The Barrière de l’Esseillon are a line of fortifications two hundred years old and capable of holding two thousand soldiers in total.The fort Victor-Emmanuel is still standing and in it’s day could hold up to one thousand five hundred troops. This fort overlooks the via Ferrata.
Some drone shots of the region in winter
The Via Ferata du Diable is a series of via ferrata routes located around a bridge called Le Pont du Diable (Bridge of the Devil) which crosses the river L’arc (The Bow). This set of via ferrata varies from two easier ones that are suitable for children to four via ferrata that are suitable for various skill levels as long as you are not afraid of heights. The last one is going to challenge your courage and stamina because it is high off the ground and there are overhangs.
The via ferrata are numbered so if you do them then do 6 followed by 3, then walk back and do four and five so that you complete a loop without back tracking. If you want to do the seventh then be ready to be high off the valley floor, to cross a monkey bridge, a nepalese bridge and a more conventional final bridge. There is an escape route but by this point you might as well finish the via ferrata and walk back.
For years I heard about Roman pisciculture baths near the sea in Spain and I thought that this is where they would keep fish for eating, like they did in medieval Europe. That idea is wrong. The pisciculture that you have near Javea, Cadiz, and other parts of the Mediterranean coast were for the production of Garum and other salted fish versions.
If you walk by the coast you can see this channel, and you can even walk along it. If you look out to see it looks like this. If you look the other way it has been filled in and exploration would require excavation, and that would require a permit. This is one of the smaller channels.
The channels are deep enough for me to stand in. The experience is interesting because they block the sound of the sea. Someone who has studied the process in depth should produce sketches to give us an idea of how this would have looked. I feel no need to know how it smelled.
This channel Is at least two meters wide and three or more meters deep. I don’t know which way water would have flowed.
You can see one of the tanks in this satellite image.
Another satellite image to give you some context
For a better understanding of Fish satling during Roman times I recommend reading this paper. .
The answer to the question of why the really large salting factories are found in the western Mediterranean, Brittany and the Black Sea, but not in the Eastern Mediterranean probably lies in the fact that the large-scale factories were designed to handle the massive catches of migratory species along particular routes. They are therefore found chiefly on the key migration routes along the Straits of Gibraltar and the North African coast; through the Kimmerian Bosphoros; and in the Bay of Douarnenez (Brittany) where there are migrant shoals of sardines
Garmin have had challenges for years. Most of them have been about distance, or vertical climbing. Now they have new Expedition challenges. Each expedition is named after an expedition or adventure by the same name.
The Camino De Santiago challenge is a challenge to walk 784 kilometres. The Denali challenge is to climb 6190m. There are two Mont Blanc Challenges. The Mont Blanc challenge is to climb 4808 metres whilst the Mont Blanc Circular (Tour Du Mont Blanc is to walk 160 kilometres.
Due to my character I have chosen to take on the Appalachian Trail challenge. It’s 3500 kilometres of walking, approximately 4.9 million steps. So far I have completed just 17.5 kilometres of that challenge. I have walked four million four hundred and twenty three thousand steps in the last year with an average of twelve thousand six hundred per day.
In theory the challenge will take me more than a year to complete, if it wants me to walk and run the distance. If I can cycle part of it then I will complete this goal within the year.
Climbing and Stepping
At the time of writing this blog post it is possible to take on one climbing challenge at the same time as taking on one stepping challenge. Both progress bars are shown together. With climbing the progress is shown in metres, and for distance it is shown in kilometres.
Pacer Challenges
If you want to try these challenges without paying for a Garmin device Pacer has offered such challenges for years now. You pay 29 CHF per year, and you can try the Camino De Santiago and other challenges. These are based on walking distance rather than height gain.
With Garmin you get a progress bar but with pacer you get your progress shown on a map, alongside everyone else trying the same challenge at the same time. You see how you overtake or keep up with them.
A Month to Completion
I would complete most of the walking challenges within a month, except for the AT and the Camino. The climbing challenges would take me a few weeks at the moment, but if I hike in the mountains in summer then I can reach those goals within three or four hikes, depending on goals.
Frustrations
These challenges count floors climbed and steps taken, rather than distance. This means that you need to walk or run for your efforts to count. Cycling will not count. In a few weeks or months we could find that they add cycling and other challenges, as people work their way through what is already around.
Another frustration is that you can’t save the progress in one challenge, to complete another challenge, before resuming the last. The Camino and AT will take two months to over a year to complete. This means that other challenges will not be possible for that extended amount of time.
Privacy
Due to these challenges being step based, or floor climbing based, you can preserve your privacy. There is no need to track with a GPS because steps are enough. Whether you have a 96 CHF Forerunner 45S (because it’s white and less popular) or a 1200 CHF Fenix or other you’re equal.
The Tichodrome Via Ferrata near the Creux du Van is not a via Ferrata for beginners. Yesterday I went with a group of people and it took two and a half hours rather than the one and a half hours that it was meant to take. There are two principal reasons for which this is not a via ferrata for beginners. The first reason is that it is high off the ground. Not only are you high off the ground but you start near the cliff.
Confirmed Via Ferrataists and rock climbers will see this height and it won’t worry them but novices who are not acclimatised to such heights will be getting to grips of being so high. Imagine trusting yourself and your equipment so high off the ground.
