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saved by the Hines Pond outflow creek
Saturday, June 29 2024
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
It was a typical morning at the cabin, with coffee, toast, Spelling Bee, and me reading the latest from the places I like to go on the web. Happily, what had seemed like a huge disaster for Biden during his recent debate with Trump wasn't playing out that way among the people who don't follow news closely (like I do). Maybe people are smarter than I give them credit for, as focus groups of swing voters largely concluded the two candidates' performances were about equal. Perhaps Trump's self-assured bluster came across as obvious bullshit to people. (You would think having a bullshit detector would confer Darwinian advantages.)
It was raining for much of the day, which kept me from doing much outside except walk around with an umbrella a few times to take in all the glorious puddles and flowers near the cabin. (There's a species of all-yellow daisy which has popped up everywhere; they're probably from one of those wildflower seed packets whose seeds Gretchen had scattered.)
I spent a fair amount of time down in the basement hooking up an ESP8266-powered D1 controller board (they're designed with the same pinouts as an Arduino) to the serial lines connecting the SolArk inverter to an ESP32-based dongle that connects it to the internet and then writing code to read the data it was intercepting. (I chose the D1 because it has sockets instead of pins, which worked better witht he connector wires I happened to have.) Since the ESP8266 only really has one usable serial port, I did all my debugging by writing data to a web page it served. (In so doing, I had to get up to speed on how exactly the ESP8266 serves web pages; initially I'd neglected to put server.handleClient() in my loop code.) I figured out how to first capture the data to a string, then how to look in that string for an expression that I knew came just before a block of ASCII-coded hexadecimal I wanted to read. And then I had ChatGPT come up with the code to turn nuggets of hexadecimal (specified by integers representing the start and end of a sequence) into integers that I knew to be the key values I need to monitor: solar power in watts, battery power in positive or negative watts, load power in watts, and battery percentage. I got nearly all of this working by early this afternoon. There were a few additional mystery values in the mix, and I'd yet to see a number that corresponded to power from the generator, though that would require me looking at the data while running the generator. I also needed to see the numbers generated during sunny conditions so I could be sure I of the sets of hexadecimal values that corresponded to solar power in wattage.
By the late afternoon, the rain finally died down to almost nothing. So I decided to take the dogs for a walk to Lake Edward on the Lake Edward Trail. I brought a beer with me, which I didn't crack open until I got to Lake Edward, at which point a light rain began to fall. I then started heading back east to the cabin. Not far from Lake Edward, I saw Charlotte investigating a wetland a little to the south, so I went of trail to traipse through it myself (it was just a few unremarkable puddles). When I then headed back north to where the trail should've been, I somehow never managed to find it, and then I became concerned that I'd gone past it and too far north. This caused me to double back south, which didn't do any good either. So I turned what I thought (based on the terrain) east and hoped to find my way back to the cabin whether I found the trail or not. Mind you, I hadn't brought a phone or a compass and it was too cloudy to navigate by the position of the sun. All I could really do was orient myself using my sense of how the topography should be oriented. Before long, I was seeing lots of landmarks (particularly large boulders) that I knew I had never seen before. The overall look of the terrain was Adirondack, but in many ways it was alien, as I had never been there before. At that point all I could do was try to keep going uphill, since doing so would either take me to the cabin or Woodworth Lake Road. Unfortunately, though, sometimes I get to the top of some lesser unknown hill in the woods and not know where to go next. This went on for awhile, and though I'd completely lost track of Neville, Charlotte appeared briefly fairly late in this. At some point I encountered a strong stream and figured there were few things it could be other than the outflow creek of Hines Pond (a large pond about a 4000 feet soutwest of Woodworth Lake). So I followed it upstream as it curved confusingly. I soon encountered a beaver dam that had impounded a fairly large beaver pond. Eventually I could tell I was getting to where I needed to be from the sound of a vehicle passing on Woodworth Lake Road. I stumbled out into a clearing full of large boulders and dense ferns and found myself across Woodworth Lake Road from the little beaver-augmented waterfall at the Hines Pond outflow. From there, it's about a mile hike back to the cabin, and as I walked, I hollered for the dogs in case they were in the woods nearby. But I didn't see them until I was back inside the cabin. They were both there, and I was delighted that Neville seemed to have completely forgotten about the dead fawn he'd been so interested in yesterday.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?240629 feedback
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