Glacier National Park - Bill Hayden's Blog - October 2008 (U.S. National Park Service)

Webcam capture by Barbara from New York

Bull Moose seen from the Two Medicine Webcam

It's a Moose
October 22, 2008

I get a lot of web cam images sent in to me. I love seeing what people capture and the changes that the cams show. Today I got a really cool one from a lady named Barbara in New York State. She was quick enough and lucky enough to be watching this afternoon when a big ole bull moose wandered through the view. I heard from one other person that they saw it briefly as well, but the image updated before they could grab the shot.

Fun stuff! :-)
Bill

Farewell to Goat Haunt
October 16, 2008

We know it's really the end of summer when the Goat Haunt webcam goes off-line for the winter. Facilities are in the process of being closed up and winterized up there and the power generator turned off for the winter. When things open up again next spring we will be able to turn the cam back on. We are very hopeful that we can replace that model of camera with one of the new and improved models that have the bigger picture and possibly weather as well. There's an interesting story with the weather modules for these cameras. The company is no longer selling them. They have not been recording accurate barometric pressure so the company is working to fix that. In the mean time they are not selling any more of the older ones. We will either buy some new weather modules when they come out, or use one older one that we still have here. New and improved is what we are shooting for at Goat Haunt and at all of our cam locations.

:-)
Bill

Today's Big Number!
October 14, 2008

I came across a startling statistic this morning. David Restivo was browsing through the statistics for the number of page visits the website has received. We looked at the Webcams page and it registered 1,737,028 visits in Fiscal Year 2008. The fiscal year was from October 1, 2007 to September 30, 2008. Total visits for the entire site during that time was 10,188,110, up from 6,024,166 the year before. That's a huge jump in visitation. Well over five times the number that visit the park in person visit through the website. I guess that explains the volume of email I get when the webcams go offline, like what happened this past weekend. Sorry about that, they are up and running again. We missed the snow that hit other parts of Montana so webcam viewers didn't miss all that much...well except the magnificent scenery that is.

So breaking down those statistics, the webcam page is visited 4746 times a day (it was a leap year so we had 366 days this past year). We don't have statistics for the individual cams, at least not any meaningful data, as the interface for those has changed a few times over the past year. Everyone has their own favorites anyway, so we will just leave that alone for now.

Thanks everyone for checking out the cams and making them the most popular part of the Glacier Website.