I went hiking on Red Rock Canyon trail today. It's a nice short hike on a newly built trail. In fact, it is so new that I missed the trailhead and drove past it because it had changed so much from the last time I was there this winter. They now have a paved parking lot and a whole new entrance and exit area for cars. The picture above shows a little duck pond next to an old, abondoned lodge building that you pass right at the beginning of the hike.

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Heehee this is hilarious. Stephen Colbert (silent "t") interviews Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes-Norton from D.C. I've never ordered a beignet, but there's a good chance I would screw up the pronunciation and call it a "ben-yet". I guess that means I'm not French. Watch the video and you'll understand:

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Here we are on the hike down from Mt. Harvard. Matt and his dad are right in front of me, and the other two guys farther ahead are another group of hikers. This grassy meadow area above treeline is called a "tundra", which I always thought of as the name for arctic wasteland. You could call it alpine tundra to emphasize the grassy meadow aspect of the place. Anyway, it doesn't look like Matt is going to have time to hike Pikes Peak this weekend, so I won't have any more pictures of us hiking 14ers unless he comes back for a visit from Minnesota. I'm thinking about taking off work on my birthday, next month, and going out to Rocky Mountain National Park to hike up Longs Peak, but I'll have to do that one solo, although there are so many tourists who flock to Rocky Mountain National Park and try to hike up Longs Peak that I think I'll hardly notice that I'm alone.

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Mount Harvard is shown in the center of the photo above. You can see the dark gray clouds in the sky that were making us worry about thunderstorms rolling in... My favorite show of the summer, Rockstar: Supernova was on yesterday and tonight (they do regular performances on Tuesday nights and then an elimination round on Wednesday). I won't talk about the show since I've talked about it the last two weeks, and if anyone reading this is very interested in the show, there are better places to go for info. But I will talk about a couple things I found out about today. Whenever I read forums about the show, a lot of the people posting called the band "SuavePorn" instead of Supernova. I couldn't figure out why, and then I did some searching, and it turns out that when the show began, there was another band called Supernova, not affiliated with the show, who sued Rockstar: Supernova over rights to the name. So some enterprising people on the Internet tried to think of alternative names for the band in case they couldn't use Supernova, and somebody suggested SuavePorn, which is an anagram of Supernova. Since the band is made of '80s rockers Gilby Clark (of Guns 'N' Roses), Jason Newsted (of Metallica), Tommy Lee (of Motley Crüe), and whichever singer wins the competition, SuavePorn seemed like a fitting name, so that's what the band is now called on the forums. Also on the forums, Dave Navarro, who is one of the hosts, is called PPoD. That stands for "Pocket Prince of Darkness", since (I guess) he looks like the Prince of Darkness, but he's also really short and skinny. So, if you read the forums, now you'll be up on some of the lingo.

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I climbed Mt. Harvard yesterday with my friend Matt and his dad. I was hoping Matt's dad, Dave, would keep our pace slow so that I wouldn't get too out of breath at high altitudes like I did when we climbed Uncompaghre Peak. I especially thought this would happen when Dave said his knee was hurting him before we started hiking. We let him take the lead so that we wouldn't go too fast and leave him behind, and he raced up the mountain. I was swimming in sweat from the pace he was setting, and even Matt, who can usually climb really fast but had been sick for the last couple weeks, was barely keeping up. We kept on telling him "Hey old man, I guess the knee's starting to feel better!" Dave had said that he figured it would take him 5 hours to get to the top, but we ended up doing it in 3.5 hours. Towards the end, I couldn't keep up, so I dropped back a little, and Dave and Matt made it to the top about 5 minutes before I did. The picture above shows the last stretch, about a 50-feet climb, to get to the top of Harvard. The path fades out by this point, and you have to scramble up boulders to get to the very top. Matt and his dad are the two guys standing next to each other far above me with Matt wearing a red shirt. It was a nice climb, and even though the weather looked like it might turn bad, we didn't get a drop of rain during the whole hike. I fell behind at the end because, like on previous climbs, I lost my breath at high altitudes, but I've learned to deal with it. I just have to take frequent breaks and go at a very slow pace when I start feeling out of breath.

