Many long, long nights and work-filled weekends later, we’ve finally launched. We put up the site late last week to coincide with the second Nevada Democratic debate and today’s Nevada caucus.

Check it out at: http://www.lasvegassun.com.

Some of my favorite features of the site:

• Clean, open design by Sun staffers Bill Gaspard and Tyson Evans. Tyson, trained as a print designer, learned some pretty wicked CSS very quickly to build the site. He also designs a content-specific main content block each evening.
• Huge photo galleries. Our in-house flash viewer scales to any size (go ahead, hit the fullscreen button) and the photos are dynamically sized by the server to look good at almost any resolution.
• Our HD video strategy. The details are still being worked out, but the video widget should hint at where we’re going. Even now, you can download 720p HD video, in addition to iPod-sized video. And we’re not wasting the resources on crappy video. I think you’ll see some great video stories come out of this “newspaper.”

And we have some exciting things happening behind the scenes. Most importantly, outside the network layer, most of our technology infrastructure is built and managed by our editorial tech team, with editorial goals and deadlines in mind. We use a Python/Django-based CMS that our (crazy smart )programmers Doug Tywman and Kit Dallege can hack at a moment’s notice. Our Flash widgets are mostly built by Zach Wise, our multimedia guru, and can be adjusted at any time. We can add storage to our servers, tweak the database and drop in utility servers - like a streaming server - whenever we want, even in the middle of the night as news breaks. It’s flexible and very freeing.

Our team and strategy might be a little unorthodox but I think it will serve us and our audience well. Keep an eye out for more features and projects launching in the coming months.

My work buddies Zach Wise and Hepi Mita shot this video of the event:

I was standing behind Sun journalists Richard Brian and Matt Toplikar when they made this time-lapse sequence. Needless to say, I got pretty dirty:

I leave D.C. at the end of next week. Stay tuned for more information.

I built a simple PHP script that parses the American FactFinder and graphs relevant data. We used race data in our examples, but the code is easily adaptable to any FactFinder data.

Read the article and download the code at the Knight Citizen News Network Web site.

Scott and I were off to the Telluride Bluegrass Festival. Four days later, we met up in Boulder, Colo. with Abigail, Dave and Meredith — my best friends from college and high school — for backpacking in Rocky Mountain National Park, and camping and hiking in Zion National Park, Sequoia National Park and Yosemite National Park.

Along the way, we crossed both the Great Western and Continental Divides, Las Vegas and San Francisco.

Scott and I spent our first night with Drew and Michelle in their adorable house in “downtown” Alma, Colo., just a few minutes south of Breckenridge. They own the coffee shop/natural food store there. If you’re ever driving through the state on southbound CO 9, don’t blink the thirty seconds you’re in Alma and you’ll see their store on the right. Visit them; they’re the definition of “good people.”

The three nights in Telluride were incredible. I can’t imagine a more picturesque setting for a bluegrass festival than the box canyon in the San Juan Mountains that cradles the town. The highlight for me, predictably, was the short Avett Brothers set Thursday afternoon. I also really enjoyed Sam Bush, Bela Fleck (with and without the Flecktones), Peter Rowan, Tony Rice, Yonder Mountain String Band –who was new to me — and Chris Thile.

But for me, the heart of the trip was with the larger group on our tour of national parks.

Below are links to posts with pictures from our various hikes. I took more than 600 photos with my new (and awesome) Canon Powershot G7, the first point-and-shoot I’ve owned that is actually worth carrying. I’d much rather shoot with a digital SLR, but the G7 is portable enough to take on hikes and overnight trips. I’ve included only a handful of highlight images below. Enjoy.

• Rocky Mountain National Park
• Zion National Park
  • The Narrows
  • Angels Landing
• Sequoia National Park
• Yosemite National Park
  • Half Dome
  • The Four-Mile Trail That Isn’t

There are some incredible views from the trail. If one wanted to experience the trail but not commit a lot of time, taking a bus to the top and just hiking down is a nice option.

Everything Is Bigger In Sequoia

From Zion, we stopped outside Sequoia National Park for a night and spent the following morning playing in the Giant Sequoia forest in the park, which is only a small part of the very large Sequoia National Park / Kings Canyon National Park complex.

The forest is exactly what you’d expect, yet unbelievable as you sit under trees that have the girth of a tank and tower hundreds of feet.

We saw the General Sherman, which is the “biggest” tree in the world. It’s not the tallest, we saw others that were taller in close proximity, but is biggest because of its circumference and height combined.

As a side note and plug for a Web application I built a few years ago for an old employer, American Forests lists the biggest trees in the country, including the General Sherman.

From the point where one enters the river, the canyon immediately starts to consume the river bank until, about a mile in, there is nothing but cold rushing water and smooth, red walls. We pretty much waded, waddled and stumbled up the river, slipping often on the hidden stones.

Because it was unlike anything I’ve ever done, the Zion Narrows hike was my favorite element of the two-week trip. The whole day in fact was my favorite. We spent the afternoon on another remarkable hike.

Starting at the valley floor, Angels Landing is two and half miles one direction, and it feels straight up. There is an elevation gain of a little more than 1,500 feet. The park map list the hike as “strenuous.” With mid-afternoon heat, that seems very accurate.

The hike has two very distinct parts: the first two miles and 1,000 feet to Scout Lookout, and the last half mile and 500 foot ascent to Angels Landing. The Scout Lookout trail is a seemingly never-ending, but pretty typical, set of switchbacks in full view of the hot Utah sun. The final push to Angels Landing is a very steep climb along the spine of a very thin rock ridge, which would be incredibly difficult without the chains that line the trail that – at times – is only about three feet wide.

My fear of heights kept me on the verge of a minor panic attack for the last half mile, but I was able to work through it with the encouragement of my mates (Later in the trip, no amount of encouragement would help me overcome another hike).

I wish I had more photos, especially of the hairy parts of the trail, but I was a little preoccupied with my death grip on the chains to really take photographs. I relaxed a bit on the way down (which I incorrectly thought would be mentally harder, as I’d have to look down) and took a couple of photos. I could probably take pictures more leisurely the next time.

The two hikes probably totaled around 10 miles and wore us out, so we scrapped plans for yet-another-camp dinner and rewarded ourselves with a trip into town for cheap Mexican food.

For more drastic photos, check out Joe Braun’s guide to the trail. He used a very wide-angle lens to get stunning images.

We spent two nights in the Never Summer range in the northwest section of the park, entering on the Colorado River trailhead. According to rangers, Never Summer is one of the least visited sections of the park, which suited us very well. Starting at 9,000 feet, the trailhead is one of the highest – and coldest — in the park.

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We spent the first night at the Box Canyon site and the second at Valley View, both permit-only backcountry sites slightly above 10,400 feet. The aptly named Box Canyon site is breathtaking, includes two streams only feet from the silver site-designation marker and has a huge, tree-free field that attracted several elk. There were even snowy patches there in late June; the range truly is Never Summer. At just less than six miles from the trailhead, the site is well worth the hike. National Geographic even mentions the site in a series about National Parks.

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Valley View is less exciting. There’s a picturesque marsh on the edge of the site, but approximately 25 million mosquitoes call it home. They probably feed on the elk we saw at the pool, but we were the main course that evening.