Just in case you thought that I haven't been talking enough about mountain-hiking and 14ers over the last few weeks, you'll be happy to know that I'm going to be climbing Uncompahgre Peak tomorrow with Matt. We're going to be making the 5-hour drive out there tonight, camp out at the foot of the mountain, and then do the 16-mile hike to the top of the mountain (14,309 feet in altitude) and back. The weather is looking like it might get nasty tomorrow (and at 14,000 feet, nasty could mean heavy snowfall which is definitely not something I want to experience in the middle of summer) so we're going to start hiking at the butt-crack of dawn to get to the top of the mountain by 10:30 and then be back below treeline by about noon. Bad weather tends to hit in the afternoon, so if we make it below treeline before then, we should hopefully be out of harm's way. And then next weekend, Matt is thinking about climbing Mt. Harvard and Mt. Columbia, both on the same day (they're right next to each other), and he asked me to come along on that hike. I told him that I'll have to see how I do tomorrow... I'm OK with leisurely-paced sightseeing hikes, but pushing to get below treeline before storms hit or pushing to do two mountains on the same day might be too much for me. I'll have to see.

Posted at 10:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (613) | TrackBacks (0)

A little more about my hike up Mt. Antero. We (me, my friend Matt, and Matt's dad) started out at 6:30AM. Matt was the first to reach the top at about 11:10AM; I came up next at about 11:15AM, and Matt's dad was a few minutes behind me. We started back down the mountain at 11:45AM, and Matt and I reached the bottom at 4:00PM, with Matt's dad about 15 minutes behind us. So, the total hike of 13.5 miles to the top of the mountain and back took 9.5 hours. I went through a liter of water, half a bottle of sunscreen and one peanut butter sandwich on the hike. You can see from the picture that there is still snow on the top of the mountain. It was about 45 degrees and windy at the summit, and I could feel it, even with my sweatshirt. It was 70 degrees at the bottom of the mountain; according to what I've heard, you lose five degrees for every thousand feet of elevation, and we hiked up an elevation of 5000 feet, which meant that we lost 25 degrees of temperature. The pictures, by the way, that are posted in this and the last entry were taken by Matt. If I get the time, I'll probably try to post the ten or fifteen best pictures from the hike on my home page.

Posted at 10:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (936) | TrackBacks (0)

I climbed Mt. Antero last Saturday. On the right is a picture of me standing at the top. I brought a little bit of my getting lost mojo along on the hike, and we got confused about the path about 2/3 of the way to the top and had to scurry up a boulder field before we found the path again. We also had to climb up a boulder field to get through the last 400 feet to the top of the mountain, and that was really really tough. Once we hit the 13800-feet mark, I really started feeling the altitude. I was pretty much taking a rest every five steps, even walking across level ground. And then the last stretch where we climbed up the boulder field seemed like it went on forever. But I somehow made it, and that's why I have my arms up in the air like a geek, because I didn't think I was ever going to see that spot. I might try a few more 14ers later on this summer, but for the next few weeks I'm going to stick with some easier hikes.

Posted at 10:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (22) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm going to be climbing 14,269-feet-tall Mt. Antero tomorrow morning with my friend Matt from work and his dad. We're going to be camping out at the base of the mountain tonight and then do the hike first thing tomorrow morning. I've never camped before, so I went out Wednesday night and bought a tent and sleeping bag and travel pillow. The weather has been a little chilly lately, it's gotten down into the 40s at night, so the sleeping bag will come in handy. I'm a little bit nervous about the climb, but not too much. I'm mostly nervous about the length of the hike. It's going to be 13.5 miles there and back. The elevation gain is 5000 feet, which is a lot, but it's a gradual rise, so the actual climbing shouldn't be too bad. But we'll see how it goes. We're leaving at 4PM today to drive up to the campsite.

