Not Quite Camp Wiconda, but Close. Mr. Sta-Puft is There

What better way to celebrate the entry of fall into Idaho than with a spring story from Uncharted. And, argh, yes, that is a play on words, because not only were these photos of Cress Creek taken in spring, but Cress Creek itself is a spring. I am prepared to be pumelled for the play on words. Go ahead. Do your worst.

But read the story. Cress Creek is such a fun place to take your kids on a hike especially, if they're like mine, they're hyperactive, a bit overstimulated at school and determined that this hike will be completed on schedule. Race up the trail, hesitate only a nanosecond at the crossroads, then race up the hill, over the bridges, down the hills, over the flatlands and to the precipice where they gawk at the Snake River below. Odd thing is if I want them to walk through a Home Depot for fifteen minutes, they're all tired.

I never get tired of going to Cress Creek. It's kind of fun to wander into this little Eden on the Snake River Canyon, parched in summer except for this little green gully where geothermically-heated spring water keeps things green. And then there are the remnants of the Sta-Puft Marshmallow Man, resplendent on one of the rocks overshadowing the trail. The goo is actually ash and pumice spewed out by the Menan Buttes 18 miles to the northwest, but  . .  . why am I telling you this? Go read the story. Now.

Yapping About Uncharted Online

Good Monday morning fellow explorers! Its an exciting day for all of us in the Uncharted community since Aaron is installing some great new functionality on our Explorer accounts! It will allow us to keep in touch with each other and stay appraised of new adventures with ease.

Several of you (explorers and staff) were quick to observe that if someone sent you a message on Uncharted, commented on your story, or someone requested to be your friend, you probably wouldn't know it unless you happened to log in to Uncharted. Those days are almost gone!

Thanks to all the hard work from our programmers, designer and technical staff, we just finished beta-testing this new functionality and it is working great! That means Aaron will be installing the new functionality on the Uncharted website today, which may cause a few hiccups throughout the day today (server reboots). By the end of the week your Explorer account will have notifications enabled. That means anytime someone sends you a message, posts a comment on your content, invites you to be a friend, Uncharted posts a new feature story, or if one of your friends posts new content, you will receive a notification message in your e-mail. You can also edit your profile to enable or disable any of those notification functions based on your own preferences.

We're working on getting the same notification process that works for stories to also work for photosets and will spread the word once that is installed.

You also may have noticed the additional "share" button with an orange "+" sign on the upper-right corner of stories. This allows you to easily post a story (including your own) on Facebook, Twitter, Digg or a number of other outlets.

Our staff really appreciated all the input we received from beta-testing last year and subsequent feedback over the many months of continued development. We hope these new capabilities help all of us stay in better touch with our adventurous friends across the world. So feel free to check it out, test it out, and yap away!

The image on this posting shows the new options enabled on your Explorer profile for receiving notifications.

If you notice any problems, as always, please feel free so send us feedback at our feedback e-mail address: feedback@uncharted.net

Time of the Spud

We're still here at Uncharted, limping along a little bit as we wrestle with server issues. Until the issues are resolved -- and we hope they will be soon -- our updates are going to be a little sparse. Trust me, we've got enough material to update the site twice a month for at least a year, so there's no shortage of material. Right now, it's just a shortage of server space.

So to entertain the troops, we've dusted off an oldie but a goodie: Shelley Spud Days, in which hapless folks play a tug-o-war over a huge pit of mashed potatoes and otherwise celebrate everything there is to know about the Idaho potato. Here's the story. Hope you enjoy it.

Burden of Progress, or Attack of the Mushroom People

Well, it finally happened. Between the community of Explorers and staff, the data uploaded to Uncharted pushed our server to its limits and required our staff to streamline data storage. There's nothing that makes a web media operative go more crazy than going to his own site and suddenly realizing something has gone wrong! "Why is the site acting up? Have evil Mushroom People invaded our server and attacked it from within?" That was our story this morning. Who are these Mushroom People and why are they attacking us?

