Diet Taco... trying to keep things light

Well we will see how long it lasts with mine! There is only so much we can do as parents to expose our kids to whatever - it is their personalities that determine whether it "takes" or not. Having a blast so far and hope she continues to want join in for a long time.

Maybe if I get the camping right it will partially make up for all the other parts of parenting I'm sucking at?

Thanks for the kind words everyone!

 

Holy crap, my alerts this morning said "Lazarus posted to your thread". Welcome back!

You may already be aware in the past couple of weeks Toyota finally removed their head from their ass and have a service campaign for the 2012 AIP. So in your case you might balance preventative steps vs keeping things stock so they don't blame you when the valves eventually go.

When you get to read further in the thread you'll discover my proximity to DV was short lived but I still manage to get there a few times a year.

Welcome to the thread!

 

Do you have any information or a link regarding the above mentioned service campaign for the 2012 pumps? Is it just the 2012s, or does it include other years, and what are they offering to do?

 

Only 2012 I believe:

https://www.tacomaworld.com/threads...-p2440-and-p2442.370792/page-24#post-16926511

https://www.tacomaworld.com/threads...-switching-valve.381997/page-41#post-16878176

 

The Dinger is back!

 

I still can't get over how dumb the stock exhaust is routed. It's routed into a compressed pipe that only gets flatter when it's hit from rocks. I mean... wow. I'm hoping mine turns out identical to his.

 

I think the guy who designed that also did the storage bins behind the rear seats.

 

See there's good things in here! @DCSBFTMFW (before a minor snow flurry changed his screen name to @T4RFTMFW) actually tagged you on page one of this thread. But I guess that was right about the time of the unfortunate misunderstanding/misinterpretation and subsequent extraordinary rendition. (Wait, are we suppose to mention that? Eh, probably not...)

Anyway, you are back all safe now and so you can finally enjoy the build thread - and that's what's really important.

 

LMFAO at your “vehicle” in your bio.

 

She isn’t the prettiest girl at the ball, but I drive her hard and she doesn’t complain.

 

Death Valley Teaser

A couple of weeks ago I got back to Death Valley for a few days solo. It was nice, but now I'm buried again already! Hope to get a trip report out in not too long, but until then a slightly ethereal teaser photo. Badwater and the Black Mountains from the opposite side of the valley in deep twilight with an infrared modified camera.

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I haven't yet noticed the IR camera picking up strata that aren't also noticeable in visible bands though I also rarely shoot the same scene in both visible and IR to make a direct comparison. In some cases I do think the IR camera is making certain strata more obvious or higher contrast but this is really hard to tell in an "apples to apples" sense because all the IR shots typically involve pretty heavy handed contrast adjustments in post processing. Lens contrast is pretty abysmal in IR because all the anti-reflection coatings on the lens elements really don't work well at all in the IR. As a result you really have to crank the contrast and/or tone curve in post processing to compensate at which point it is difficult to tell if a higher contrast in strata is due to actual differences in albedo in the IR band or simply a result of the post processing increase in contrast.

Now obviously there must be some significant differences to be seen - chlorophyll being the classic one - but so far haven't noticed anything too dramatic as far as rocks go. I do think though that desert varnish appears to be darker in IR than in visible though I might just be being fooled by the brighter chlorophyll response of all the plants living on top of the varnished rocks. Also weathered wood seems to have a different IR response with new/old wood looking pretty similar in the visible but rather obviously different in the IR.

I have to say the one slightly unexpected result which I really should have realized in advance - cloud contrast drops significantly when shooting IR. Since the sky goes practically black in IR I had hoped that I'd see nice extra high contrast clouds, particularly emphasizing the typically thin cirrus we see in the desert. Well dumb me forgot that of course since one of the big benefits of IR is that it cuts through haze on the ground that it will also cut through clouds pretty well too! So if the sky does have some interesting cirrus or other thin clouds they end up looking really anemic in an IR shot. So for punchy clouds in a black and white shot I think taking the red channel from a visible spectrum shot is better than IR. You can also use a polarizer if sun angle is appropriate with a visible camera to improve things further. None of the standard polarizers sold polarize at all in the IR band so if you want to try that you have to pony up for a very expensive IR band polarizer and deal with mounting it somehow. I have not done this though I've seen a blog post from someone that did.

