Last night Britt and I had dinner with peglegpete and a couple of his friends, who are up here for the week. Very very very good time. HI T.B PEOPLE I MISS YOU ALL WE NEED A T.BOB STAT.

Saturday was the Imogene Pass Run: 17 miles (plus two blocks) from Ouray (7810 ft) to Telluride (8820 ft), over 13,120 foot Imogene Pass. That's over 5000 vertical feet up in 10 miles, followed by over 4000 feet down in 7 miles, most of it on a rough and rocky 4WD road. It was the most awesomely fun race I have ever run.



( Up, up, and away! )

I averaged about 11 minute miles and made it to the finish line with a time of 4:10:42, 19th out of 73 finishers in my age group. I was hoping to get in under four and a half hours, so I'm really happy with that time.

All the photos on my Flickr page are here.

The Rio Grande Pyramid is just going to have to wait to be climbed by me some other time. We hiked 9 miles in and set up camp next to a good sheltering clump of trees (we kind of expected the weather wasn't going to be perfect); it started drizzling later that afternoon, so we spent the evening under the trees watching herds of elk on the opposite hillside; and woke up the next morning to rain, rain, rain and more rain. We waited until after noon, hoping things would clear, but they never did, so we packed up and hiked out (in the rain) and slept in the Sportsmobile.

I think we took about seven pictures. If any are good, I'll post them.

We had to cross the Rio Grande just past the trailhead (we made jokes about illegal immigrants); crossing back the second day, the river was a good 4-6 inches higher, roily and opaque, and far less fun to cross. Not that I like crossing rivers, ever.

We salvaged the weekend by stopping on our way back Monday near Wolf Creek Pass and doing a dayhike. Approximately one bazillion wild mushrooms (mostly chanterelles, mmm) were spotted, seven pounds of which returned with us. Britt also caught 4 trout, and near the road were lots of wild raspberry bushes. Dinner tonight, well, you can guess the menu.

That's me, on top of the 57th highest mountain in Colorado (13,972 ft). Wikipedia says of Pigeon Peak: In terms of local relief, it is one of the most impressive peaks in Colorado. Its most dramatic rise is over the Animas River to the west, over which it rises 5,750 ft (1,750 m) in under 2.5 mi (4 km). Also, its east face is a 1,000 ft (305 m) cliff. Also, it can kill you with its brain.

( Fascinating tale and pretty pictures! )

Or just go straight to the photos on Flickr here.

We are back from our successful ascent of Pigeon Peak, photos to come, although if you want a preview of some very pretty mushrooms we collected on the way out, see my post at mycology. But that's not what this post is about.

This post is about me getting confirmation that my transfer application to take over the spot of a runner who can't make the Imogene Pass Run has been accepted. Which means that in two weeks from tomorrow, I am going to run the 17-mile jeep road from Ouray (7810 ft) to Telluride (8820 ft), over 13,120 foot Imogene Pass.

*gulp*

As some of you know, I'm training for my third marathon, and bound and determined to break 4 hours (which incidentally would qualify me for Boston, at my age). Last night I ran a teeny little 5K race here...and came in third among the women at what to me was a mind-boggling 23:27 (and which I think must be slightly off - my own timer gave me 24:27, and I know I turned it off a little late, but not by a whole minute - I'm guessing I came in around 24 minutes). First was a former college track star and second was a high school track star, and their ages added together are still less than mine, so I feel pretty good.

Anyway, the amusing thing about it is that the local paper reported on the race, and although they didn't give my place, they ran a photo of me (the third photo for the article). Um, I look hot and sweaty and kind of chunky, and my ponytail is foreshortened and looks like a librarian bun. But hee, my picture in the paper this morning!

Britt's birthday was August 1. I asked him what he wanted to do for his birthday; I shouldn't have been surprised. We planned out a big loop: up the Pine River to Emerald Lake (not the one we went to two weeks ago) and then Moon Lake, a dayhike to peak-bag 13,684 ft. Mount Oso (something I've wanted to do for a long time; Oso is a distinctive mountain visible from much of the wilderness, and we tried to climb it a few years back via a ridge from Middle Mountain and were cliffed out), then a hike over the entertainingly-named Moon Rock Pass (to Rock Lake, of course) and then down Rock Creek to the Vallecito River and out. About 40 miles of hiking, lots of elevation change, fishing out the wazoo, and a shuttle between trailheads which Britt's brother agreed to do if we took him out to breakfast.



( Hiking, mountain climbing, fishing, and eating wild berries. )

Who needs words? Just show me the photos.