This was quite the headache for our team to figure out. Growth is usually welcome, but it does come with a price. All things considered, however, it is a good problem to have. It wasn't very long ago that Uncharted didn't even have an operating website. We only dreamed of such a thing. And even when it was launched, we weren't sure we'd ever get to this point, but here we are. A problem? Yes. A headache? Yes. But a good problem to have? Also yes.

Despite the headache and the fact that our technical gurus and leadership were under the gun to resolve the problem, once our team got together we had a plan of action within 30 minutes, and the site was brought back online within 2 hours. Not bad for a startup, eh? What a team!

And what was the solution? Well, since the Mushroom People are probably watching, we could tell you, but then we'd have to kill you...

Happy Adventures,
GeoJoe

Uncharted Hangs out at the Bar J

I'm in awe of those who can use a Dutch oven for things other than burning food. I've had a little success using such ovens -- I can make a mean stew and, this summer, at my wife's insistence, we made our first Dutch oven peach cobbler. But making something like biscuits in such an oven, without them ending up like charcoal, is a feat to be seen. So it goes without saying that one of my favorite things to do at Wilson, Wyoming's Bar-J Wranglers ranch, is to eat the biscuits they make in their Dutch ovens.

We're long-time fans of the Bar-J, their dinner show and chuckwagon cooking. If you've never visited their ranch, you've got to, next time you're in Yellowstone Country. Until then, read our Uncharted story on their enterprise here. Have fun. Just watch out for Granny.

Dancing, Dancing, Dancing

The rumbling thunderstorm and rushing breeze mix their sounds with those of Main Street.

Main Street noises, though, are not the swoosh of cars, the occasional click of a bicycle wheel, the regular shuffling stamp of pedestrian feet. From around the corner of the brick-fronted jewelry store, in the center of the street, emerges a woman carrying the black-on-white, yin with yang flag of South Korea. Behind her, pushed as if they were leaves on the growing breeze, a knot of reedy dancers clad in pink and aquamarine silken clothing, ruffled by the breeze, buffeted, as it seems, by the tloing! tloing! doing! crash! zloing bloing! of the drums and cymbals carried by the similarly-clad band, some of whom growl away on recorders, adding the drill and trill to the cacophony of clashes, accompanied by the swirling dancers, the rumble of thunder and the rush of the wind.

This is the Idaho International Folk Dance and Music Festival, in full swing for its twenty-fourth year. The festival has its roots at Ricks College, a private school – now Brigham Young University-Idaho – in Rexburg. In 1983, a team of folk dancers from the school attended a dance festival in Europe and decided to stage such an event at home. Partnered with the Rexburg Chamber of Commerce, organizers brought the first folk dance festival to town in 1986. You can read more about the festival's history here if you like.

During the festival, Rexburg is gently taken over by the dancers, musicians and their entourages. It’s common to run into them at Kmart or Wal-Mart, shopping with the local families who host them – providing room, board and companionship – during the festival. During the festival week it’s as common to hear German or Mandarin Chinese being spoken frequently, loudly and punctuated with laughter as the dancers eat burgers at McDonalds or ice cream at the Dairy Queen. This is how you know it’s festival time.

It’s a great event. Go read about it at www.uncharted.net here. And thanks.

Tranquility Base, Here . . .

Nearly forty years ago, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins took those "small steps for men" and fulfilled what even a decade ago seemed an unsurmountable obstacle: Landing men on the moon and returning them safely to Earth. Getting the U.S. space program from the era of crashing Vanguard rockets through the tragedy of Apollo 1 to the glee of watching Walter Cronkite's schoolboy anticipation and tearful joy at hearing Neil Armstrong's words from the surface of the moon took thousands of men and women, countless millions of man-hours, billions of dollars and one rather enjoyable Ron Howard movie.

So maybe, in a small way, getting our family up the 1.2 mile trail from the base of Oregon's Multnomah Falls to the deck at the falls' top, represents our own small steps for men; our one giant leap for family togetherness.

It was not a simple jaunt. The trail may be just over a mile, but it climbs more than 600 feet in that distance, a pretty steep requirement for three little pairs of feet anxious to climb but not necessarily used to such exertion. But, as you'll read in Uncharted.net's update this week, those little feet made it to the top and then, well, we arrived at Tranquility Base.