I try not to write too much about TV shows because, number one, I think I watch way too much TV, and it makes me feel even more guilty to follow up watching way too much TV by writing about all the TV I watched. Secondly, if you want to read about TV shows, there are better websites to go to than my diary page, including my all-time favorite website of all time (did I mention of all time), Television Without Pity. One of my favorite writers at Television Without Pity is Miss Alli, and the show she's currently writing about is "Big Brother: All Stars". Even though I read all of Miss Alli's recaps, I rarely watch "Big Brother". They have about 25 episodes every week (actually I think it's 3 episodes/week), and as you might imagine, for every couple minutes of interesting stuff you have to endure a half-hour of inanity. But, from reading Miss Alli's recaps and from the bits and pieces of "Big Brother" that I catch when I'm flipping through the channels, I've slowly developed a huge heterosexual man-crush on Evil Dr. Will. The problem with most reality show contestants is that they seem to have no idea that they are playing a GAME. They spend hours and hours worrying about who is playing the game "with integrity". When they lose, they say that they're proud of themselves because they "played with honesty". As Miss Alli often says, the most common self-diagnosed affliction among reality show contestants is too much awesomeness. They are too honest, too nice, too trusting, too caring to win a competition filled with backstabbers, liars, cheats, and frauds. To get an idea of the ridiculousness of it all, imagine someone saying that you have "no integrity" because you charge them rent for landing on your property when playing Monopoly. Or that they're "too trusting" when you sink their submarine in Battleship. It's a game. For someone to win a game, someone else has to lose. It's not about who has more integrity or honesty or kindness, it's about who's better at playing the game. Evil Dr. Will treats "Big Brother" like it is a game. And he's entertaining while he does it. He intentionally loses all of the Head of Household competitions, often blatantly so, because he knows there's no value in having power in the Big Brother house, since you're just putting a target on your back for the next week when you no longer have power. Near the beginning of the season, he announced to the entire house that he hated everybody living there, and he was miserable, and he wanted to be voted out. Nobody knew if he was joking or serious, but they were pretty sure he was trying to trick them, so they didn't vote him out, or even consider voting him out. The thing is, if he really was miserable, then they would have done him a favor by voting him out. And if he was trying to play them, which he was, then the best thing to do would have been to vote him out, not keep him in. But he somehow outsmarted them. He's best at telling people that he's going to lie to and manipulate them as best he can to win the game, and then lie to and manipulate them, and then somehow pulling it off. Recently in one of the competitions, a veto competition which can change the people who are nominated to get kicked out, he promised another contestant that he would try his best to win. The competition involved players being isolated from each other and then hitting a buzzer to receive either good things or bad things. The catch is that you are awarded a certain amount of points for every bad thing you "win". An example of a bad thing would be eating slop for a week. Winning a good thing, like a plasma TV, would cost you a certain amount of points. The player with the most points at the end wins the competition. Of course Will didn't buzz in for any of the bad things. What he did buzz in for was a prize of $5000. In an interview he says, "Look, money can't buy you love. But money can buy you stuff - and I LOVE STUFF!" Hee. Anyway, I could go on and on, but Miss Alli is a much more entertaining writer than me, so read her recaps and develop your own man-crush on Evil Dr. Will.

Posted at 11:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (37) | TrackBacks (0)

If you're going to color us anything, then color us bad.