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It turns out I was wrong about not hiking any more 14ers this summer. Matt and I are going out to hike to the top of Mount Harvard tomorrow. The original plan two weeks ago, before Matt got sick, was to climb both Mount Harvard and Mount Columbia on the same day, but we decided to take it easy and only do Mount Harvard tomorrow. Which I feel a lot better about. Matt's dad is also coming along with us. He tends to slow down our pace, which is good because hopefully it means I won't be gasping for breath and feeling like I'm dying so much when we reach the higher altitudes. I'll be bringing my camera and I'll probably post a couple pictures next week. We're also planning on hiking up Pikes Peak next Friday. Because the hike is so long, it's 13 miles up and 13 miles back, we're planning on doing the climb and then hitching a ride with someone back down. There is a road that goes all the way to the top of Pikes Peak, and there's even a restaurant at the top (actually, it's pretty much just a donut stand from what I hear), so there's always a few tourists at the top who you can hitch a ride with back down. In non-mountain climbing news, the first article from my thesis work came out last month. Here's the link to the abstract; unfortunately you need a subscription to the journal to read the complete article. It's my first "first authorship", and for those who don't know the ins and outs of the politics of science research, that's kind of a big deal for a young researcher. There should be at least two more articles coming out based on my thesis research, and I should be first author on both of them, but it's out of my hands at this point since I don't work in that lab anymore and I don't have the time or the inclination in my free time to write the articles myself. So, basically it just depends on whether my graduate advisor gets around to writing the articles, or gets around to assigning Jim Lancaster, the postdoc who used to work on my experiment, to write the articles. When I came back to Rice for Commencement, Jim was working on another article related to my thesis research, so I think that there'll be at least one more coming out, but like I said, it's out of my hands.

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Is it hot enough for you? Since I wasn't climbing any 14000-feet-tall mountains this week, I decided to go back to one of my favorite, "easier", hikes, Section 16 of Palmer Trail. The total climb is only 800 feet, and most of the trail is level ground. The scenery is beautiful as well. But it turns out that we have a heat wave going across Colorado and the rest of the U.S., so the 95 degree weather made the trail a lot harder than I remembered from when I hiked it this winter. Once I got to the top of the hill, though, it was a nice easy walk. I ended up getting sunburn, however, because I forgot both my hat and sunscreen at home. It doesn't look like Matt and I will be climbing a 14er this upcoming weekend. As I expected, his schedule is pretty hectic getting ready for his move to Minnesota at the end of the month. He said there's a small chance he might try to climb this weekend, but he doubted it. In TV news, my favorite singer Dilana (see my last post) from Rock Star: Supernova sang one of my favorite songs, Zombie by the Cranberries (although I'm actually partial to Dreams by them), and even though I thought she didn't do that good, the judges went nuts about her performance, so it looks like she'll be around for a while longer. The other singer whose song I liked last week, Storm Large, also did really well this week. I think those two women will be in the final three, which is pretty cool for a hard rock reality show competition, since that kind of music tends to be dominated by guys.

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My softball game on Tuesday was cancelled, and I had another softball game scheduled for Wednesday, but I totally skipped it. I just can't take striking out again. Softball is way too hard. So, what did I do instead? Well, I watched Rock Star: Supernova. If you don't know what Rock Star: Supernova is, it's basically American Idol, except with rock music instead of pop. I don't really like rock music, but my favorite website, Television Without Pity started recapping the show, so I decided to give it a try. It was actually halfway decent. Some of the singers did suck, and I didn't like about half the songs they chose. But I got blown away by this rendition of Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire", sung by Dilana (from my ex-hometown of Houston, TX):



And then I rocked out (or at least rocked out as much as I could while lying on the couch with a tube of Pringles sitting on my chest) when I heard Storm Large sing Cheap Trick's "Surrender", which is a song I don't remember ever hearing, but which I may very well karaoke if I ever karaoke again, which I really probably shouldn't do.

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Another change of plans for the Mt. Harvard/Mt. Columbia hiking trip. Matt is going on a biking trip this upcoming weekend, and the person he's going with couldn't do it another weekend, so we're planning on climbing Mt. Harvard on July 22 instead of this Saturday. It's just as well, since Matt is now full-blown sick. He went home early from work yesterday, and it doesn't look like he's coming in today, so I doubt he would have been in very good shape to climb this weekend. Anyway, I've got a softball game tonight. I don't much want to go. I've somehow been getting progressively worse as the season goes on, and our team is pretty bad, so it hasn't been much fun. The guys on the team are really nice, though, so I'll probably keep going until the end of the season, which is in about three weeks. A lot of times someone brings a case of beer and we'll hang out and have a few drinks after the game. Actually, I struck out in the last two games, and the rule is supposed to be that each time you strike out, you bring the beer for the next game, so I think I'll run out after work and get a case before our game tonight.

