Note from Wayne Harrison: This first part of Pinecam's history is going to sound a lot like I did everything myself for the first years because, actually, I did. This was my personal Web site and my hobby for a very long time. I maintained the site alone (both the content and the programming), with the exception of Steve Brown, the weather almanac guy, who has been with Pinecam almost since Day 1, keeping daily weather records for the area.

"Pinecam.com" was actually founded as a wild mushroom-hunting site, called Mycelium, in April 1994, with a black & white Quickcam and information about wild mushroom hunting in the area. Wayne was the editor of Spores Afield, the newsletter of the Colorado Mycological Society at the time. A separate page, with the weather camera, was for mushroom hunters in Denver to check the weather "up the hill" to see if conditions were good for mushrooms. The original URL was www.igc.apc.org/mushroom/welco.html. The site grew, and more people went to the weathercam page than the mushroom section. It was renamed the "Pine Junction Weathercam," offering local weather information and was the highest web cam on the Internet for several years (8,500 feet) until ski areas caught on to the web cam concept.

In May of 1996, the Buffalo Creek Fire hit the area, running 11 miles in 4 & 1/2 hours and eventually burning a total of 12,000 acres. As a working journalist, site owner Wayne Harrison kicked into high gear, offering local citizens updated information on the fire, as well as official information releases from local authorities. The Web site offered updated pictures (both still and video) of the fire from a camera located at Harrison's house. The images were even carried by CNN. It is believed to have been the first actual forest fire covered "live" on the Internet. Due to requests from other media, Pinecam also offered high-resolution pictures of the fire for use by news Web sites, and newspapers. Working by himself, Harrison updated the Web site frequently so that residents of the area could stay informed about the progress of the fire and efforts to suppress it. He also used the web site's first "breaking news" email service for the area during the fire, sending out email alerts on fire developments. The was the start of "Pinecam" being used as an information vehicle during disasters by local residents.

On July 12, 1996, a deadly flood hit the Buffalo Creek area and the Web site that was to become Pinecam, kept local residents updated on roads closed and recovery efforts. The site began publicizing fundraising efforts for the town of Buffalo Creek to rebuild its shattered water supply and by the North Fork Fire Department so that they could replace equipment lost in the flood and worked closely with the widow of a Buffalo Creek resident killed in the flood to help her get donations after the family's insurance company refused to pay.

Enthusiastic community reaction to Pinecam's fire updates convinced Harrison that there was a definite need for a Web-based, community information site. Pinecam, still named the Pine Junction Weather Cam, began a deliberate move to information technology. Traffic for the site continued to grow after Buffalo Creek, as word of mouth spread among local residents and from many people living outside the area.

Also in 1996, the original site expanded and Harrison started a "Highway 285 Directory" and an "I-70 Directory," but the World Wide Web was still very new to many advertisers and the efforts folded due to a lack of local advertising. The site carried local news, community updates, and local fund raising requests during its two-year run. The death of a daughter in late 1966 caused site founder Wayne Harrison to abandon his mushroom web hobby, but the Pine Junction Weathercam continued. Here is one of the first versions of the "Harrison Family Home Page" from that period. After four years on five different servers, Pinecam.com became our home in 1998.

On June 12, 2000, the Hi Meadow Fire broke out, and Pinecam.com was covering the fire with community updates and information, much of it coming from Harrison's full time job as Assignment Manager at KMGH TV in Denver. As word about Pinecam spread again, the Web site began making headlines with its fire coverage.   Still working alone at that time, Harrison spent 18-hour days answering hundreds of emails, and updating the web site. Local real estate agent Susan Lamphear and her husband pitched in to answer posts on the Pinecam forum and also put up maps of the fire.

As word of the fire spread, locals and out-of-state friends of locals, began coming to Pinecam for the latest news. The fire burned 10,500 acres and destroyed 51 homes. (read the Pinecam guest book from 1999 to 2003) Harrison, still working alone, spent the week updating the site with coverage that local residents had come to expect from Pinecam. Harrison and Pinecam were even recognized by Colorado Gov. Bill Owens for community work during the Hi Meadow Fire. Other local politicians also followed suit. Many displaced residents e-mailed to say the only detailed information they could get on the fire was from Harrison's updates on Pinecam.com. One local couple accessed Pinecam's coverage from a cruise ship in Alaska, and said it helped them decide whether they should make an early return due to the fire. One really memorable event was the posting of a "prayer" for God's intervention, sent in by someone from out-of-state. The morning after the prayer was posted on the front page, a freak snowstorm (in June) moved in and helped fire fighters get control of the fire.