- Color Me Badd

It's that time of the year when the weather gets crisp, the leaves turn color, the kids go back to school, and the thoughts of 20- and 30-something slacker guys turn to fantasy football. We had our fantasy football draft last night, and I now have the roster for my team - Color Me Badd. I had mixed feelings last night about my draft picks, but there are twelve people in the league, so it's not like you're going to be getting Larry Johnson, Shaun Alexander, Larry Fitzgerald, and Peyton Manning all on your team. Looking at Color Me Badd today, I'm actually pretty happy. I have four top-notch position players - LaMont Jordan at RB, Torry Holt at WR, Matt Hasselbeck at QB, and Antonio Gates at TE. I've got major holes at my RB2 and flex (WR/RB/TE) positions, but hopefully a diamond in the rough will emerge from the bottom of my roster. About the only thing I would change if I could do the draft over again would be that I wouldn't draft Antonio Gates in the 3rd round. That is where he should be drafted, but there are so many good tight ends that I would've been better off trying to fill some other positions. I got screwed in that round though because I was counting on getting a decent wide receiver in the 3rd round, but there was a run on wide receivers right before my pick. Larry Fitzgerald gone, Anquan Boldin gone, Reggie Wayne gone, Darrell Jackson gone. Geez did I get screwed. About the best thing I could have done was to get a third tier running back, a Willie Parker or maybe a Kevin Jones. But, all in all, Antonio Gates wasn't a bad pick, and, in the rest of the draft, there's not much else I could have done better. So I'll cross my fingers for a good season. I play Holy Mack in the first week, and they're run by the guy who was league champion last year, so we'll see how that goes.

Posted at 11:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is the fourth and final part of my description of my hike up Longs Peak. For the first part, see my Sunday, August 20 post. For the second part, see my Monday, August 21 post. And, for the third part, see my Wednesday, August 23 post.
I'm going to try to keep this post short. When I planned on writing this long description of my trip, I was hoping that I could give a richer picture of hiking 14ers than my usual one or two paragraph posts. It's a breathtaking and scary and tedious and excruciating experience all at once. Hopefully I've conveyed some small part of that, but spending so much time on these posts, coupled with a busy week at work, has meant not posting on other things going on with me, and I've also not returned emails to people who wrote me last week with birthday greetings, as well as all of the customary keep-in-touch messages that need to be sent to, well, keep in touch with people. I've also neglected to do any kind of research for my fanstasy football draft, which takes place tomorrow. Let's hope my strategy of not drafting anybody who is stupid enough to drive a motorcycle without a helmet, anybody who is on the verge of getting his 11,452nd NFL drug/alcohol suspension, or anybody whose name rhymes with Candy Boss or Smerrell Bowens will carry me through. Anyway, my point is that these posts have taken up a lot more time than I planned, and while I hope that those who read them do get a better sense of why I enjoy climbing 14ers, I think it's time to finish up with a quick short send-off note about my trip. Um, I mean quick and short from this point onward. So, I reached the summit of Longs at 9:30 in the morning, 5.5 hours after I started. I had been told beforehand that it would be about a 12 hour round trip, although I was hoping I could do it in about 9 or 10 hours. I was worried about going back down the mountain. Going up is hard work, but you're in control the whole time, and if there's ever a point where you can't go on, then you can turn around. Neither one of those things would be the case going down. Getting down the Homestretch meant sliding from one tiny foothold to the next. And by sliding, I mean sliding on your butt, for, you know, maximum friction. Although, I actually did more of a crab walk most of the time. Towards the bottom of the Homestretch, some guy thought he'd be funny and told me I blew out the seat of my pants. That would've sucked because, number one, I had my wallet in my back pocket, a very bad idea in retrospect, and also, a blown out butt seat in my pants would mean nasty brush burns from any more butt slides. Butt (pun intended) he was just joking. Ha ha funny guy. I was following an older couple down the Homestretch, but I lost them in the Trough. I eventually joined up with a college-age guy and girl group. His name was Shane and her name was Erica, and they were seniors, more-or-less (Shane was a 5th-year