The stretch of vitality

Winter is officially started here. Monday I hike up Anemone in Boulder with CHAOS. It was around 10F, but the air felt good. Today I started the ski season off up at Breckenridge. I’m excited to have a season pass this year and try three new mountains.

Did another nice full moon hike with Mags and Chaos Monday night. We went up Sanitas on a cold and misty night under some hazy clouds. There was still ample light on the trail. I had never actually hiked Sanitas, the most popular trail in Boulder, so it was good to get that done. I baked some banana bread for the hike which I think came out great. Yesterday I was working up at Fort Collins since HP had a big town hall meeting. They gave us New Belgium beers (brewery is in Fort Collins), hurray!

Sunday I hiked the Wapiti Trail up in Heil Valley just north of town with a group of eight from my hiking club. It was a really nice hike and a very friendly group. Very easy hiking but great mountain views. Next weekend I’m going to go back and bike it, which should be fun.

In the middle of the night, I headed out to Golden Gate Canyon with a bunch of folks from my hiking club to hike Tremont Mountain and see the sunrise from the summit. We assembled in Boulder at 3:30am and drove about an hour up steep, windy roads, with several stops for car sickness, to the trail head. The weather was not good. It was raining on and off in Boulder, very cloudy with dense fog, and pretty cold. However, we made a go of it and when we got to the trail head the rain was done and the ground was more or less dry. We hiked off trail, bushwacked, and scrambled up for about an hour or so to tag the summit. We were running a bit behind so we were too late to be on the summit for sunrise, but it was moot due to the clouds and fog. Normally you would be able to see all of Golden Gate Canyon and the Continental Divide, but our visibility was about 100 feet.

We scrambled back down and had some yummy breakfast at the trail head of eggs, potatoes, peppers, and salsa along with tea, OJ, etc. It was about 37 degrees there and there was still patches of snow here and there on the mountain.

More photos here.

So overall starting with the Brazilian Batteria on Thursday and concluding today with dinner at Uncle Bill’s, this has been a very enjoyable and full weekend. Today I hiked 7.5 miles along the Walker Ranch Loop in about 3 hours. It was a cool day with lots of fog and mist in the air plus just a few occasional raindrops. So the trail was not in heavy use. It is a very interesting hiking taking you from recently burned forest down along the rushing rapids of the South Boulder Creek, through some meadows and back up some steep single track rocky trails.

More photos here.

Yesterday I drove 20 miles north from Bend to Smith Rock, the birthplace of modern American sport climbing.  The rock formations and views are stunning.  I saw some cool rock climbing going on as well.  I’ll post a few pictures here.  Lots more (I filled up my camera) on my web site.

Wow, that was a totally kick-ass weekend! I left Thursday afternoon to drive to Corvallis, OR because I needed to use a special HP video conferencing room there for an all day meeting Friday.  The drive was northwest on route 20 passing through both the Deschutes National Forest and the Willamette National Forest.  It was stunning.  The road was often thrown into shadow by the dense towering pine trees rising probably around 100 feet on either side of the two lane road.  There were large swaths of dense pine forest.  Early in the trip there were a few fires set here and there I assume as part of some sort of controlled burn process, but they smelled great.  Eventually the road follows a fast running stream and the pine trees relent their complete dominance and allow in some big leafless trees with broad branches that are entirely cloaked in thick green moss.  The whole drive has a decidedly Lord of the Rings feel.

Further along there are striking sets of barren pine trees sticking out from snow-covered mountains that look exactly like hair folices in skin.  Here and there are hills barren from logging.  When you eventually start to see towns and people again, they are tiny logging towns filled with quirky trailers and small houses.  I passed several logging mills whose purpose is probably obvious even to sharp-eyed extra terrestrials.  First, row after row of piles of enormous pine tree trunks two to four feet in diameter, then a large rectangular factory building, then on the far side neat stacks of 2x4s.  Occasionally along the road people have posted enormous tree trunks as trophies.  I saw two that had to be around seven or eight feet in diameter.