Oh - and for reference - the IR converted EM5II is sensitive from about 830nm to 1050nm. Some of my older IR shots were from a converted G1 and that was sensitive from about 720nm to 1050nm. So far I kind of prefer the longer wave response of the converted EM5II though it also means lens contrast is even worse than on the G1.

 

What helps in general are lenses with fewer elements since basically the coatings are doing nothing to help with internal reflections. Old adapted lenses tend to have fewer elements because that's how people were forced to design lenses before we had good coatings. So yes indeed old adapted lenses can do quite well. But a new lens that also has fewer elements will also do quite well.

In general prime lenses have fewer elements than zooms so again they usually do better in the IR but that isn't always the case since high end prime lenses may have lots and lots of elements. The Panasonic 14/2.5 which is otherwise a rather ho-hum lens actually has really great contrast on the IR camera just because it is a very simple design with few elements. In contrast the Panasonic 42.5/1.2 which is optically one of the most amazing lenses I've ever seen in the visible is an absolute disaster in IR because it has so many dang elements in order to achieve that remarkably well corrected visible band performance.

One other "modern" lens problem in the IR is that it appears that some of the particularly exotic glasses use to correct chromatic aberration appear to have very low transmission in the IR. So now you don't just have reflections to deal with but basically an IR cut filter built into the lens.

The last issue I'm still not clear on is whether some lens coatings rather than just not doing their job in the IR might actually makes things significantly worse if they in fact somehow cause more than the typical 4% reflection of uncoated glass. It sure seems certain otherwise "simple" lens designs may have wickedly bad center contrast and I wonder if that is down to certain coatings actually making things a lot worse in the IR. Since coating types and technologies all seem proprietary and undocumented it is all sort of a mystery.

This is what IR really excels at and goes way beyond what a polarizer can ever do.

Polarizers combat Rayleigh scattering which is scattering from extremely small aerosols or molecular scattering. This kind of scattering produces polarized light and so a polarizer can filter out that scattered light. As the particle size increases now we get Mie scattering instead and it produces unpolarized light which the polarizer can do nothing about. This is why polarizers really don't help in dusty conditions (as dust particles are large enough to produce Mie scattering rather than Rayleigh) or in humid conditions where condensation onto otherwise small smoke particles increases their effective size to the point they produce Mie scattering rather than Rayleigh scattering.

IR on the other hand just takes advantage of the fact that the amount of scattering is dependent on how large the dust particles are compared to the wavelength of the light. This is why a lot of sunglasses are tinted yellow - they cut off the blue shorter wave length light that scatters more easily off of any sized particle. Shooting in IR is a more extreme form of that and it works really well. There are limits of course, once the particle sizes get large enough like in a dust storm it doesn't matter. But in general yes IR cuts through haze and dust quite well which is why I've been using it for daytime distant landscapes in the desert.

As to the rocks question you got me curious. Below are four B&W images. The first three are all from the same visible exposure and are the blue, green and red channels. The last is from an IR exposure (again 830-1050nm). The IR exposure was a number minutes later so the sun angle is very slightly different making the shadow details a bit different. Note especially how the IR shows disturbed surfaces (those with less or thinner desert varnish) quite distinctly from older surfaces. There is a small aluvial fan midway up the left edge that is indistinguishable from the surrounding terrain in the blue channel that becomes progressively more obvious moving from green to red to IR. Another one about midway along the bottom edge. Also along those bottom edge ones note the actual channels that currently flow during storms are obvious in the IR but not seen in the visible bands. I'm not sure if that is due to varnish differences or just that there is more plant growth and thus highly reflective in the IR chlorophyll in those channels.

