2009 Nov 21
Mt Flume via the Osseo Trail

I took a hike up to Mt. Flume via the Osseo Trail, which starts 1.5 miles up the Lincoln Woods Trail, off the Kancamagus Hwy at the Hancock Campground and ~5 miles from I-93 at Exit 32 (Lincoln). I left home early, arrived early, and left the Hancock Campground parking lot at 7am---all set for cold temperatures, slippery conditions, and balmy skies. None of these appeared, but I had a good hike. I took 3:10 going up---well under the 4:25 book time, which is pessimistic because of the easy trail for the first 3.5 miles. I stayed at the socked-in peak for 25 minutes and ate a sandwich atop Mt. Flume shrouded in fog and sheltered from the wind. On the way down, the skies began to clear and the sun drove away the haze. Being on top 3 hours later might have been pleasant, but it took that long to burn off the haze. The hike in total was 11.2 miles, 6.5 hours, with temperatures in the 40s and 50s. The morning damp burned off so that rocks were dry by the end of the hike.

Doug Anderson introduced me to panorama software. The examples here are 3 or 4 photos stitched together using DoubleTake. The LincolnWoodsTrailPanorama is 11400x2300 pixels and is composed of 4 overlapping images. Click on the thumbnail LincolnWoodsTrailPanorama and then toggle (at least in Firefox) on the image to see it in full resolution or scaled to your window. The OsseoLincolnWoodsJunction is 3 photos making a panorama OsseoLincolnWoodsJunction of 8300x2300 pixels. The OsseoTrailPanorama (3300x4800) OsseoTrailPanorama is a vertical overlapping of 3 photos with a large exposure range, which also gets blended.

DoubleTake is shareware for $25, but I tried it in the free mode. Hence, the DoubleTake watermark on the photos. The origin of the panorama packages and the underlying SIFT algorithm seems to be from Professor Helmut Dersch of the University of Applied Sciences Furtwangen. His package is at sourceforge. There’s a commercial version described at http://wiki.panotools.org/Panorama_Tools_Plugins. I fooled around with 3 programs. DoubleTake worked well, especially the drop-in feature and the ability to adjust photos to give the algorithm a better starting point. The others seemed to have more warping capability.

LincolnWoodsTrailPanorama
LincolnWoodsTrailPanorama 		Looking Down Trail from Mt.Flume
Looking Down Trail from Mt.Flume 		OsseoTrailPanorama
OsseoTrailPanorama
Brook next to Osseo Trail
Brook next to Osseo Trail 		OsseoLincolnWoodsJunction
OsseoLincolnWoodsJunction 		Small falls along Lincoln Woods Trail
Small falls along Lincoln Woods Trail