2010-05-21 49 -122

There Will Be Cake

Welcome to the official wiki page of the Vancouver graticule's Second Annual Geohashing Day celebration. If you enjoy this account you may also be interested in reading about the following day's Mouseover Day festivities.

Fri 21 May 2010 in 49,-122: 49.2624552, -122.4351431 geohashing.info google osm bing/os kml crox

Location

A short bushwhack from a logging road between Dewdney Trunk Road and Alouette Lake. Quality of the logging road is unknown. Google maps street view shows an open gate across the access to the road, so we knew there was a small chance that the road would be gated, thus arrived prepared for a 4 km walk from the known good roads.

Participants

• thepiguy
• Rhonda
• Robyn
• Wade
• Xore
• yangman
• Arbron
• srs0
• Elbie
• Kyle (a.k.a Thor)
• Denise

Is there some way to make the participants list into two columns? Vancouver is seriously going to need that at this rate.

Plans

For Vancouverites the Geohashing Day coordinates are released at 6:30 a.m. the same day, so the first meetup was at hash o'clock sharp in the #geohashing channel. Geohashing Day meetup point selection prefers an attempt at the actual coordinates for the day, but while Vancouver's was in the middle of the water, Surrey's was close enough to civilization that it was easily chosen as our destination.

Planning from there was confusing and fluid, involving five different vehicles, one of which didn't exist and three of which were eventually used, four different pick-up locations for people in at least three cities, about seven different proposed departure times, buses and SkyTrain.

Sample Conversation

Rhonda has just agreed to meet pi at Waterfront Station at 16:10, then take the Skytrain to Yaletown where they will rendezvous with Wade and Rhonda's car at 16:30. The wiki has been updated with this plan.

Xore has joined #geohashing

<Xore> Wade, I'm going to drive my car to work and then we can leave about 4:30 to go to the geohash.

<Wade> Sounds like a plan.

<Robyn> Or you could go with the other plan on the wiki that we already made. Rhonda is bringing her car.

Robyn is informed that "Rhonda's car" and "Xore's car" is the same vehicle.

<Wade> I told you it sounded like a plan. In fact it sounded like THE plan, but I wasn't going to say that.

We struggled to adhere to the principle of geohashing as a mostly unplanned mass meet-up, while balancing the desire to use transit and carpool rather than single-occupant vehicles, and acknowledging the fact that most of the group has to work on a Friday, in one case until seven p.m. That's the sort of thing Mouseover Day was created to address, but this graticule strives to overcome such petty barriers at darkness and gravity. The final roster was something like this:

Vehicle 1 (Rhonda)

• Rhonda and pi meet at Waterfront Station at 16:10
• Travel via Canada line Skytrain to Yaletown station, near the car
• Leaves downtown at 16:30
• Stop at Braid Skytrain station for 17:00 for one final pickup
• Contains: Rhonda, pi, Xore, Wade, yangman

Vehicle 2 (Arbron)

• Leaves UBC CS Building at 19:00 (between X-wing and Dempster).
• Contains: Robyn, Arbron, srs0, Elbie

Vehicle 3 (Kyle)

• New geohashers Kyle and Denise, leaving from their home in a convoy with Vehicle 1

Expedition

Temporary Summary

All eleven participants hiked four kilometres each way, ate cake, and returned safely to the car. Details withheld because we want to get a little bit of sleep before tomorrow's Mouseover Day festivities.

Driving

Considering that Friday happened to be the last working day before the Victoria Day long weekend in British Columbia, the traffic heading out of town was not disastrously bad. A few highlights.

• Elbie got out of work early, but didn't know what kind of car she was waiting for. To entertain herself while waiting she tried to persuade srs0 to join her in waving at all the cars that passed. The first one turned out to be Arbron.

• Robyn talked Arbron into taking the Lougheed Highway instead of Highway #1. As we reached the end of 12th Avenue where Robyn demanded he take the left ramp onto the Lougheed and not the right ramp onto the #1, not only was the left ramp barricaded off, but the sign identifying it as an on-ramp was painted over. We took the #1.

• While on Dewdney Trunk Road, we passed a vehicle whose front seat passenger gave an astonished gasp of delighted recognition and waved at us. We all looked delighted to see him and waved back. By the time it was determined that no one on board had the faintest clue who this person was, we had passed the vehicle and it had turned off down a side street. We still don't know if he misrecognized one of us, one of us failed to recognize him, or if that's a game he likes to play in cars.