All four were processed by cranking contrast to the max, clarity to the max and then using a straight line tone curve from the darkest to lightest histogram bins. That was about as "apples to apples" as I could make it but is far from perfect. Note especially the blue channel seems to suffer from lower contrast from haze compared to the others.

​

 

The 20/1.7 is quite good for IR. It has good transmission and contrast, not the very best of all the lenses but near the top. More importantly it is also quite sharp at the edges and corners when shot in IR. Many lenses that are nice and sharp on the edges and corners in the visible don't do so well in the IR.

Yeah I'd skip converting an E-PL1. Since you end up having to boost contrast on most IR shots it means you don't want to start with a noisy sensor like the old 12MP sensors. I'd go for one of the 16MP cameras. You don't need the additional resolution at all, most lenses aren't going to perform well sharpness wise in the IR until stopped down quite a bit and diffraction is worse for a given aperture in the IR because of the longer wavelength. So really 12MP is probably just fine resolution wise, but the 16MP sensors have considerably better noise performance.

Also would recommend bodies with IBIS since even with a converted camera the sensitivity is getting low which when combined with stopping down to F/8 or so means shutter speeds can get slow in all but full sunlight.

Last some cameras can be converted while preserving the dust-shaker function while others can't. Worth doing a little homework about which cameras and which vendors do conversions preserving the most functionality.

 

Southern Death Valley
February 2018

I managed to get out for a few days in early February for a solo trip. I was hoping to do less driving this time around so I planned on just hitting a few sites on the southeast side of Death Valley along West Side Road. As usual I woke up about 4AM in Baltimore, got a cheap direct flight to Las Vegas and was at the truck by about 9:30AM. Truck all provisioned, myself fed at In & Out and on the road out of town by about noon. Pleasant uneventful drive through Shoshone and over Salsberry Pass to get to the southern end of West Side Road. Aired down and headed for my first stop, the Queen of Sheba Mine. Got to the mine by about 2:30PM.

The weather was unseasonably warm which made it a very pleasant afternoon. I pulled the truck onto one of the terraces at the mine which was just becoming shaded by the steep slope behind it. My original plan was to explore the mine right away and perhaps another nearby before sunset but at this point I realized just how tired and somewhat stressed out I was. I plunked down a chair and table to have a nice snack and enjoy the view across the valley. Exploring the view with binoculars it occurred to me there was actually a nice photo in all of this. I grabbed some camera equipment and spent a lazy half an hour goofing off from my chair. A halfway decent photo was the eventual result.

View from Queen of Sheba Mine
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After this I still felt really tired and so decided that exploring the mine would be an activity for the next day instead. I poked around the nearby ruins and did a little reading. I picked out a composition for when sunset would eventually come around. I took a short nap. I hadn't really realized how exhausted and stressed I was until I got out and away from everything. Blessedly this spot was also completely free of any cell service!

Sunset came along but any clouds that would produce appreciable color had long since moved out of the area. The blue/pink terminator in twilight was about all there was. Still the view was gorgeous and the fairly extensive ruins along with the ridiculously straight access road to the mine made a nice composition.

Queen of Sheba Mine Sunset
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I actually skipped dinner and promptly collapsed after sunset finally waking about twelve hours later. Did I mention I was exhausted?

Feeling much better in the morning I was up before sunrise and enjoying the moderately brisk desert morning. There is a lot of junk laying around this mine site and some of it made for entertaining abstract compositions.

Rocks? Metal? Big? Small?
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This mine featured a flotation mill in its heyday and since then the gigantic flotation tank has slipped off of its foundation and crumpled into a heap. The above photo is a portion of the carnage and the photo spans about six feet for reference.

An old road switchbacks up the steep hillside behind the mine and there were visible adits and shafts along the way. The road looked a bit dicey so I walked it and really needed the exercise anyway. In the end likely a Tacoma could make it up with some spotting along the way and probably a breeze for a smaller vehicle like a Jeep. The views just kept getting better and better on the way up. It was only about a 600 foot climb and gradual following the road.