In my overnight in Corvallis I had a delicious meal of Louisiana crab cakes, baby back ribs, mashed potatoes, and brocoli, all in just the right size portions.  Friday at worked at the HP office in Corvallis.  A poster on the wall in the building listed a long list of impressive technologies invented here.  At the top left was “calculator” with no qualifying adjectives.  It was fun to explore the office a bit. Having spent a lot of time in the cube farms of banks and insurance companies, it was exciting to be in a true engineering R&D facility.  There were “R&D Area: Visitors must be escorted” signs everywhere.  In one corner I found an enormous plotter printer that made me drool thinking about the network diagrams that thing can print. I passed numerous raise-floor data center rooms, and one room that was a literal “clean room” complete with the guy in OR scrubs with matching hair net and booties.  There are dioramas on the cube walls outlining the assembly process for ink cartridges.  It’s just generally a cool place (at least on your first day there), and the video conferencing room was pretty slick (think Star Trek “On Screen”).

I wrapped up things early on Friday to try to get to Portland in time for the Pub and Pedal event Bernie was attending.  Sadly my GPS took me to “319 Swift Pine St” instead of “319 SW Pine St”, so there was a bit of a delay.  However, I made it to Bernie’s new house only a little later than I planned.  Here I rendezvoused with Big Wave Lew, who happened to be in town for a science conference, which was a happy coincidence.  Bernie outfitted us with bikes and gear from his arsenal and we rolled to the first stop on the “Pub and Pedal” outing.  He we joined forces into a small bike gang and moved on to the next bar.  It was a very nice night for a ride.  Then we sat at the bar a while and got caught up.

Next stop was Bossa Nova to get tickets for the March Fourth marching band show later that evening.  On the way out a woman in a big pink wig, fishnets, and panties with “GB” in a superman logo on them came out from the Mobile Groove Bomb  bus stationed outside the venue, and gave us her rap about their organization.  M4 wasn’t hitting for a while so we rolled to Launch Pad Gallery  for a Brent Wear  show.  This was fascinating mostly for the people watching, but they had a bar, some snacks including fresh watermelon, and some cool pieces both in the exhibit and permanently in the gallery.  A cello trio played a set of live music after the DJ was done.

Then we headed back for the March Fourth show.  March Fourth is basically part marching band, part side show, part burlesque.  At this show there was no marching as they were on stage, but they had dancers and stiltwalkers running around and hula hooping and so forth.

Saturday “morning” we borrowed a friend’s dog and truck and drove down town to get Lewis.  On the way to the hotel we were held up by a protest march that seemed predominantly about marijuana legalization with a small anti-war contingent.  Bernie says this is a fairly common sighting.  We grabbed Lew and headed to Washington Park  where we had some lunch on the benches in the Japanese Garden and then went on a long hike around the trails in the park, crossing over into Hoyt Arboretum.  We saw some fantastic pine trees and giant sequoias.  After that we parted ways with Lew and took a disco nap to get ready for the evening’s concert.

Now, the official impetus for this Portland visit was a live show by Laura Veirs, who I have been way into recently.  We headed to a restaurant near the venue but it was unexpectedly closed, so we had to settle for something quick at the Taco del Mar next door.  I bribed the staff with an extra tip in exchange for the turning off the horrible 80s muzak CD they had playing.  The we headed to Doug Fir Lounge for the show.  I drank 7/8s of a beer at the bar during the opening acts.  Laura’s performance was really great.  The sound was clear and not too loud. It was a solo show and the audience was quiet and attentive (not so during the openers).  She’s a great song writer and lyricist.  I was way into it.

Next stop we throw our bikes onto a rack on Bernie’s friend Anne’s car (insert 40 Year Old Virgin bike in trunk reference here) intending to move on to Hopworks for a late night snack, but sadly they were closed, so that concluded Saturday evening festivities.

