NEW Camp Muir webcam now online

A new webcam was installed at Camp Muir on May 18, 2011, by supervisory climbing ranger Stefan Lofgren. The camera is a StarDot NetCam SC Vandal Resistant Dome with a wide-angle lens, mounted on the NWAC instrument tower at the west end of the plywood guide-service hut extension (the "Gombu"):


[size=small]The new webcam (inside the clear inverted dome) mounted on the NWAC instrument tower.[/size]

The view looks south towards Mounts Adams, Hood, and Saint Helens, and includes the upper Muir Snowfield. This should provide an important new tool for trip planning, especially under weather conditions which produce a thick cloud deck at the elevation of Paradise with sunny skies above (very common lately, and typically very common in late spring and early summer).

Images are 1024x768 pixels and set to upload once per hour at 15 minutes after the hour, which is apparently all the current communications link can handle. The camera finally went live today June 2 for a few hours, managing to upload several images starting after 2pm. The time stamp on the image is incorrect for now, showing January 2000. Here is a nice image from 7:17am on June 3, 2011:



The current image can be found at www.nps.gov/webcams-mora/muir.jpg . I've added this view to my Mount Rainier Paradise WebCams page now, and it also displays the image modification time given by the server below the image.

At an elevation of 10100 ft, this is now the highest webcam in Washington state by a big margin (as far as I know, the previous highest was the Mission Ridge summit cam at 6800 ft), and also the highest in the entire Cascade Range, surpassing the two webcams at Mount Bachelor's Pine Marten Lodge at 7700 ft.

Excellent, as usual, Amar!  Thanks for making this cool tool so convenient!

Nice track for the solo boarder with the only line on the snowfield right now.

A camera takes mystery out of the mountains, but it'll be fun to drool over....

Thanks for posting the link...
I noticed that it's not posted on the ( www.nps.gov/mora/index.htm ) page?

Well, the park did finally update their homepage as of June 27 to link to the new webcam:

Want to see the view from the mountain? Check out our new Camp Muir webcam . Note: the date and time stamp is currently incorrect, but the camera is live.

While skinning up towards Muir yesterday (July 6), I met Stefan Lofgren skiing down near Pebble Creek. He had been up at Muir fixing the timestamp, and making a few other various improvements to the telemetry/webcam/communications system. It looks like the timestamp has been corrected since the afternoon of July 5, although the file modification time returned by the server is still off by 8 hours (this is only detectable if you're running some type of webcam-saver script as I am which checks that modification time).