Backpacking trip in the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest along the abandoned Suiattle River Road, with day hikes along Downy Creek and Sulfur Mountain trails, into the Glacier Peak wilderness.
Andy and I took 3 days to hike along the Suiattle River Road this past weekend. The weather was mostly cloudy and spitting rain for most of the trip, but we lucked out on our second day and ended up with at least a little sunshine and a dry sky to enjoy our campfire under.
Day 1: While the company was great, the hiking was not the best. Day one we hiked 14 miles total, but 8 of those miles were along the very boring Suiattle River road. We knew it would be this way – such is the price you pay for seclusion – but I can say that it wasn’t worth the monotony. We found a pretty sweet campsite at Downy Creek, set up our tent on the sandy banks, and headed out for the Downy Creek hike. The 3mi one way trip was pretty & lush & uneventful. We ended the day after 14mi of walking by passing out before sunset – I blame the Makers Mark and the Beef Stroganoff.
Day 2: We headed out for our hike up Sulfur Mountain looking forward to some actual vertical elevation (4000ft) and decent mileage (10mi round trip). The f0rest was absolutely lush, and we certainly got our fill of the greenery as we wound our way up, up, up into the clouds and eventually snow. The snow level kept us from continuing on at the top of Sulfur Mountain, where we had our lunch and turned back the way we came.
We ended the day by taking a quick day hike up Sulfur Creek hoping to find the hot springs that our Green Trails maps eluded to. While Sulfur Creek lives up to it’s name, we did not find the source of the stink in the form of warm pools of bubbling water. We found a cairn at one fork in the trail that lead to a great view of the creek, but no hot springs were to be found. After scrounging up some firewood, we headed back to camp and enjoyed a nice long evening by the fire. All told, we put in about 16mi on Sunday.
Day 3: Our last day was nothing much to speak about – a long hike along the 8mi Suiattle River road back out – but ended fantastically at the Darrington Burger Barn.
Pictures uploaded Here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/kmwoley/20100529SuiattleRiverRoad#
I am super excited about my brand new 2009 Kona Sutra. I took my first ride on it last week to work and back, with a detour up to Naked City Brewery/Taphouse for Alex’s surprise birthday party. But today Andy and I took our bikes out for their first _real_ ride. The picture above is over looking Mt. Rainier from the I-90 bridge.
Continue reading ‘The Green Machine II’
How good is Windows 7 software RAID? Is it faster or slower than a cheap hardware controller (aka “fake RAID”)?
This past month I’ve realized the simultaneous need to add more hard drive storage and decrease the probability of losing the data stored within. While I fully realize that redundant hard disks are not a substitute for a backup, I do want to use a RAID array to reduce the likelihood that I have to restore that data from a backup. Also, I plan to put data on that disk that I would be annoyed to lose, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world (i.e. music, movies, etc.).
Disk drives are cheap (1.5TB is currently running around $100), but industrial-grade RAID controllers are not. Being that I’m cheap, have an old (4 years is old, right?) system, and just need a bare-minimum amount of reliability I’m looking for the cheapest way to add a couple of mirrored drives. That basically means that I use a “fake RAID” hardware controller or a solution managed completely by Windows. There are various pros and cons to each, but I’ll tell you up front that Windows 7 software RAID was what I chose because of performance & trust. After the break I’ll get to the details as to why.
Continue reading ‘RAID on the Cheap: Windows 7 Software RAID vs. inexpensive “fake RAID”’
My recent hard disk failure made me realize that I had no idea where to find the CHDSK logs that are created when Windows runs CHKDSK at boot. In my case, I had just installed a drive that had a bunch of NTFS corruptions caused by a different computer.
Below I walk though what I think is the easiest way to find the CHKDSK logs (and more) which are available in the Windows Event Log.
Continue reading ‘Where to find CHKDSK results in Vista, Windows 7′
Damn it. Just when I’m getting ready to backup my PC for that ever-exciting OS upgrade, my external backup hard drive died… a strange death, too. I was deleting an old backup set to make room for the most current and the drive started to hang. Once it finally cancels out, the drive disappears from the computer entirely. Reboot. Plug back in. And then comes the big ‘uh-oh’ … Windows can’t read the drive and wants to format it.
Logical guess: looks like the controller for the external drive has failed. Time to pull it out and stick it in the server.
[edit] Yep… my Adaptec USB 2.0 external enclosure released the last of it’s remaining magic blue smoke. Dropping the drive into my Windows 7 server box rebuilt the drive indexes and recovered the data via chkdsk.
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