Posted at 10:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (945) | TrackBacks (0)

Maybe mountain-hiking isn't the hobby for me. Last month, I went hiking out in Waldo Canyon and ending up getting lost and walking about 10 more miles than I should have, coming home sunburnt and with blisters all over my feet. Well, yesterday, I went hiking to Sentinel Point and guess what happened? I got lost, and ended up walking about 10 more miles than I should have, and I came home sunburnt and with blisters all over my feet. This time, I never actually did find my way back onto the trail I was looking for, and I ended up finally coming out of the mountains about 5 miles down the road from my car. I was so tired that I hitched a ride back to my car. The guy I hitched a ride with was an ex-Marine, and he kept on telling me that I should have been able to tell direction by which side of the trees the moss grows on and by which directions the plants grow. I told him that I would just buy a compass before I went out hiking again. Anyway, I have a friend at work who hikes 14ers. By some geological quirk, there are about 50 mountains in Colorado between 14000-14500 feet in elevation, and none taller than that. These mountains are called 14ers, and a lot of people make a hobby trying to climb as many 14ers as they can. For nearly all of the mountains, "climbing" means just walking up mountain trails to the top of the mountain. It doesn't involve ropes or grapples or anything like that. My friend who climbs 14ers asked me if I was interested in coming out with him the next few times he goes out, and I said yeah. I think he's going out next weekend to climb Mt. Princeton, and in July he and some other guys are going to climb Pike's Peak. Hopefully, with an experienced hiker along with me, I won't have to worry about getting lost anymore.

Posted at 10:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (484) | TrackBacks (0)

The softball team I play on is the Air Force Academy's version of the Bad News Bears. We lost our game today 19-7, and we lost yesterday 26-3. We've been 10-run ruled (the game is ended early because one of the teams is behind by 10 runs or more) in our last three games. But we might have a chance to escape total futility. We 10-run ruled the Math Department's team in the preseason, and we have yet to play them in the regular season. There's also a Medical Services team that is mostly females, and I think we have a shot against them. I hate to be sexist, but our softball team needs every little thread of hope it can grab onto. Personally, I went 2 for 2 in Monday's game and 0 for 2 in today's game, and I haven't made any errors yet in the outfield, so I'm not doing so bad. I still can't seem to hit the softball like I should. It's slow pitch softball; it's a really big ball moving at a really slow speed, so it's hard not to look like Mickey Mantle when hitting. But I've been hitting more like a blindfolded 8-year old swinging at a piñata. I guess as long as I have a good time, it doesn't matter, and I didn't pull any leg muscles this week, so that's a big plus.

Posted at 10:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1053) | TrackBacks (0)

I try to read as much as I can, but when I first moved here and started my new job, I had trouble finding time to do much reading. Mainly it was my new schedule, where I had to wake up at, my goodness, 6:30AM. My years in graduate school had showed me how nice it was to sleep in until 9 or 10. So getting up at the crack of dawn was too much for me, and I was dead exhausted by the time I got home. Anyway, I'm to the point now where I'm somewhat functional when I get home from work, so I've gone back to reading. Right now I'm reading Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, which, to me, kinda sounds like the title of some L. Ron Hubbard Scientology piece of junk, but it isn't. It's a historical fiction book about math and cryptology in World War II and in the early days of the Internet. It's really two or three or maybe even four novels in one, with one of the stories taking place in the late 1990s, and the other story taking place during World War II. Anyway, for whatever reason, I love narratives where there are a whole bunch of different stories all overlapping with each other, so movies like Robert Altman's Short Cuts and Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia are right up my alley, as well as books like Joseph Heller's Catch-22 and even horror-of-English-majors books like Ulysses and Gravity's Rainbow. Anyway, I first heard about Neal Stephenson's books in an article about his Baroque Cycle books, which is a series of three hardcover (now eight paperback) books that looks at the birth of modern science and modern economics during the late 17th and early 18th century, following the lives of real-life scientists like Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke, and Gottfried Leibniz and also several fictional characters, such as Daniel Waterhouse, Jack Shaftoe, Enoch Root, and Eliza, Duchess of the fictional Island of Qwghlm. The descendants of these fictional characters appear in Cryptonomicon, with the exception of Enoch Root, who through some magical elixir is able to evade death and who appears in person in both the Baroque Cycle novels and Cryptonomicon.

Posted at 9:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)