senior who, I got the impression, could easily become a 6th-year senior), at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. They had left Fort Collins at midnight and started their hike at 2:30 AM. I was telling them about how I usually get altitude sickness on 14ers, and they said, "Oh, we know about altitude sickness". Apparently, Erica threw up on the way up the mountain. And she still summitted! Damn, she's one tough lady. I'm such a wimp with nausea that at the first hint of throwing up I'd be lying on the ground moaning for a stretcher, a cold compress, and a bottle of Pepto. Anyway, Erica, in addition to be some kind of nausea-fighting superhero, happened to be very cute and possessed a great sense of humor, which I inferred from the fact that she laughed at all of my jokes. So, why didn't I get her phone number or email address? Well, I never think of asking for girls' phone numbers or email addresses until they're long gone and I'm standing there with no way to contact them. But also, she's a college senior which, sadly, because it's means I'm getting soooo old, makes her a bit too young for me. Anytime the age difference gets to be near a decade, that makes things weird, I think. And also, what's going on with her and Shane? I'm about as good at reading people as I am at dealing with nausea, so maybe her and Shane were a couple and her "flirting" was just her way of being friendly with the weird elderly fellow who had joined them and who thought his jokes were so funny. Anyway, I hung out with them all the way through the Keyhole, and we had a really good time. But, after the Keyhole, we hit the neverending boulderfield. It was big huge rocks as far as the eye could see, as the picture at the top of this post shows. About halfway down the hill from the Keyhole, I started thinking, oh man, my legs are getting pretty tired. By the time we reached the bottom, I was thinking, please someone kill me now. I still had another 6 miles to the bottom, and my legs, especially my knees, were telling me they were done walking. Erica and her group (there was another guy, Jeffrey, in their group, who they caught up with at the Keyhole) were going to stop in the restrooms at the campsite in the boulderfield. I knew if I stopped, my legs would stiffen up and make my trip down even more miserable than I knew it was going to be. So, I kept going while they stopped in the restroom. And I guess the best way to describe my gait on those last 6 miles to the bottom is drunk, sleepwalking zombie walk. But, I had summitted, which I didn't think I could possibly do on this trip, and I had met a whole bunch of amazing people - Jonathan, JDad, that guy who biked 200 miles and just decided to climb Longs on a whim, his friend - Mr. Happy Climber, Shane, and, of course Erica. So, all in all, wonderful experience. And I did make it down somehow. I reached the ranger station at the bottom at 3 PM, 11 hours after I started my hike (not counting the time I spent searching for the trailhead between 3:30 and 4 in the morning). So, I hoped you enjoyed my story of my Longs Peak climb as much as I enjoyed experiencing it. Now back to regularly scheduled programming.

Posted at 11:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is the third part of my description of my hike up Longs Peak. For the first part, see my Sunday, August 20 post. For the second part, see my Monday, August 21 post.
At this point in the narrative, I want to point out a couple things about myself. The first thing I want to point out, I am relatively new to mountain country, having moved out here in January, and I am very new to mountain climbing, having climbed my first 14er only two months ago. A newbie like myself quickly finds out that the world of mountain climbing, like most other hobbies, has its own particular terminology. Words like talus, scree, cairn, switchback, and bushwhack are some of the terms I've had to learn. Another new word for me, at least as it pertains to mountain hiking, is exposure. I first read about exposure when I read an online description of a non-standard route up the very dangerous Little Bear Peak. The description was filled with phrases like "the exposure is very bad at this point" and "lots of exposure at this crossing" and so on and so forth. At the time I read the description, for whatever reason, I thought exposure meant that there was a break in the trees and/or the path ran along the east side of the mountain so that there'd be lots of "exposure" to the sun. Indeed, hiking 14ers can be such a long, arduous journey that the sun can be wilting. Anyway, it made sense to me. It was only some time later that I learned the actual meaning of exposure. According to climb.mountainzone.com, exposure means "(t)he condition of being on