Some people are peakbaggers. They have a list of mountains to climb (Colorado fourteeners; the "seven summits"; etc) and they climb them.

Britt is a lakebagger. He wants to fish in every named lake in the Weminuche Wilderness. So last weekend, we backpacked into the area known as Mountain View Crest to bag four lakes: Ruby (one of many in the Weminuche), Emerald (ditto ditto), Webb, and Pear. I insisted on bagging a peak as well: Overlook Point, the high point (12,998) along Mountain View Crest. (Yes, it sounds like a subdivision. It's a ridge.)

The 360° view from Overlook Point (1 minute video, no audio, annotated):



( Story of our hike, 14 more photos including ELK!!! and links to the others. )

Or, go directly to the set (23 photos, 1 video) on Flickr.

There's a little race being run right now in the mountains north of here: the Hardrock 100, a 100-mile trail run that loops out of Silverton and runs through Telluride and Ouray as well as over Handies Peak, one of the 14ers (mountains over 14,000 ft). Beautiful and rugged country, with stream crossings, snowfields, etc etc and a ridiculous amount of elevation gain/loss (33,000 ft!!!).

Kyle Scaggs just crossed the finish line this morning in 23:23:30 (and he's 23 years old; too bad he wasn't 7 seconds faster!), smashing the previous record by over 3 hours and finishing over 6 hours ahead of the second-place runner. Think of it: this guy ran a hundred miles of rugged terrain in basically one (extremely long) day. This sort of thing completely fails to appeal to me personally, because if I'm going to be in those mountains I want to be taking my time and enjoying myself, not a sleep-deprived zombie running by headlamp, but I can't help but be hella impressed.

(also, to amuse a certain segment of my flist: one of the runners is named Paul Gross. :-)

I don't have a lot to say, so I'll just link to the Flickr photoset. Our goal this trip was to get into the upper valley of Rincon La Osa, a high valley that runs from the Continental Divide to the Pine River. (Which I am crossing in the photo above. That is a grimace, not a grin, because that river is very recent snowmelt.) It took two days to get there; we stayed there a day and dayhiked up to Gunsight Pass on the Divide, and then it took two days to hike out by a slightly different route (on the way in we went via Divide Lake, on the way out via Granite Lake, but the trails rejoined shortly after the lakes). We saw lots of deer and elk, but too far away for decent photos. Britt fished a lot. The weather mostly sucked, but when it was nice, it was lovely. Um. Not a particularly exciting trip report, sorry. :-) But it was awesome to get away from people and into the mountains again.

Did not get eaten by bears. Pictures to come (although not a huge number, as it rained excessively).

From Escalante we drove back toward Colorado on the Burr Trail, which is the more scenic and slower route. It passes through the dramatic redrock of Long Canyon, where we explored a little side canyon and I photographed some really cool stripey rock; then it descends across the Waterpocket Fold (the south end of Capitol Reef National Park) and joins the north-south Notom-Bullfrog road. We'd taken this road twice before; once we'd gone north to Hanksville and once we'd gone south to the Bullfrog ferry across Lake Powell. This time, armed with a guide to the backways of Utah, we went east, across the Henry Mountains. These granite peaks are weirdly out of place in the sandstone country; volcanic forces uplifted them, and then the sandstone eroded around them. Unfortunately, in 2003 there was a huge fire which absolutely toasted the forests in the Henrys, because otherwise it would have been a lovely and cool oasis in the desert. After routefinding our way across the pass and through the mountains, we headed Coloradoward, stopping at the overlook where Lake Powell backs up into the Colorado River. There were a bazillion places we would have loved to explore, but it was time to go home.

( Four final pictures )

All 111 pictures from the trip (and let me tell you, that's only a fraction of the photos on the hard drive!) are in my Utah/Arizona 2008 set on Flickr.

To wind down our trip, we revisited the Escalante area. (We were most recently there in the fall with friends: photos | lj post.) ( More photos and stories, including NEKKID ME OMG. )

OMG only one more set to go. I may actually get all these posted before our next backpack on the July 4th weekend.

ETA also, I am amused that on Flickr, "naked me" has more views than any of my other photos in this batch. Reminds me of everyone wanting to see my boobies.

I figured I'd better get to the rest of our vacation pictures before we went on another vacation :-)

Cottonwood Canyon is about 50 miles of dirt road that connects the Paria-Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness and US 89 with Utah 12 between Bryce Canyon NP and Escalante, going north-south along Comb Ridge. It's known as a scenic drive for many reasons, among them Grosvenor Arch:



( Cottonwood Canyon )

We then continued north to Bryce Canyon:



( That hoodoo that you do so well )

Or, straight to Flickr: Cottonwood Canyon photos (5) and Bryce Canyon NP photos (14).

