| I made it. |
[Jun. 10th, 2007|01:43 am] |
So It's been 1 week. I made it to California, I drove 3300 miles with my Dad across this surprisingly vast expanse that is this beautiful country. We passed through Mount Rushmore, saw Bighorn do some impressive sitting on crazy mountain peaks. Moved on to Cody Wyoming, just outside Yellowstone for a night. Then we entered Yellowstone. Just inside the gates we saw 2 grizzly cubs that were probably about 90lbs each, they were on the mountainside next to the road. Then we found our campsite, it was on the edge of a lake in this park that is about 1/3 the size of Belgium. We spent 3 nights exploring the park, climbing to peaks going through canyons, hopping ridges and finding forgotten lakes with herds of Bison, Deer, and Antelope that sometimes act skittish, and other times will allow themselves to wearily approach you as they make their way by. We saw beautiful sunrises and sunsets, and walked up this mountainside trail, you know, one of those paths barely two feet wide curving in and out along the edge of a mountain, where trees can't remotely grow, where you can only go forwards or backwards for a mile or more with hundreds of feet seperating you and anything lower down, where the wind blows almost so loud you can't hear anything else. Saw Old Faithful and at least a hundred zones of geysers, mudpots, fumaroles, and burning ground. Saw at Mammoth Hotsprings a beautiful section where the Springs in one area, all starting spouting into the same pond, and that forced the cascades to move over away from the main face where the water runoff had used to flow. The hotsprings water is highly acidic, and is full of dissolved limestone, this limestone gets deposited as a new type of stone called Travertine, this has the effect of snagging a whole bunch of trees grass moss and stone, and embedding them into the rockface, stuck solid. Due to differing temperatures of the water, you get different microcultures of bacteria, these colonies have different colors ranging from white (minimal to no microorganinsms) to yellows greens greys and blues. The steam came up from zones visible all over the park, as we walked over rigelines, next to lakes and rivers, coming up from rockslides. After getting snowed on a couple times in our campground, we left and headed through the mostly barren landscape of Nevada. The rolling highway reminded me at times of scenes from Cars (pixar). We halted in this town called "Winnemucca" one of the 3 towns on the map for nevada, and it was just motels advertising free cable and giving out casino coupons, closed businesses, and the 3 casinos. After that we headed out and wandered through little towns of the US, wholesome backcountry folk; some pretty impressive mountain roads, until we found our way into Yosemite National Park. If you don't know, Yosemite is a Valley that that was carved out of the Granite Rock by the initial act of water, and then later Glaciers in the last iceages. This leads to some spectacular meadows, and ponds, and hundred of foot cascades. The Sequoia are pretty awesome trees. They actually survive hundreds of fires during their normal lifecycle, and these fires hive them space to grow, because inbetween fires the undergrowth clogs things up. This is a bit different from the lodgepole forests of Yellowstone also need fires in their lifecycles, but for them it's a neccessary part of their being seeds being released from the pinecones. In 1988 the mistaken work of the ranger system preventing fires lead to an overcrowding of dead and dying undergrowth that lead to a massive forest fire that burned much of the park, however the damage wasn't permanent, and whereever the fire burned, now there are clusters of new seedling lodgepole pines. Anyways we finally made it in to California, and the next day we drove around exploring and I took my dad up to the airport.
I started work monday, and my boss got me a quadcore mac pro with 4 gigs of ram and 800 gigs of harddrive initially. With that came a 30 inch Cinema display, a 23 inch one a 20 inch one, a 20 inch Imac, and a Macbookpro, which is a pretty damn sweet laptop. It has a isight camera, so if anyone wants, I can do video chat!
My housemates are pretty cool, 2 google girls and 1 apple girl and 1 apple guy. Only the guy is an engineer, the girls all work in other professions... which cool, but I guess it means things won't be as geeky as I expected they'd be. Ah well, it's probably a good thing.
Next week is WWDC (just google it if you don't know) and I'm gonna see what I can do to steal someone's pass to visit it. Unfortunately it may not work out, we'll see.
Missya |
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fbartho's journal
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