The second flaw is that it is poorly equipped. There are very few hand holds and foot holds on this via ferrata. Most of the time your feet are on bare rock where feet can slip and where there is barely enough for more than your toes or a side of your shoe. As a result there are chances that a foot slides every now and again.
The third challenge is the cable. It is lose so when you put weight on it it swings out. Imagine as a beginner trusting the cable to hold you whilst standing a fair distance off of the ground.
This is a terrifying via ferrata for less experienced praticitioners and I strongly advise you not to go until your less experienced friends have done a few more via ferrata. The fear factor for this via ferrata is an excellent warm up for Leukerbad. That’s a demonstration of how unadapted I think this via ferrata is for beginners.
Two evenings ago I was trying to sync files from Kdrive to the local drive and it kept getting blocked. I wasn’t clear as to why this was happening until I saw that Pi-Hole had throttled the IP address of the computer that was attempting to sync from Kdrive. It did this one in the morning, and the second time in the evening.
I suspected that for some reason the computer might go to sleep when it isn’t used, but a Pi doesn’t sleep, so that wasn’t it.
Temporarily Disable Pi-Hole
When I disabled blocking by the Pi-Hole and tried to sync once again it worked flawlessly. It took hours but the data was transferred from the remote machine to the local machine over the next twelve hours, or so.
Rate Limiting by Pi Hole
Pi-Holes will tolerate up to 1000 requests per minute from a device under normal circumstances. Usually a system would make a few dozen requests at a time depending on the website being visited. When you’re synching gigabytes of files via a cloud client it might send several thousand requests as it receives requests, and provides status updates on whether packets are received and when to send the next one. This is a generalisation. I could not find specifics for Kdrive.
The Wrong Assumption
Aside from considering a computer going to sleep and stopping data transfer I also considered that the cloud provider would throttle download queries, and speed. When I tried to download data from iCloud I did encounter a similar problem and when I tried from one or two other providers I seemed to have the same problem.
Interesting to Know
When I tried to download several 2 gigabyte files manually with the Raspberry Pi I found that it sometimes saturated its 8 gigabytes of ram before slowing down to a crawl. It doesn’t like downloading large files in bulk. I came across this bug several times.
And Finally
In normal circumstances cloud synching is a few files at a time, rather than several hundred gigabytes at once, so you don’t run into this issue. If this was a normal situation then I would modify Pi-Hole to have a higher rate limit, but for now I will leave it as it is.
You remember the old saying. The best camera is the one that you have with you. Today the same can be said about “edit suites” that you carry in your trousers or jacket pocket. I’m speaking of edit suites that work with your iphone or ipad. Lumafusion is one such example.
It differs from other mobile editing solutions in a number of key ways. The first is that it allows you to edit on a timeline with three video sources at once This means that you have more control. It allows you to split audio which allows you to overlap sound from one clip to another and provide a better finish.
This includes the option to add graphics, idents and other visual content. It allows you to provide a finished product, ready for broadcast or distribution.
Another nice feature is that you can record your voice over directly to the timeline once the edit is finished. This means that vloggers and people who like to record commentary rather than natural sound, can capture natural sound, and add commentary later.
I played with this editing solution with footage shot on an iphone SE at a music festival as well as other footage shot on an iPhone 8 Plus. The edit suite was my iphone 8 plus while lying on a couch.
I like this editing solution because it allows for a high quality turnaround of mobile phone footage for a number of platforms without carrying a laptop. This is ideal for hiking, climbing and other types of video content. It costs 20 CHF so once you’ve spent several hundred on an iphone it’s cheap. ;-). It allows export in h264 as well as h265.
Caveat
I tried importing greenscreen footage via Google drive from a PMW-200 that had been converted to mp4 but the video codec was not recognised. I have yet to try greenscreen quality.
I will be present at the IFSC Climbing World Cup Villars tomorrow. For me climbing has always been an active rather than a passive sport. It has been a sport where the landscape is nice and the crowds are small. Tomorrow will be the first time that I go and watch as other people climb.
It’s not that I don’t watch people climb. Between climbing gyms, bouldering gyms, via ferrata and Rock climbing it is a sport that I have explored in depth. What I haven’t explored in depth is climbing with an audience, climbing as an event, climbing as a competition.
Program
Friday 15th July
9.00 – 16.00 Men & Women’s lead qualifications
17.00 – 19.00 Men & Women’s speed qualifications
21.00 Speed Finals Women & Men (LIVE)
22.00 Award Ceremony (LIVE)
Saturday 16th July
10.00 – 12.30 Lead Semi-Finals Men & Women (LIVE)
20.00 Men lead Finals (LIVE)
21.00 Women lead Finals (LIVE)
22.00 Award Ceremony (LIVE)
Instinct tells me that lead climbing should be the more interesting discipline as it relates directly to the climbing I do. Speed climbing could be fun and interesting to watch but it has less practical applications in ordinary climbing life. If I want to be lazy then I could go up on Saturday and stop asking questions.
On Saturday from 1300 to 1600 there is the concours populaire, That’s when amateurs can try their hand at speed climbing.
Villars Sur Ollon is a place that I have visited a number of times but for once we should be welcomed by summer rather than winter temperatures. It will also be for climbing rather than skiing, hiking or après ski. I will take pictures and let you know what the experience is like. It’s nice after organising satellite distribution for sporting events finally to go on location. We’ll see how energetic the crowd is.
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