In memoriam:
Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker
Motherfucker, Tits.

Well, I finished the half marathon, but I didn't make my goal of breaking 2 hours. Which is probably because 1) I was coming back from an injury that really cut a hole in my training, 2) I tried to stay with three other runners going for 9 minute miles, and I knew it was too fast for me, and I stayed with them for 7 miles, which probably wasn't good strategy as this is the first time I haven't made negative splits, and 3) JEEBUS IT'S HOT. Over 70 at the start, 83 at the (uphill and unshaded) finish. Not sure what my time was exactly, but 2:03-ish, which is worse than my first half some years back. Oh, well.

I still have two more sets of photos to sort through, rotate, and upload the good ones to Flickr. Aren't you excited? *crickets* But I won't be able to do so for a bit, as today I'm off to Breckenridge for a work conference-slash-boondoggle. Britt's coming with me, as are our mountain bikes. \o/ Damn, I love living in Colorado.

I...I'm going to have to punt, here. Because the South Coyote Buttes are so mind-blowingly magnificent - the colors, the shapes, the sheer abstract artistry - that I really don't have anything to say. I've uploaded thirty pictures to my Flickr site, and you can find them all here. Or do the slideshow thing. There's a sliver of moon over a butte, there's a weird tower with a window in it, there are stripes, there are squiggles, there's a couple pictures of me. Um, yeah. Ogg say: sandstone nifty, make pretty pictures.

( A dozen photos, links to a bunch more, and me going blah blah blah about our vacation. )

Or just see all 21 photos without the blah blah blah on our Flickr page, tag: zion.

Been gone a while, first to the Colorado State Democratic Convention (you can read my write-up at the Denver Post's PoliticsWest blog here - and haha, four out of our five CD3 delegates were elected from the Western Slope, including one guy from our county) and then off to Utah and Arizona for what was going to be a week but stretched into two because, mmm, Utah and Arizona.

Shakedown cruise of our shiny new-to-us Sportsmobile went A-OK! Even though it's rather painful filling the tank (30-40 gallons * $4.50-$4.90 diesel = ow ow ow) we only had to do it twice during our two weeks out; what a contrast from our old RV which got less than half the mpg and had about half the tankage. Of course gas then (2005, when we sold it) cost about half what diesel does today....

Used 4WD four times, twice on long, nasty jeep roads to and from trailheads, and twice briefly to get out of sand or mud hazards. Mostly camped in pull-outs off BLM or NFS land, but spent 1 night in free campground and 4 nights in definitely not free but still damn primitive NPS campgrounds. Hiked between 4-10 miles every day except for one day when we did a bunch of mountain biking instead; a couple of days we both biked and hiked, either because we were using the bikes to shuttle between trailheads and make a loop, or because we used the bikes to access the trailhead (in Zion, which was YAY). Oh, except for one day in the middle when we totally vegged out. Took about a bazillion pictures which I shall be putting on Flickr and annotating here.

I want to be still on vacation, damn it. I am not sleeping half so well in my own bed as I did under the van's pop-top. I suddenly have all this $%#@! work to do, and my house is a mess of dust and cat hair, and my lawn needs a haircut, and so do I. And there are all these photos that need rotating and uploading and captioning. And I want to write about our awesome trip. So I'm going to (try to) stay away from my friendslist and see if I can manufacture some spare time that way. If you have posted something I should see, point me to it.

As some of you know, I am somewhat underemployed - not that I mind. I do end up doing a lot of mindless drudge work that really doesn't need my advanced degrees. On the other hand, sometimes the mindless drudge work is kind of cool.

One of the things I do is publish climate model data to the Earth System Grid, a web interface to a distributed data library. Users need accounts to retrieve the data. I have a list of all of the institutions people have listed on their account information and am going through the list with Google, Wikipedia, and Wikimapia, making a spreadsheet of institution names, URLs, and latitudes and longitudes with which to make a Google Earth KML file that will show all the places our users come from. It's sort of like archaeology, starting with a fragment of pottery (CIHEAM-bari, IRI, PIK) and trying to recreate who, what, and where. Plus, yay for getting paid for playing around the web all day!

The problem with having nice friends who invite you on river trips and loan you nifty inflatable kayak thingies is that then you get all covetous and want to spend money and get your own.