high vertical rock with full consciousness that nothing exists between you and the distant ground but thin air." What is the purpose of this side-discussion? On Longs Peak, after passing through the Keyhole, it is said that one experiences much exposure. Though there is less than 1 mile to hike past this point, there are colorful names given to multiple portions of the hike after the Keyhole. There is the Trough, the Narrows, and finally the Homestretch. Even the part that isn't given a name, right after the Keyhole, is legendary. There are many hikers who take one step through the Keyhole, see the other side, and turn right back around. And this leads to the other thing I want to bring up about myself. I'm scared of heights. I'm scared of heights to the point that I get knee-knockingly nervous when I'm in a skyscraper, with a window between me and open air, and I look down at the ground. I'm scared of driving over long and/or tall bridges, so that I dread driving across the Mississippi, or, when my friends and I used to vacation at the Outer Banks, North Carolina, driving over the ocean from the mainland to Hatteras Island. So, quite obviously, mountain hiking is the ideal hobby for me (I write sarcastically). Suffice it to say that I was not looking forward to all of the exposure I was about to experience on Longs Peak. So Jonathan and JDad and I crossed through the Keyhole, with me taking up the rear. I should mention that I had no thought that I might turn around. I was scared, but after going so far, I knew I couldn't turn around. And to be honest, crossing through the Keyhole wasn't bad. It's hard to describe the danger or lack thereof along this part of the route. In most parts, the path is about three feet wide. Not quite wide enough for two people to pass each other, but not narrow enough tht there's any danger of falling off unless you completely go ass-over-teakettle. And the dropoff from the path is not immediate. There's a one-to-three feet section of slope that is somewhat gentle before the real drop-off. Anyway, knowing how I handle heights, I didn't spend too much time looking over the edge. You pretty much have to stare at that path straight ahead of you because there are rocks and boulders strewn along the way. Getting from the Keyhole to the Trough was fairly simple for me. There are painted bullseyes marking the way, and the path is fairly level, even going downhill for a short section. The Trough did not have much exposure, but it was a bear getting up it. It is essentially a 200-feet slope of boulders. Jonathan sped ahead of me and JDad up the Trough, and several times JDad had to tell Jonathan to slow down. I was happy to go at JDad's slow pace at first. At some point, though, I ended up in the lead, and I caught my second wind. And I desperately wanted to get out of the damn Trough, so I kept going as fast as I could without losing my breath. The hardest and most dangerous part of the hike came for me right at the top of the Trough. The final climb out of the trough involved getting up on a boulder that was about a foot too tall for someone of my height to step up on to, and was too smooth to get any decent handholds. The only way to get on it was to jump up high enough to lay your torso on it, and wrap it as best you can with your arms while you wiggle the rest of your body on it. I was tired enough when I reached this part that that kind of move would be close to impossible for me. I noticed that the rock next to it had a slight ledge that could be reached by walking to the far side of the rock. I got up on the ledge and started walking across. As I got closer to the end of the ledge, though, I realized that I had less and less of a foothold to stand on. By the time I reached the end, I was standing on barely a couple inches of rock, and a drop of water on that rock would have been enough to make me slip and have a nasty fall of 4 or 5 feet to the boulders below. By nothing more than luck, I made it to the final boulder out of the Trough safely. The hiker right behind me, seeing the danger of getting to the boulder, and worried about his hiking partner making it up, climbed up onto the boulder and tied a rope around it, leaving it there for the rest of the hikers following us. I would be extremely grateful for that rope on my way down the mountain. After the Trough is the Narrows. This is another part that is known for lots of exposure, but to be honest, I can remember close to nothing about this part of the route. Like the portion right after the Keyhole, it is level and you just follow the painted bullseyes. I had by now left behind Jonathan and JDad in the Trough, which I felt a little bad about, but I knew they'd be just fine without me. After the Narrows is the final part of the hike, appropriately