Pinecam continued to provide post-fire information months after the fire, including panoramas of the damage. Pinecam.com was selected as a "Best of Denver 2000" web site by Westword, (a Denver weekly). The category was "Best Source of News About the June Fires."

Just months after the devastating Hi Meadow Fire, residents found out that Jefferson County was planning to build a facility for juvenile sex offenders near Pine and Pinecam joined other homeowners to protest. A grass-roots organization was formed, named Help Our Mountain Environment (H.O.M.E) and Pinecam helped publicize the fund raising effort of the organization. Harrison even served as a moderator at a particularly memorable H.O.M.E. meeting on a homeowner's front porch where the county administrator was grilled about the planned juvenile facility. Pinecam helped publicize fund raising efforts for the group so that a lobbying lawyer could be hired to fight county commissioners. After months of work by local residents, Jefferson County decided to look elsewhere and a potential problem for the community was alleviated.

In September 2000, Pinecam.com signed agreements for local and topical news feeds, with Moreover.com, an international news aggregation service , to provide news "feeds" of headlines linked to stories from major newspapers all over.This allowed Pinecam.com to provide a wide variety of news feeds  that were updated 24 hours a day, seven days a week, plus a mountain weather picture updated every 30 minutes during daylight. It was a direct offshoot of Harrison's new job as Senior News Editor of TheDenverChannel.com. Harrison began working for the site in December 2000, and developed systems to allow the two web sites to compliment each other: TheDenverChannel used information submitted by Pinecam visitors during a community emergency and Pinecam was able to use information developed by TheDenverChannel and KMGH that was of interest to the mountain community. Harrison was instrumental in getting Moreover to add news stories from TheDenverChannel to its feeds.

In 2001, Pinecam began offering news headline service to WAP devices (wireless phones capable of accepting text). It was the first wireless news service offered in the mountain corridor. Pinecam's intent was to draw people interested in Colorado mountain news and events. That's when Pinecam coined the phrase "News & Information With A Mountain View!" The picture, and the news, were both directed to the Colorado mountain community.

In late 2001, Harrison began corresponding with Kurt Boyer, a Web programmer who was planning a move to the area. The two exchanged numerous e-mails that discussed how best to serve the area with a community-based web site. The exchanges resulted in a collaboration agreement between the two and the decision to remove all paid advertising from the site since its intent was to serve the community -- not make money. Where Harrison was able to bring information and content to the site, Boyer's forté was making Web sites more interactive and user friendly. It was a perfect match.

In 2002, a series of area forest fires culminated with Colorado's largest ever -- the Hayman Fire -- and Pinecam was there, providing updated community information, via the site, the discussion board, e-mail alerts, and a chat room. Through his association with TheDenverChannel, Harrison was also able to provide added information on the fires and, for the first time, live streaming video from the Channel 7 helicopter as it orbited the fires for hours.

In April, 2002, first the Topaz fire, then the Snaking Gulch Fire broke out near Bailey, Colo., and local residents again turned to Pinecam for fire coverage and community information.  The five-month-old Web Log (Blogger) came in handy as the site was updated immediately with first word of the Snaking fire, pictures e-mailed from local citizens, and community information. Harrison and Boyer hit the ground running, and never looked back. One of the first things Boyer did was get rid of the old discussion board and install new software that allowed visitors to more easily leave messages during the fires. Boyer also replaced the clunky java-based chat room with an IRC chat room. The early fires were followed by Black Mountain, Schoonover, Iron Mountain, Fall River, and Coal Seam, which Pinecam, utilizing its own information technology, covered and expanded its "footprint" into areas it had not been before. Then came the mother of all Colorado fires: the Hayman Fire.

In fact, Harrison was camping near Glenwood with his family when the Coal Seam Fire broke out and came home to find the Hayman fire bearing down on his community. The first alert went out on Pinecam at 2:42 p.m. Sunday, June 9 when the fire was only 3,000 acres and was still very far from our area, but headed toward Cheesman Reservoir very quickly. Although it was the beginning of Pinecam's fire coverage, detailed evacuation information was already being relayed on Pinecam from fire officials to the public. By 6 pm that evening, Pinecam was posting lists of evacuated areas and evacuations shelters. (Watch a movie of Hayman from Wayne Harrison's house)

Hundreds of thousands of people from the area and around the world came to the Web site for detailed information and updates -- the kind of information they had come to expect from Pinecam in two previous fire seasons.