Above Queen of Sheba
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Up near the very top shaft of the mine there was some geology monitoring equipment and tire tracks did show that at least one vehicle had made it up the road. The road actually continued a fair ways further up the ridge but the best views had already been had and so I considered myself to have reached the "top" as it were. There were a number of adits that went varying degrees into the hillside before reaching dead ends. Most had collapsed entrances though.

Looking Out
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Making it back down to the truck I explored a few more spots at the lower levels of the mine site. There is actually quite a lot to explore here. Any mine enthusiast should have Queen of Sheba on their list. The mine history itself is pretty interesting too and the National Park survey of all the mining resources in the former National Monument done in the late 70's makes a good read.

Eventually I packed up and headed back to West Side Road. I traveled West Side Road for perhaps fifty yards before turning up another road into Galena Canyon. Here there are a variety of talc mines. Most of them were fairly recent operations from the 60's and 70's with little historic value and just large unsightly scars on the landscape. One has two huge metal tanks on the side of a hill but I opted not to hike up to them. I did stop at one mine that has a pretty impressive loading platform with a bit of rail on it coming out of a near by adit. It made for a decent photo though in the process I dropped and severely scratched my sunglasses. Expensive photo it turned out...

Talc Mining in Galena Canyon
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From here I needed to decide the rest of my modified itinerary. Originally I would have spent this day hiking up to Hungry Bill's Ranch and the following day hiking Hanaupah Canyon. Now I only had time for one. I decided on Hanaupah Canyon and returned to West Side Road to drive north.

A couple miles up the Hanaupah Canyon Road was a good spot to camp and I was happy to spend a lazy late afternoon again not doing much. It was a little warm but there was also a very nice breeze which again made for great lazing about weather. Directly across from Hanaupah Canyon is Badwater. Exploring the Black Mountains with binoculars was entertaining and I was eventually intrigued by some of the telephoto compositions of the rugged escarpment on the east side of the valley. Once the sun got low enough the entire valley was in shadow I took a few shots and in the process of dealing with the haze in post processing the end result was a bit abstract. You might notice a few black dots on the salt flats which are people to give a sense of the massive scale of the Black Mountains.

Badwater and The Black Mountains
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A few months back my daughter and I had camped at nearly the same spot and the clouds and sunset put on an amazing show. Not so much luck this time, but a few clouds hung on the eastern horizon and gave a bit of color.

Sunset Over The Black Mountains
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As it got into deeper and deeper twilight I decided to try a long exposure shot with an infrared modified camera to cut through some of the haze in the valley. Exposure times got close to a minute and the end result sort of ethereal.

Badwater and Black Mountains Twilight
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This night I did actually have the energy for dinner and cooked some hot dogs. I read a bit more about the area's mining history and reviewed the guide book on the Hanaupah hike. I was asleep probably by 7:30PM again.

Wednesday woke to a clear sky and so not a very photogenic sunrise. I had breakfast and mostly poked about in no big rush. I had the whole day to get around to my hike. Eventually by nine or so I was packed up and headed up the road towards the mouth of the canyon. I passed a truck coming down that had camped up at the mouth. They had hiked various parts of the canyon the day before and had encountered three backpackers who were going to attempt Telescope Peak this day. That also explained a black van I had seen parked way down by Shorty's Well just off West Side Road. This intrepid trio was apparently attempting one of the most grueling hikes imaginable - from minus 280 feet to 11,043 feet in just about 12 horizontal miles. Of course most of that elevation gain is packed in the last few miles.

I continued on and eventually the fairly decent road dove off of the fan and into the wash itself at the mouth of the canyon becoming much, much rougher. It appears most folks stop at the mouth and hike in from there, probably a good idea for most vehicles. Naturally I just kept on driving.

The road continues into the south fork of the canyon which has some impressive steep walls and narrows along the way.