named the Homestretch. The picture at the top of this post (yes, you must scroll and scroll and scroll to see it now, I apparently feel like writing a novel tonight) shows the beginning of the Homestretch. As you can see, there were tons of people going in front of me up the Homestretch. This was wonderful for two reasons: it made the pace up the slope very slow, and I always love slow paces, and, secondly, you could follow the path up the slope that everyone else was taking, and, presumably if the people in front of you aren't tumbling off the mountain, the path is pretty safe. You may remember when I was planning my trip up Longs Peak, I talked a lot about it involving Class 3 climbing/hiking - "Scrambling or un-roped climbing. You must use your hands most of the time to hold the terrain or find your route. This may be caused by a combination of steepness and extreme terrain (large rocks or steep snow). Some Class 3 routes are better done with rope." The Class 3 aspect of the mountain came out in the Homestretch. It's pretty much a slope of smooth rock heavily interspersed with cracks. A lot of the climbing involves following the cracks, using footholds or handholds that you can gain in them. On my way down, later on, I heard a lot of people complaining about iciness on the Homestretch. There were definitely patches of ice, but it was pretty easy to avoid. The worst parts were where I had to gain foothold in a crack that was too narrow for my foot. This was bad because I had to twist my foot at a weird angle to get it in the crack, and then untwist it at another weird angle to get it back out, all the while clinging and climbing clumsily up the slope. It was past 9 in the morning as I climbed up the Homestretch, and there were already several hikers making their way down. I did not envy them, and watching them go down made me very worried about my own trip down. The difficult thing is that there are only so many safe routes up and down the slope, and with so many people going up, the people going down usually had to choose a more difficult and more dangerous route to get by. Many of them used an interesting maneuver, known as the butt-slide, to get down the slope. As I found out on my own trip down, it's basically a controlled fall, so the more body parts in contact with the mountain, the more friction, and the slower your fall. Anyway, I followed the creeping line up the Homestretch, and before too long, I was at the summit. I had climbed Longs Peak! I walked around the HUGE summit, someone said it was 4 acres in area, and then I sat down and got a peanut butter sandwich out of my backpack and started eating. About 15 minutes after I arrived, Jonathan and JDad reached the top. I ran up and congratulated them. JDad took the picture of me on the summit that I showed in my August 18 post. It was cold and windy on the summit, and I was very nervous about getting down safely, so before too long, I was ready to go back down. Before I left, JDad stopped me and told me to make sure I signed the summit roll. The summit roll is a list of people they're supposed to have on all 14ers who have reached the top. Longs Peak was the first 14er I climbed that had one, though. I wrote my name, my hometown, and under the comments portion I wrote, "It's my birthday!!!". And then I was ready to go back down.

Posted at 11:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's been a long day for me, so I'm going to take a break from my Longs Peak hike narrative and just drop a quick post tonight. One of the things I miss moving from Houston to the Springs is the major decrease in the number of radio stations I can pick up driving around town. I don't have a CD player in my car, and I don't have satellite radio, so I'm stuck with whatever the broadcast stations are. The mountains don't help either, blocking stations based in Denver and sometimes blocking the Pueblo-based stations. Anyway, I've been listening to sports talk radio mostly, but the last time I got a haircut, the barbers were listening to an oldies/big band/swingtime station, and I asked them what station it was. Since then, I've been listening to that station (1530 AM, by the way), and this morning, in honor of Tori Amos's birthday, they played the Tori Amos cover of the song "Murder, He Says". She did the cover for the soundtrack to "Mona Lisa Smile". This song definitely sounds like a '40s swing-era tune, but it might have the most bizarre lyrics of any song I've ever heard. The song was originally sung by Betty Hutton, and here is her version of it, straight from YouTube.

Posted at 11:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (19) | TrackBacks (0)

This is the second part of my description of my hike up Longs Peak. For the first part, see yesterday's entry.