• The gate to the logging road was locked.

Hiking

In case the car arrangements didn't make that clear, in order to truly plan this expedition, one has to calculate how many ways there are to disperse a group of eleven people into subgroups along a trail. Order matters, both of the subgroups and within the subgroups, but walking to the left or right of another person is counted as the same arrangement. I'll leave the factorial calculations to the physics majors in the group, but the chemical engineer, software architects, or theatre production design major are welcome to do it first. This calculation is necessary in order to quantitatively describe the confusion involved in getting eleven people up a hill along a relatively straight road.

The car that had to leave last, because of the person who had to work late, turned out to be the first to arrive at the locked gate, so the group waited for the others. It was a bit cold standing around, so Elbie and Robyn set off first as a scouting party. pi caught up and the group explored and marked side trails with arrows showing the way they had gone, or the way they recommended going.

We think one of the trails we took was actually a river, not a trail. It got us to within 950 m of the geohash, and then turned away, plus the geohash was on the wrong side of the trail from the trail we thought we should be on. We had marked that trail with a big wooden arrow showing we had gone that way, so to prevent the rest of the group from following attempted to phone or text them. It turned out that the some people had missed seeing the arrow, some had misinterpreted it as pointing to the main fork, and three were coming down the wrong trail towards us. It was dark enough by that time that we decided a count off was in order.

You'd think that a group of such highly educated people could grasp the concept of a count off. Here are some sample attempts:

"One! Two! Two! (pause) Three! Four! (silence) We said FOUR, you guys COUNT! Start again!"

"One! Two! Three! Four! No I'm four! (pause) Five! Six! (long pause) Six! (more silence) SIX!"

"One! (pause) Two! Three! Four! Five! Six! Seven! Seven! (pause) Eight! Nine! Ten! Twelve!"

"One! Two! Pi! e! i! Negative i! We're all here, damnit!"

Despite such poor people tracking, we were relatively certain that we had enough manpower to scare off any bears we encountered, so as long as they weren't stealthy enough to quietly grab someone from the tail end right after they had said "twelve." We didn't lose anyone on the trail, and the closest we knowingly got to bears was an area where there were some black felt scraps that looks like bear scat.

The main uphill trail was mostly large rocks, and then further up two banks with a fairly deep trench between them where, had it been raining this week, there would probably have been a sizable river. Even if the gate had been open the rugged car that belongs to Xore and/or Rhonda would not have been able to negotiate it. It didn't look so bad in the dark, though. Eventually we reached the fork that was supposed to get us nearer to the geohash. It did for a while, then we reached an equilibrium point about 350 metres from the geohash where despite going forward, we didn't get any closer to the coordinates. This matched the limited research we (and by we we mean mostly Rhonda) had done. The geohash was through the trees to the right of the trail, and we were out of trail.

Bushwhacking

The entrance to the bush didn't look any worse than the trail we had come up. That is to say that both were pitch black. The Stupidity distance was about 370 metres. It was after ten p.m. by this time but the spirit of geohashing and the fact that the person carrying the cake had already entered the bushes carried everyone through that first barrier of bushy undergrowth.

"Don't walk too close, the branches are whipping back!"

"Don't lag behind, we don't want anyone lost!"

A few metres in it wasn't quite as bad, because the trees above were so dense that there was no greenery, just the trunks and roots of trees with needles and little crispy dead branches underfoot. Nevertheless, at this point some group members started to roll for sanity and called for a halt. pi was still avidly calling for us to advance "only" another 360 metres through the bush. He and all experienced geoahashers in our and any forested graticule well knew just how long it could take to go a relatively short distance through bush, even in daylight. It's not unusual to take over a minute per metre of progress into dense vegetation. Then pi took one more step and suddenly agreed that now and here was a good place to celebrate. He did not immediately reveal what it was that he had seen beyond the next layer of trees.

In this case we had progressed 20 metres in our initial five minute burst of enthusiasm, if we were able to extrapolate that speed over the remaining distance, that would be an hour and a half of night bushwhacking. We determined that the sort-of clearing we were in would be adequate for the celebration. As someone pointed out, the actual geohash was going to look exactly like this, even with the flashlights on. There was brief discussion about which particular slightly flattened area we would use, the one two metres closer to our goal or the one that was large enough to accommodate out group. We chose the latter. It even had a flattish stump on which to set the cake.