The downside of technology

Trip Start May 06, 2010

137

Trip End Oct 14, 2010

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Where I stayed

Darrington Motor Inn

Flag of United States Darrington, Washington
Friday, June 25, 2010

Today was my last day at Olympic National Park. It started out overcast so I thought I'd visit some of the waterfalls. The first one I went to was Marymere Falls. It's about a mile hike from the trail head through what they consider the dry part of the park since it's in the rain shadow of the peaks. Well, it may be dry compared to the rain forest but it's still very lush. The falls were quite nice.

Next was Sol Duc Falls, which is also about a mile from the trail head and also in the rain shadow. It's an interesting waterfall to see in person but a very difficult one to photograph. There are four different parts all falling parallel to each other from along the side of a narrow canyon. It's hard to find an angle that shows all four of them well and it's poorly lit toward the bottom of the narrow canyon. I did the best I could and headed back to the car.

I started driving back toward Hurricane Ridge and intended to stop if the weather looked better, which it did. Unfortunately, technology was revolting against me today. I set my GPS. It should have plotted a route but instead it hung up showing it had calculated 99% of the route. I tried turning it off and back on repeatedly, but it still couldn't complete generating a route. I tried changing some of the options but nothing I did got it working again. In addition, the XM radio was rarely getting a signal, my PhotoTrackr for geotagging pictures was having trouble getting a fix on the GPS satellites in the forest and my watch stopped working. I skipped stopping at Hurricane Ridge and just headed for North Cascades National Park using a map, which I luckily had.

After a few hours the GPS started working again. That was certainly a relief. I have no idea why it stopped. I'll worry about it quitting again for the rest of the trip. I drove to Darrington, a little town to the west of North Cascades National Park and got a room.