I was returning from my sightseeing excursion to the breathtaking waterfall falling into Chasm Lake. That excursion unfortunately involved me walking about half a mile down the wrong trail. Shortly after I turned around, I came up on a hiking group walking towards me. "Is this the trail to Longs Peak?" I asked. "Well, it's one of the trails, but not the easy trail." I thought of that 500-feet tall cliff and knew what they meant by the not-easy trail. They told me to go back to the trail junction to get back on the Keyhole (easy) route to the summit. It was getting close to daybreak now, and I could see without my headlamp. When I got back to where the trail split off, I could now clearly see the trail I should have taken. Why couldn't I see it a half-hour ago? Who knows, but I was back on track now at least. The trail was getting rocky, and I wondered if this was the boulder field I had read about in the route description. I would soon find out how wrong I was. I went up a few switchbacks. The sun was now completely up. There was a group of three hikers in front of me, and I caught up to them when they sat down to take a break and apply sunscreen. That was a good idea, so I stopped too and got out my sunscreen. I asked them where they were from, and, if I remember right, it was Nebraska. Maybe Kansas. Anyway, it was one of the Plains states. It amazes me how many people I've met on 14ers who are from flatland states. I can certainly understanding a yearning for mountains for people who live in those states, but with all the trouble I've had with altitude sickness, I can only imagine what it's like for someone who comes from a low-altitude area. Anyway, I told them I was thinking about turning back at the Keyhole, but they told me they were going all the way. I said that was great, and they got ready to leave and told me they would meet me at the top. Unfortunately, about a quarter-mile on, I passed them up. One of them was sitting down and breathing hard. I said hi to them and went on. I didn't see them for the rest of the day, so I'm guessing they didn't make it. I was now getting close to the "real" boulder field, and oh my, it was a doozy. It was a half-mile long if it was an inch, and it culminated in a climb of several hundred feet up to the Keyhole. The path started disappearing among the boulders, but it was easy enough to see where to go. In the middle of the boulder field was a small campsite where people who don't want to make the full 15-mile round trip in one day could stay overnight, dividing the trip over two or more days. As I approached the climb to the Keyhole, I ran into a father and his 12-year old son hiking. I asked them if they were going to keep on going past the Keyhole. They were. I asked them if I could tag along with them. I could. That was good news; I needed all of the support I could get for the rest of this climb. I was feeling fine, physically, but everything I'd read said the climb gets much more difficult and much more scary once you go through the Keyhole. The son's name was Jonathan, and the dad, well let's call him Jonathan's dad, or JDad (he told me his name, it begins with "S", but I can't for the life of me remember it). Jonathan and JDad come from St. Louis, and they visit Colorado every year. Jonathan had been waiting all year to climb Longs Peak, and he climbed five 14ers during their week in Colorado to train for it. FIVE 14ERS!!! In one week, a 12-year old kid has climbed more 14ers than I have in what I consider to be a very busy climbing summer for me. Jonathan and JDad were more agile on the boulders than myself, and I had a hard time keeping up with them up to the Keyhole. I managed, though, and after what seemed like an eternity, we made it to the top of the boulder field and the Keyhole. We took a short break there. I ate my Pop Tart snack bar. The picture at the top of this post shows Jonathan standing in a one-room stone hut that is right next to the Keyhole. As we took a break at the Keyhole, two more hikers came up and stopped to talk to us. They were bicyclists who were pedaling around Colorado and decided on a whim to climb Longs Peak that day. The first of them to come up said that so far on the trip he had biked 200 miles. This is through mountainous Colorado, so it had to be 200 miles of hard biking. And now he was climbing Longs Peak. His companion was lagging behind. When his companion finally came up, he was, well, I don't know how to say it except to say that he was the happiest climber I think I'll ever meet. His leg was hurting and he said he was riding high on ibuprofen. He also said that he was a "New York Jew" when JDad mentioned that one of his daughters was living in NYC trying to make it on Broadway. Mr. Happy Climber said that, ten years ago, he had been a fat, out-of-shape businessman, and now he was having the time of his life. Hee, I think I need to start taking more ibuprofen. Anyway, we got our stuff together, Jonathan and JDad were going to be leaving a lot of the contents of their backpacks behind at the Keyhole, to be picked up on the way back. We were about to pass through the Keyhole. Apparently, there are a lot of people who take one step through the Keyhole, see what it looks like on the other side, and turn right back around. I was glad to have Jonathan and JDad with me.