That's me on the Dolores river, paddling the Fat Cat, which is kind of like a cross between a kayak and a cataraft. Steve and his girlfriend Sue are on the cataraft in the background, and Britt, who took the picture, is in an inflatable kayak (duckie). Britt and I traded crafts on and off, but I felt a lot more confident in the Fat Cat and used it in all the named (class II and III) rapids. Part of it was because the cat is more stable and the seat's higher, so I could see better, but part of it was because during my first stint in the duckie, the wind was blowing really hard (well, it was blowing most of the trip!) and one astonishingly strong gust overturned the duckie and knocked me into the water. Yep, I took a spill in flatwater - and had no problem with any of the rapids. Clearly, I have a very special talent. Sigh.

The Dolores is a nifty river. The section from Slickrock to Bedrock (yabba-dabba-dooo!) starts out in a fairly open valley which the river paradoxically travels through crosswise; the valley subsided after the river was entrenched. Then it enters a classic desert sandstone canyon which was occupied by pre-Puebloan cultures who left plenty of artwork behind:



( More pictures and more river rambling. )

I should add that we drove our NEW SPORTSMOBILE YAY out to do this trip (well, it's just a couple hours west of here) and we camped in it the night before we put in - everything seemed to work beautifully. I'm pretty excited about the prospect of more desert trips this spring, and mountain trips this summer.

Except now I want a Fat Cat. (Britt wants just a regular inflatable kayak, like the Aire he was using, which costs maybe a couple hundred $ less - not much difference, really.) Steve got his at the Outdoor Retailer show in Salt Lake, which we went to last year and came back from with all sorts of schwag and pro-deal stuff. So the question is, do we shell out the money for the boats now, so we can play all spring and summer, or do we wait until OR in August and maybe save a thousand bucks between the two of us? Thing is, this is a wet year, and there are a lot of tiny rivers which are not normally runnable that we could do. Like the Escalante, which is very tempting - remember this picture from our hike last year? It's runnable maybe one year in five. And this is it. Steve offered to loan us his boats again - but then reconsidered, because he wants to come with us, and he'd need one of them! Then again, we could just rent inflatable kayaks, which I'd be fine with as long as we did flatwater rivers. Decisions, decisions.

But I think we will go to OR again. I guess I should work on our website so it looks a little more legitimate... :-)

Wow, has it been a month? Um, distracted with my other journal? Distracted with politics? Distracted with...ooh, shiny!

Yeah, I'm kind of like that. I still read my flist on this journal, never fear (although pretty much just once a day or every few days).

Today is my wedding anniversary. Britt's been putting up with me for 17 years of official wedded bliss (plus a bit more than a year of living in sin). The man deserves a medal, he does.

Anyway, we are busily tarting up our Sportsmobile and hope to do a shakedown long-weekend cruise to Utah this weekend - that will be a good start to getting back to this journal's usual pictures of outdoorsy stuff.

This weekend we are headed up to Laramie to look at a used Sportsmobile. It's a lot like our old Westfalia Synchro, except, you know, with an actual engine instead of a hamster wheel. Absurdly expensive, too. Um, yay?

Saving throw dice fall
but we all, ultimately,
use up our hit points.

...you wake up to a snowstorm, and in the middle of the afternoon go for a run in t-shirt and shorts.

The Electoral Vote site (which is syndicated at electoralvote) has some interesting analysis of the Super Tuesday results. In particular, the Votemaster (Andy Tanenbaum) sorted the Democratic popular vote percentages and came up with the interesting tidbit that the most overwhelming majorities for Obama were in caucus states:

Obama did extremely well in caucus states and Clinton did very badly in them. How come? Turnout in caucus states is always low, usually about 10-20% of the electorate. Only highly motivated people bother to show up, especially the Democratic caucuses, which go on for hours and people haveto publicly defend their choice. Obama has a smaller, but extremely active and loyal following, especially among younger voters. These are precisely the people who can swing a caucus state by showing up in droves and working hard to convince the other voters that Obama would make a great President. In primary states, the media, especially TV ads have a much bigger influence.

This was certainly the case at our caucus, where we had a lot of people who had never before come to a caucus, and all but one were Obama supporters. (They were not all young, by any stretch of the imagination.)

One anomaly in the table of percentages is New Mexico, which is listed as a caucus state but split nearly 50-50 between the candidates. Since Durango's only half an hour from the NM state line, we get New Mexico news in our daily newspaper.  When I read the coverage of the caucus, I immediately thought: hmm, that sounds more like a primary than a caucus.  I did a little Googling and found out that yep, the New Mexico "caucus" is basically a primary. There is no discussion, no open voting.  Voters cast ballots at the caucus site and then leave, and they can even cast absentee ballots in advance. 

I think Obama's success in caucus states says a lot about his appeal. He inspires people. And I think that's important.