Day 17: Flying High!

Had a FANTASTIC day eventually.  Started out hiking the north side of the valley to get different perspectives of caves across the valley using shadows as well as higher elevation and binoculars to locate caves and put on the topo map.  Eventually gave up due to too many “caves”.  Caves are everywhere, and I suspect a lot are hidden under vegetation.  The true caves may have water flowing from them which would feed onto areas where plants can thrive and thus hide the cave from view.  Also the caves on the cliff faces may just be little overhangs, and not connect in any fashion.

Excited to see a book written on caves of the Ka’a’awa valley by the Forest Service.  Dr. Hunt will be bringing this book that I plan on using as a test reference for the thermal portion of my project.

My project is actually up in the air…  It is quite possible that the Thermal Camera will not be working, and also just as possible that the hexacopter that would fly it will also not be working.  I REALLY want to see this project happen, but am prepared to find a backup to my project…

After doing my hike, I came back to base not sure what to do with myself.  Luckily Greg was ready to fly a Phantom and we went to do transects of the cliff faces to start creating a 3-D model of the cliffs (Greg’s project).  We used Dr. Lipo’s Optia camera that did GPS on the photos.  Paul did an initial run and went higher than the wall tops.  We got beautiful views!!

After this and several transects, I helped Ted fly his Instant Eye looking at the wall that the Laser was done on, for Dr. Weschler.

Liking it!