A few days after the fire started, several people began asking for personal donations on Pinecam to help firefighters. Pinecam contacted Janet Shown at the Mountain Resource Center and made arrangements to funnel all donations though the recognized non-profit. This was done to alleviate a potential liability issue for Pinecam. Harrison and Boyer wanted to make sure that contributions were going through a recognized local non-profit with a history of service to the area, and not to individuals. The Mountain Resource Center was given full access to Pinecam so they could post requests for help directly on the site, as needed. During the fire, Pinecam was used to publicize the need for supplies and money, explaining that donations could be made through Mountain Resource Center. The operation was a success, as Mountain Resource Center and volunteers used the reach of Pinecam to gather funds and supplies for firefighters. A number of people stepped up to offer help. Many gathered supplies and equipment and donations for firefighters and dropped them off at Mountain Resource Center. A number of these good Samaritans never even sought public recognition (see "A Report from the Trumbull Relief Effort" on the Pinecam Blog).

As the fire burned for weeks, Pinecam continued its community information mission by relaying official news releases from the five different counties affected by the fire and later, by giving evacuees tips on what they should do when they return home. Pinecam also continued to issue additional emergency information well after the fire was controlled.

After the Hayman Fire, Harrison and Boyer decided to form a citizen "board" to oversee the IRC-based Pinechat chat room. The board went through a number of self-regulated changes, including repeated resignations by a few members, eventually resulting in a rift that ended when board members on one side voted out the former Pinechat board chairman they had unanimously elected when the board was formed. Half of the board resigned in the first few months because of personality conflicts. It was as a result of the friction and continued discord in the chat room that Harrison and Boyer decided to disband the chat room board.

The Pinechat IRC chat room was actually a very small part of the total Pinecam presence during the 2002 fire season. While Pinecam was serving thousands of visitors every day with extensive and detailed fire and evacuation information published on the site and sent out in email updates, the chat room was hosting a dozen and was prone to IRC service failures. During one memorable moment during the Hayman Fire, however, more than 140 people crowded in the chat room and the result was near chaos because every time someone new came into the room they'd ask, "Where's the fire?" Add to that, the ability of virtually anyone to put out erroneous information instantaneously in the unfiltered chat room, causing widespread panic, and it was clear to Harrison and Boyer that an IRC chat room was not a very good way to distribute critical public information over the Web. Pinecam came up with an inovative solution to this problem, which you'll read about shortly.

After Hayman, Pinecam developed the visual Colorado highway signs that show real time messages from the Colorado Department of Transportation. The signs easily allow people who are not on the highway to check for any highway alerts before leaving home. Pinecam also developed a second news alert service, for pagers, to augment its email news alert service. The idea is simple: to reach as many people as possible with time-sensitive emergency information, even if they are evacuated with no computer access. The free services are used by thousands of people. Pinecam also added more cameras and additional mountain weather stations to cover the area from Bergen Park to Bailey and down to Deckers. Pinecam also installed an information robot, called Pinecone, that immediately posts weather, news alerts, and news releases on the Pinecam forum (discussion board) from a number of recognized news sources, so that Pinecam visitors can stay on top of what is going on. In addition, Pinecam added an eye-catching front page scroller than can be quickly updated with community information.

Pinecam beganning offering a "Shoutbox" on the top of its main forum in late 2003 as an alternative to its chat room. The "Shoutbox" is an editable interface where people can post messages and have them say up for others to read as they log on. The messages can be edited easily by moderators, if need be. Plans are to use the "Shoutbox" feature a means to relay important community information during the next disaaster. Unlike a chat room, the messages can be edited for accuracy, or deleted, and they will remain for others to see as they log in.

Pinecam's Harrison and Boyer began working closely with the fledgling Mountain Community Disaster Council in Sept. 2002, eventually joining the steering committee of the consortium of established public service agencies that are active in any disaster. MCDC was formed as a direct result of lessons learned in the 2002 fire season, with the intention of coordinating any future community relief efforts for the public service agencies in the area. Kurt Boyer was asked to design the Web-based communications system for MCDC, which he did, despite a computer hard drive crash that forced him to start over at one point. Wayne Harrison attended numerous MCDC planning meetings, as the council worked out methods to best serve the community in any time of need and to communicate with them. Pinecam, as the most recognized and visited Web site in the area, was a logical choice to distribute MCDC information.