Hanaupah Canyon Road
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Eventually I reached what is now the end of the road, about one mile before Shorty Harris's old mining camp. I wasn't quite paying attention to where I was so the road's end sneaked up on me resulting in about ten minutes of awkwardness getting the truck turned around! I got my backpack filled with snacks and plenty of water and continued hiking.

Within less than ten minutes of walking I could hear water and indeed in the middle of the wash there was a small stream flowing. I stayed to the left (south) of this and in about one mile had reached the old mining camp. Up on a shelf above the wash there were three one man tents pitched with heavier packs left inside. These presumably belonged to the three folks who must have been attempting their summit today. Standing there and looking up at Telescope this seemed patently insane to me.

Nothing really remains of the camp other than a small adit turned into a tiny workshop a bit up the bank. The cabin has long since washed away. At this point it was also necessary to cross the water twice which was getting troublesome as it was getting rather overgrown.

After this point I screwed up in my route finding. I was looking for a old road on the northwest bank but because I misinterpreted the guide book and its very detailed map I was looking for it way too soon. As a result I was on the wrong side of the water for nearly half a mile and it was absolutely brutal going. It took me over 90 minutes to go less than half a mile fighting horrible brush and thorns the whole way. Eventually I found the road but then erred again when I left it too early resulting it some really unpleasant traversing of steep slopes and some more bushwhacking for good measure. At the end of all this I was very tired and very pissed. Still I was so close to my goal at this point there was little else to do but continue.

Now past Hanaupah Spring - the source of most of the water and overgrowth - there was a short section of wash that was mostly just giant cobbles and boulder hopping. As the wash turned a corner I saw a dark narrows section ahead from which came the surprisingly loud sounds of frogs. Some relatively minor bushwhacking brought me to the mouth of the narrows and once again the sound of water. I had a rest and a snack in the very cool narrows by a first waterfall.

These narrows are pretty darn amazing and were well worth the hassle of getting to them. I took a lot of photos, but none did it particular justice. I climbed past the first fall after which there is a long shallow chute the water flows down. Past that a flat section slightly choked with brush and then a wide ten foot fall. At this fall I could see what looked to be a reasonably safe bypass but given I was solo and the guidebook implied the next section was extremely brush choked I decided to call this the end of the canyon for me.

I managed to find one spot where the sun penetrated into the narrows and took a long rest there as the rest of the canyon felt quite cool at this point.

Sun in the Narrows
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Eventually I decided it was probably time to leave. Now with the benefit of route-finding hindsight getting back to the truck was much easier. A short way out of the narrows and before Hanaupah Spring I began climbing the northern side of the canyon a bit earlier and while still a steep traverse now met the old mining road at its first switchback. This put me above a wicked prickly pear garden and on much easier footing. The road eventually petered out at a halfway decent place to cross the water. This was still insanely overgrown, but less so compared to everything else I experienced on the way in. Once on the other side I could stay along the south side of the wash where an intermittent use trail kept me well clear of the brush all the way back to the mining camp. From there avoiding the brush was quite easy all the way back to the truck.

Having driven out of the canyon and back onto the fan I found I had some limited cell coverage and took stock of the weather and my schedule. I could camp one more night and then leave early in the morning to my flight the next day. After a bit of rest and planning though I opted to head to Vegas that night for a cheap hotel and instead spend the following morning getting the truck well prepped for my next trip. That trip will include flying into Vegas with my daughter for a four night trip so I figured having things "ready to roll" would be a good idea.

In the end I still haven't gotten to Hungry Bill's Ranch, but it is always good to leave an excuse to come back to any particular part of Death Valley! Hanaupah Canyon was definitely something special but it also made me appreciate how awful a canyon with water can be given all the brush. Maybe in five or ten years I'll return with my daughter and hopefully I will remember the correct route!

 

Fuck you and your therapeutic solitude. I can't wait until Ben gets a bit older.

 

Is that a giant frog in the last photo?