Sunday we met Wyatt for vegan brunch.  I was defeated by a stack of three corn cakes.  Then we meandered around a bit on bikes, stopping to watch various team sports at a city park.  We eventually did stumble on the game of bicycle polo we were looking for.  Wyatt got in there and tried his hand, but it takes a lot of coordination.  Most of the players use junky “fixies” – one speed bikes where the pedals are directly chained to the gears so you can brake and reverse with the pedals. These are good for stalling (balancing motionless), which is handy for polo. Players are penalized for dabbing (touching the ground with their feet) and must ride aronud in a circle before resuming play.

Then I wanted to make sure my drive back to Bend was mostly in daylight, so we biked back to Bernie’s and I hit the road.  I’m looking forward to another visit at the end of the month.

Rest of the photos are here.

Ha ha!  I have achieved local immersion – under deep cover I have infiltrated many layers of the complex Boise metropolis society.  Wednesday I had dinner in town with a very nice woman that I met here, and of course I grilled her on the local scene.  Friday I had an adventurous outing to a local rock concert hall called The Venue.  Apparently this place often hosts Christian Rock groups and their shows are all-ages with no bar so they are catering to a pretty young crowd.  But this show was regular irreverant rock music.  Now, much like my experience hanging out with the fans of the Lesbian Punk Rock band in Salt Lake, sadly my writing skills are just not developed enough to capture the true colors of this experience, but I’ll give it a shot.  So again via craigslist I met up with a group of local folks, and after a few minutes of conversation between seriously louder than a normal rock concert songs, it soon became clear that these folks, predominantly early 20s girls, were a breed I had so long been unfamiliar with during my many years in jazz bands – GROUPIES.  They had seen one of the night’s bands The Lauderdale  several times before in the Boise area, and were “friends” (self-described) with the band. So I heard a description of each band member and his respective radness, along with a description of the alcohol they planned to drink over the course of the evening.  The band played a very short set – The Venue seems to book about six bands a night and they each play thirty-five minutes or so.  Shortly after that, I went out with the groupies to meet the band at their van in the parking lot.  Ah, if I had only taken some writing classes in college…

So let’s see, we’ve got five skinny rock and roll kids, presumably early twenties but it’s hard to tell because they do seem a little road weary plus about eight or so groupies that started appearing from all directions. Mostly girls between seventeen and twenty-five, but with a few boy companions mixed in. The agenda seems to be to fit as many people into the van as possible, leaving a few standing nearby the open side doors, and then drink, smoke, and chat.  It was fairly cold out that night, but I guess overall tolerable.  The groupies range from seemingly sober to plastered to silliness.  One of the groupies is a touch older, perhaps a recent college grad, who at one point rattled off stories rapid fire for about twenty minutes.  During this time, I learned some interesting things about her, including that she used to work at the Tamarak ski resort, the Boise State basketball team spends a lot of time in her apartment, tales from several parties and various incidents of drunk/stoned people doing silly things, the details of several of her arrests and terms of her probations, and my favorite – the story of how some folks were keeping her awake one night smoking pot outside her bedroom window and she stormed out to chase them away screaming “GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM MY WINDOW. I HAVE TO GO TO ANGER MANAGEMENT TOMORROW MORNING!”

After my initial fascination subsided and the cold started to set in, I went back inside and caught the set of Paper Mache , who were actually pretty good.

Saturday I was invited to a barbecue with some local folks, and of course I was giddy with delight to participate.  It was a fairly small affair and the hostess, who was indulging more heavily in the margaritas than the guests, lead most of the conversation.  Having been on the radio for about ten years, she certainly had the gift of gab and a funny personality.  The hosts had rescued three dogs, and the dogs also provided lots of entertainment. Jane, one was a Scottie, so they get extra stars for that. There were two work groups – several from a cell provider call center, and several from a hotel chain, so lots of funny work anecdotes were shared.

Sunday I met up with a friend of my Aunt’s for a nice long hike in the foothills accompanied by her dog Remi.  She had lots of good information, and moved to Idaho from Pennsylvania, so she understood that transition.  Afterward she cooked me a lovely dinner and I played some saxophone for her.