Data Movers: The Pipes Our Information Travels

Unseen, unnoticed concrete buildings, the kind you pass every day but never consider, these are the places where our data are moved. Make a call, send a text message, post an update on your Facebook page, your bits and bytes are moving through a glass tube about as thick as one of your hairs. 

Hub

Pumped underground or overhead, hanging from telephone poles, all of this information hovers in a critical balance. 

Traffic jams start at times when most people turn on their computers and connect to the world outside their own, slowing down the arrival of this information or dampening its quality. 

Aerial view of information traffic

All of this information relies on power. Not all power is alike. Noise, blips and blurps are all words that take on a whole new meaning when we work with electricity. Total Harmonic Distortion isn't the name of a thrashing speed metal band but is what happens when we don't have a quality source of energy. Because we’re bandwidth hogs, consuming data from numerous devices just about anywhere we want to, we’re also energy hogs.

DC Plant

The name of the game is five 9s reliability. 99.999%. But even still our information is vulnerable and its path can be easily interrupted by little things we never think of: a glass pipe bent at a funny angle, a bad drop from the utility lines to our house, a generator that doesn't turn on when it was supposed to because of a bad transfer switch, a brownout in the grid caused by a heat wave that triggered 100s of air conditioners to turn on at the same time. 

Our information is just going through pipes. And there are leaks and clogs just like with water. Everything flows when there is a clear path. But there's always impedance. 

DC Cabling

The next time your phone drops a call or your YouTube video takes a long time to buffer, think about the long path that information has to go. It's going through these buildings and huts in places you'd never think of. Climate controlled with blinking lights flashing on and off, humming with daily activity. The constant drone of a busy freeway outside your airport motel window. 

Rainbow Spaghetti

These are the Data Movers. And they're working 24 x 7 x 365, relying on thousands of pieces of computing and power equipment. In one of these huts, maybe 35 square feet in area, you can see the names of 30 big and small  manufacturers of conductors, resistors, capacitors, chips, copper, silicon, and plastic. In the large master information centers, you've got thousands of square feet of rainbow spaghetti wires, fiber coming in from underground and information blasted through satellite dishes.

Data Movers

And this is where our lives hang in a strange balance between what's real and what's virtual and where these realms overlap. 

Great Roads of the Pacific Northwest, Vol. 2: Cerrando el hoyo/Closing the Loop. Linking some lesser known trails in the Chuckanuts.

With my hiking partner, I'm working on book project number 2: Great Roads of the Pacific Northwest. Everybody knows about the great hiking in the region, but what about all of those great roads, which are wonderful not only to drive  and ride bikes on but just plain walk. Together, we have a list of some 15-20 roads that we will pare down for a book that will serve as a sort of anti(guide). Entry 1 was on the Endless Road to Soggy Saddle. 

Here's entry number 2 in our notebook. And it's a route that we have given the name "Cerrando el hoyo" or Closing the Loop. Below, I offer 2 maps indicating the general and specific location of The Loop, which begins at the Clayton Beach parking lot off of Chuckanut Drive.

The Triangle by my name is approximately where we had lunch, near the top and a massive clearcut. We call it the site of the Battle of the Bulge

Heading east from the Clayton Beach parking lot, we head up an old logging road,  Fragrance Lake Road. According to an old guy in the parking lot, you used to be able to drive this road straight to the lake and he was bummed that he couldn't do that anymore, but we couldn't share his disappointment, as walking roads is what we live for.

Finding peace in the Chuckanuts

About a mile up the road, there is a point where the road splits and we take the road less traveled, the road that doesn't go to Fragrance Lake. We head head right or Southeast more or less off another spur. This road leads to a fairly well-known lookout where, on an especially clear day after a rain, Mount Rainier looms enormous to the South. Experiencing Mount Rainier from this spot is rare but great views of the San Juan islands and the Olympic Mountains can be had most days of the year.

After this spot, the road gets weird. Only mountain bikers go beyond this lookout and midwinter it's rare even to see them. The road continues up and up through various stages of forest growth. Somewhere on the drive from Bellingham to the Clayton Beach parking lot you cross from Whatcom into Skagit County, where the logging policies are a bit more aggressive, which makes for spottier clumps of forest. There's also a unique light, which is difficult to capture with a camera, that is caused by the space between the trees--mostly hemlocks and doug firs with the occasional cedar.

Where the road starts getting weird. I like the spacey light between the trees

On the map above, the spot indicated with an arrow and my name is approximately where we eat lunch, near the top of a mountain and a very apocalyptic scene of a clearcut that we call the site of the Battle of the Bulge.

The site of the Battle of the Bulge. The trees lost. Doomsday Scenery at its finest.

The walk continues through this doomsday scenery of slash pile destruction and then descends down a spur of the Lost Lake trail seen on the above map, which is a beautiful section of deep, dark, mossy forest and then connects back to Fragrance Lake Road, which leads us back down to the parking lot at Clayton Beach. All in all, the Loop encompasses about 8 miles with an elevation gain of approximately 1700 feet with lots of ups and downs in between.

Deep, dark, spooky and green. Just how I like it.

A cold, cloudy January morning didn’t stop us from traversing this loop on the Chuckanut Mountain ridge. Chuckanut is an interpretation of a Lummi word meaning “Long beach far from a narrow entrance,” and these mountains represent the only place where the Cascade mountain range stretches down to the sea. Famous for their leaf fossils from the Tertiary Age, the Chuckanuts also have a lot of glacial erratics, which I call “erotics” and make wonderful jungle gyms for Lupe. 

What's nice about this jaunt is that it's relatively calm for being in the Chuckanuts where there are so many trails densely packed together, all with parking lots full, even on rainy days. There are loads of hikes  to be had on the very developed trail network that criss-crosses over the Chuckanut range. Nevertheless, just about everybody here does the same dang hikes. The most popular of which is the Oysterdome hike where, on fair weather days, people are lined up as if it were an amusement park ride. Oysterdome is a wonderful hike with a great view, but there are better views to be had in the Chuckanuts, one of which I'll save for another post because it requires traversing a strange road to get there.