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No hiking Mt. Harvard for me and Matt today. Matt came down with the same bug that I've been fighting all week, and that along with the rainy weather that is forecast made us decide to postpone the trip for now. We're tentatively planning on going next week, but things are going to get crazy for Matt pretty soon because he's moving to Minnesota for a new job at the end of the month. That's actually the reason he's hiking up a new mountain every weekend with me; he's trying to get as many mountains in as he can while he's still in Colorado. Anyway, the plan right now is to do Mt. Harvard (and hopefully Mt. Columbia) next weekend, and then Matt, his dad, me, and maybe some other people will climb Pikes Peak on the weekend after that.

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Just after my last post, I came across this trip report on 14ers.com about someone who got caught in a thunderstorm near the top of a mountain. She was OK, luckily, but it sure sounds scary. The title of her post is "Make like a Marmot!!" Marmots are little beaver or hedgehog-like creatures (see picture above) who like to hide in rock cracks, which is what the person who wrote the post had to do when the thunderstorms rolled in.

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The picture above shows the path to Uncompahgre Peak, with the peak itself in the background. I went home from work early today because I have a sore throat and my chest feels all congested. I've been feeling pretty crummy all week. On Tuesday I was all headachy, and then yesterday my stomach hurt. I'm hoping I recover by tomorrow, since Matt and I are supposed to leave for our campsite tomorrow afternoon, and then we'll hike up Mt. Harvard and (hopefully) Mt. Columbia Saturday morning. I say hopefully, because the weather is supposed to be stormy again this weekend, just like it was last weekend, so if it looks ominous when we get to the top of Mt. Harvard, we'll have to turn around instead of climbing Columbia. I've never actually mentioned why it's so bad to get caught in a storm when you're mountain-hiking. It isn't that you'll get rained or hailed or snowed on, which is no picnic, but the real danger is from lighting strikes. Once you're above treeline, which is at 12,000-12,500 feet for most mountains in Colorado, you're likely to be the tallest and/or pointiest thing in the general area of where you're hiking, which makes you much more attractive to a lighting bolt. Also, you're 14,000 feet closer to the clouds at the top of a mountain than you are when you're at sea-level, which also makes lightning strikes much more likely. So it's very important to get below treeline ASAP when it looks like there's a storm rolling in. Speaking of safety, some poor guy had a fatal accident last weekend on one of the more dangerous 14ers, Little Bear. The 14ers Matt and I climb and the routes we take are relatively easy. The biggest dangers are from storms and from twisting your ankle crossing a boulder field. For the more dangerous 14ers, like Little Bear, there is the chance that if you slip or make a mistake, that you could fall hundreds of feet. That's pretty much what happened to the fellow who died on Little Bear. He grabbed onto a large rock that looked secure, but it was loose and rolled on top of him, which caused him to tumble 300-400 feet down the mountain. He died immediately from injuries from the fall. Anyway, I have no interest in climbing the hard mountains; hiking up the "easy" mountains is excitement enough for me.

Posted at 10:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBacks (0)

Matt and I climbed Uncompahgre Peak on Saturday. If we had walked from the very bottom of the 4-wheel drive road to the trailhead as planned, then the hike would have been 8 miles to the top and 8 miles back, but luckily someone gave us a ride on the last mile of the 4-wheel drive road on the way up and on the last 3 miles of the 4-wheel drive road on the way down. It was especially lucky to get a ride on the way down, since a drenching rain storm broke out just as we got the ride. I had a really tough time climbing once we got above 13,000 feet. If anything, it was even worse than climbing Mt. Antero two weeks ago. The altitude just seems to hit me all of a sudden. I go from breathing hard and being a little bit worn out to where I can barely catch my breath and need a rest every other step. Anyway, I made it to the top somehow. Hopefully next week when we climb Mt. Harvard and Mt. Columbia, it'll be a little easier. Happy 4th of July everyone!

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