He's Back!!!
December 28, 2008

After a long hot summer hiatus, the snowman has finally returned. Hopefully over the course of the winter he will introduce some of his friends to the park as well. Watch for him smiling back at you (well he doesn't actually have a mouth, but if he did he'd be smiling back) for the next couple of months.

The first snowman showed up last winter on Christmas Eve. Amazingly he and his buddy became one of the most popular spots on Glacier's website. Easily attracting more attention than almost any other page on the site...and more email than anything else for months. Their slow demise last spring was a sad occasion for many website visitors but a clear indication that another fantastic summer was on the way.

Well no sooner did the first flakes start to fly here in the park this fall, when the emails started coming in about the return of the snowmen. It's been bitter cold here for over a week and not good "packing" snow at all. Today however it rained, making some great (although soggy) snowman weather. My phone rang about 2:00pm and it was David calling to get me over to HQ to get the winter snowman season started again.

It's always fun to see how long it takes for changes to the site to be discovered. Within 20 minutes we had our first "Thank you" email about the snowman. It's so gratifying to know that people are watching and that Glacier National Park has so many fans throughout the World.

Bill

Webcam Image of the Day
December 22, 2008

Have you ever seen a really great image on the webcams and saved it? Have you ever sent one in to us and wondered what happened to it? Well at one point there were plans to maintain a gallery of those images, as we had once done in the past, but that just became too time consuming to maintain. With the help of two very talented guys we have somewhat of a solution.

Todd from Acadia wrote a program to randomly select an image from our files and move it to a new location and rename it. Tim from our IT office set it up to run once a night and FTP the image to our server. So now each night one image is randomly selected and displayed on the Gallery Page. It might be one from last week or last month or it might even be one from an old camera location that no longer exists. In any case it will be an interesting peek into the past. Maybe you will see one of your's highlighted!

Hopefully this will be a way to share some of those shots, in an entertaining way.

For you Mac users there is also a new Webcam Widget that includes the new Image of the Day as well as links to four of the other cams. Look for it in the Multimedia section of the website.

Bill

PS We have a new camera and it works very differently from the others. We haven't worked all the bugs out of it yet. It seems to randomly take images for a while and then stops for a few days. Once we get it working better we will install it somewhere in the park. It has a nice zoom and that could come in handy somewhere. In the mean time you can check out its latest image here. Don't be surprised if it doesn't update for days and then all of a sudden starts up again. It's very finicky that way, and with everything else going on we haven't had a chance to really sit down a play with it.

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84 Below!!!  Brrrrrrr
December 19, 2008

Many of you have noticed that the Two Medicine Webcam stopped working last Saturday, right after it registered 84 below! Well it didn't really get that cold. The lowest temp I noticed online at St. Mary was 18 or 19 below. I'm guessing that the temps were about the same in the Two Medicine Valley.

The bigger problem is that when the power went out in East Glacier (and apparently Two Medicine and St. Mary as well) both cams stopped. St. Mary's came back online when the power returned. Two Medicine has not come back online. We are not sure what the problem is. Since the road is covered in snow right now we can't get back in there to see if the power is still out up there or if something else is wrong. It's possible that there are problems with the satellite dish or the hardware associated with it. The bottom line is that we don't know when the cam there will be back online. We will keep you posted as soon as we know anything, one way or the other.

On the plus side...look for something fun to show up here before Christmas. We're working on a little something and will release it soon.

PS...it's not the Many Glacier Cam...sorry!

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