Photographer captures Devil’s Lake for Google
Street View offers 360-degree images of state park
It took months of hiking with a 50-pound backpack camera, but Christopher Pitts has put Devil’s Lake State Park on the map. The virtual Google map. Last winter, Pitts, a photographer from Cross Plains, strapped one of Google’s Street View camera setups to his back and spent his weekends capturing 360-degree images on the trails in the park. Now anyone can virtually explore those trails on Google Maps’ Street View.
Street View debuted in 2007, providing panoramic images from streets around the country captured by cars equipped with special 360-degree cameras. In 2012, the online giant introduced Trekkers, backpack-mounted cameras it would use to capture images in hard-to-reach places like the Grand Canyon. The following year, Google began lending out the Trekkers.
The program is open to anyone, although not all applicants are selected to participate. It’s an unpaid, “just for fun” gig, Pitts said. Google typically loans the cameras for 45 days, unless an extension is granted.
“My first thoughts were to capture the beauty of the Wisconsin River up by the Dells — I’m a former Duck driver and tour guide up there — and I was Google-searching and I came across the Trekker loan program,” Pitts said.
After a monthslong process that included a few rounds of interviews, Google accepted Pitts’ application and sent him the camera setup in November 2015.
Pitts, who grew up in the Wisconsin Dells area and lived in Baraboo for about a decade, first headed to the Dells of the Wisconsin River. There, he hopped on a boat from his old employer, Dells Boat Tours, and photographed the sandstone formations of the Upper Dells that made the area famous long before water slides and theme parks.
After the Dells, Pitts spent months at Devil’s Lake, which attracts more than 2 million visitors every year.
“I always went to Devil’s Lake as a child, and loved hiking the rocks and everything,” Pitts said. “So it seemed like the perfect merger of new technology and taking photos and hiking.”
He first tackled the East Bluff Trail, which climbs 500 feet up the park’s East Bluff and past noted formations like Elephant Rock.
“It was the first time that I didn’t stay very long when I got to the top,” Pitts said, noting the challenge of hiking up the steep bluffs with the 50-pound camera on his back. “For that first hike, I was pretty much up and then down.”
Pitts went on to document most of the other well-traveled trails in the park, including trails on both the East and West bluffs, the Ice Age Trail, the CCC Trail and the Tumbled Rocks Trail.
Before Pitts photographed every inch of the popular trails, Devil’s Lake — and other outdoor spots around the state — already had a number of “photo spheres” on Google Maps. The spheres are 360-degree photos submitted by users. But those photos don’t offer the foot-by-foot, 360-degree experience of the Google camera.
The camera is made up of 15 lenses, Pitts said, that take snapshots every few seconds. After Pitts finished hiking and sent the camera and images back to Google last March, it took until January to stitch the images together to create the street — or in this case, trail — view.
Pitts said capturing the images didn’t require any special skills, other than the fitness to hike the trails.
“Just about anybody can do it — the technical aspects weren’t really photography-related,” he said, noting it only required a smartphone app and the backpack camera setup.
“It was definitely a fun little journey,” he said.
He hopes to take part in the loan program again, photographing the park and the Dells during other seasons. If he does, Google users will be able to choose which season they view the park in on Street View, allowing them to virtually hike the park any time of year.