Because of its high community profile, Pinecam was also selected by Evergreen Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster (EVOAD) to act as the official information source for that group in the Evergreen area. The two alliances assure that Pinecam will be able to provide first-hand disaster-relief information for the foothills community that it serves. Pinecam encourages local residents to contribute directly to local charities and fire departments and to volunteer through them, or many of the civic or faith-based organizations that serve our communities.

Pinecam Issues 36-Hour Warning Before Blizzard of the Century

On Sunday night, March 16, Pinecam began relaying the first in a series of ominous weather alerts from the National Weather Service, warning that the upcoming storm would bring totals in feet, not inches. The warnings were sent out via Pinecam's email alert system and posted on the site. The warnings told people to prepare for a major snow storm of historic proportions. The snow didn't start until late Monday afternoon. During the "Blizzard of the Century," Pinecam used its community connections with MCDC to relay critical community information and requests for volunteer help. The Web site logged a huge amount of traffic as tens of thousands of mountain residents were snowed in and were looking for information. Scores of emergency messages were posted and relayed to citizens looking for information. As part of its operational plan, Pinecam helped MCDC, the Mountain Resource Center, the American Red Cross and other local public service agencies by relaying important community information to thousands of mountain residents. Our Web traffic approached levels attained during the 2002 Hayman Fire. Pinecam proved it was once again the place the mountain community comes for updated information in a local emergency and was given a special award by the Red Cross for its work during the blizzard.

During the fall of 2003, Pinecam began gearing up for the 2004 fire season by adding additional people to help in distributing community information and requests. Pinecam Forum moderators were selected who will help keep order and relay important information during an emergency. Longtime Pinecam helper John Lamphear stepped up to take the position of liaison between Pinecam and MCDC and EVOAD. This was to take advantage of John's previous work with Pinecam during the 2002 fire season in which thousands of dollars in donations were collected and tons of supplies were donated. John's job is ensure that there is a smooth flow of information from local organizations affiliated with MCDC and EVOAD, Pinecam, and other local Web sites.

In late 2003, Pinecam began a concentrated effort to improve the Web site once again and give it even more appeal than other local Web sites. We wanted to make sure that our site had a unique "look" and "local appeal" beyond what could be found other Web sites and wanted to make sure that Pinecam.com continued to reflect the kind of quality and appeal that made it so popular for locals in the first place.

We also added a recipe section with searchable database to give even more of a community "feel" to the Web site. The recipe section, called "What's Cooking On Pinecam?" was enthusiastically accepted and more than a thousands recipes have been added to the database -- one more Pinecam "touch" that makes the Pinecam the innovative leader among local Web sites.

Kurt Boyer moved from the area in 2004 and is no longer involved with Pinecam on a day-to-day basis, although he does offer technical support to his php-challenged former partner.

The business model for Pinecam changed in 2004 from a not-for-profit to a for-profit community information resource. In December 2003, we began serving Google text ads in order to raise enough money to pay our monthly operating costs. Pinecam began looking at other opportunities in 2004 to enhance its revenue and thus establish a financial base to make professional improvements to the site.

Also in 2004, Pinecam began adding to its group of volunteer moderators to oversee the day-to-day operations of the Pinecam forum. Pinecam adopted its first military unit in 2004 -- a group of soldiers in Afghanistan which included a local Pine resident. The adoption of military units expanded in 2005, with the formulation of a Troop Support Action Committee, which began expanded troop shipments to military units in Afghanistan and in Iraq.

Pinecam Incorporates

In January of 2005, Pinecam incorported as Pinecam, Inc., with a board of directors working with Wayne Harrison to oversee not only Pinecam.com but other operations that Pinecam hoped to become involved in. Henry Diaz was appointed by the board as Pinecam.com's first president. In the summer of 2005, Harrison turned ownership and control of Pinecam.com to the Pinecam, Inc. board of directors, thus ending an 11-year stint as the owner of Pinecam.com.

Since its inauspicious beginning in 1994, a number of web sites have come and gone in the area (some in less than a year), but Pinecam remains year in and year out, and has attracted a loyal following. Pinecam is something you can count on, not just during a local disaster, but 24/7, day after day, season after season, year after year. We are proud to be a part of your everyday life.