critical to enforce any GHG mitigation policy. In a scenario when the actual decrease in GHG concentrations are less than the claimed reductions, the Carbon tracker hopefully can tell us what the actual GHG emissions for a given place are.

 

Procrastination – a philosophical approach

In Hindu mythology, Arjuna is a warrior who refuses to fight his cousins in a great battle. Then, Lord Krishna, who was his charioteer speaks to him about why he should fight, the result is the cornerstone of Hindu religious thinking, called Bhagavadgita.

 

No returns below 200 $

BEGIN RANT

I ordered a transportable gas cylinder from a reputed chemicals/lab supplier (hint: it has acquired a leading chromatography company based in State College.) I usually order stuff from them because their website is more user friendly than their competiton, albeit their prices are costlier. I ended up not using it for my research and tried contacting them to see if I could return it. Their argument was that

1. They could not return anything costing less than 200 $.
2. Their reputed catalog (which serves a better purpose as a mini pillow) had this policy in the front pages.
3. Their online ordering form has this information.

 

Bob Webber Trail

This hike is mentioned in Tom Thwaites’ book (50 hikes in central PA). I wanted to do some hiking in this area for some time. I did this on Memorial Day. This was my first solo hike away from State College ( I earlier hiked Mt.Nittany solo), so I took it easy and opted for a smaller (although more challenging) trail instead of the nearby Golden Eagle trail or the BFT. I reached the trailhead by 2:00 pm. A note of caution: The trailhead is on the creek side (left side, when driving north) of the road, at a place called Ross Run Canoe Access Area, just outside the village of Cammal. There is a sign for Wolf Run Wild Area on the right side of the road.

There were a few cars in the parking area. The view of Hemlock mountain and Pine Creek was magnificent. I started hiking at ~2:30 pm after signing at the the trail register. As the book mentions it, the trail gets very steep around 600 m although leveling off before the switchbacks. It was good hiking. The only downside was that I forgot to pack my recently purchased hiking pole (which would have come handy for the downhill return). I came across ~ 3-4 groups of hikers, all returning. It took me ~1.1 h to get to the top.

On the way, I passed the Raven’s Horn vista, took some pictures of some nice wildflowers and saw two worms sunbathing on a rock . The switchbacks were what I was looking for, after being disappointed in the Falls Trail in Ricketts Glen State Park. The book mentions two springs off the trail.

I was pleasantly surprised to find teaberry/wintergreen shrubs along with the hemlocks and oaks mentioned in the book. I first came across teaberry on my Mt. Nittany hike (Mothers’ Day, 2007). They were bearing fruit (as shown in the photo from my Mt.Nittany hike) back then. The leaves have a minty smell (due to methyl salicylate).