Posted at 11:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (549) | TrackBacks (0)

I have multiple pictures I want to post from my trip up Longs Peak, and I'd also like to give a pretty complete description of my hike, so I'm going to go ahead and spend the next several days posting pictures and describing my hike. Let's get started then. The plan was to get up at 3AM on Thursday, August 17 and hike up to the Keyhole of Longs Peak, about 3/4 of the way up, and then turn back around, unless I was feeling good enough to keep going. As expected, I didn't sleep well on the night before the trip. Tossing and turning, half-asleep around 1 or 2 in the morning, I convinced myself that the alarm wasn't going to go off at 3 because of some problem with the clock, and that I was just going to sleep on through to the morning, when I would take some leisurely hikes around the park and tackle Longs Peak some other day. But the alarm did go off, and I stumbled off my air mattress, put on my glasses, and drove the ~10 miles from the campground to the parking lot at the trailhead. The parking lot was 80% full when I got there around 3:30. I gulped down a bottle of water, put in my contacts, put my headlamp on and got ready to hike. Only one problem - where was the actual trailhead? Remember that it was still pitch-black night out. I walked to the far end of the parking lot and found a break in the fence leading into the forest. I tentatively went on, and quickly came to a rickety-looking bridge made of fallen tree trunks. It didn't look right for such a well-traveled trail. So, I turned around, went out to the parking lot, and looked around some more for the trailhead. But I couldn't find anything promising, so I went back to the bridge again, crossed it, and went on. After about a quarter mile, the path started petering out, and it looked more and more like this was not where I should be. I turned around, AGAIN, and went back to the parking lot, AGAIN. My hike was off to a very inauspicious start. There were a couple guys in the parking lot unloading equipment from their truck and getting ready to go. I went up to them and asked if they were hiking Longs Peak Trail. They were, but they were turning off of it to go to Chasm Lake. Well, maybe I could tag along with them until they turned off. They said they were going to be moving at a fast pace, so it probably wouldn't be a good idea for me to follow them... This was difficult for me. I just wanted someone to show me where the trailhead was, but it was so embarassing to be going on a hike and not even being able to find the start of the trail. Luckily, I heard some hikers behind the Ranger Station, so I walked back to see if they were getting started. Voila, there was the trailhead, behind the Ranger Station. It was almost exactly 4AM by now, so I was getting started more or less on schedule, despite the delays. Usually, I'm huffing and puffing pretty early on in the hike; I think mainly from lack of sleep, with my body still not ready for physical activity so early in the morning. Also, Matt and his Dad, who've been my hiking partners on 14ers prior to this one, go really fast at the beginning of the hike. I was trying to go slow and easy for this hike, and it seemed to be working. I felt like I usually do when I take weekend hikes around the Springs, not much more tired than a normal walk. I quickly passed up the group who had left just before me. The forest I was walking through is named Goblins Forest, and I have to imagine the name was thought up by hikers like me walking through it at 4 in the morning. I didn't see any more hikers until I left the forest and reached the alpine tundra at 11000 feet. Then I came on several groups. I tried my classic line, "Is this the top?" I think that line is money, but the groups I passed were already struggling with the climb, and nobody seemed to be in a very good mood. It was eerie to look back on the groups I had passed and see the line of headlamps making their way up the trail. The sky was crystal clear, and there was an unbelievable view of the stars. It's the first time I can remember seeing the "milky" part of the Milky Way, that is the white blur of stars that look like a brush stroke across the sky. Amazingly, I was feeling energized, and ready for lots more climbing, which was good, since I had to do lots more climbing. The path split off in several places, but there were signs at each of the split-offs indicating clearly the way up Longs Peak. I also printed the route description from 14ers.com and had it in my pocket. I was doing fine until I reached what turned out to be the last trail split-off. One trail, to the far left, went to Chasm Lake, while the other trail went up Longs Peak. The problem was, I only saw one trail. It was still dark out, so I could only go by what I saw with my head lamp. There was a boulder field which I thought I had to cross, but no trail across it that I could see. I was tempted to start crossing the boulder field until I found a trail. I also thought about waiting for one of the hiking groups to catch up to me, and hopefully they would know where to go. Finally, I decided just to take the one trail I could see, and hope it was the correct one. The trail took me slightly downhill, and even though the trail was fairly wide, there was a steep drop-off from the edge of the trail that I wasn't crazy about. I kept trying to look behind me for other hiking groups, but the trail curved around the mountain, so that I couldn't see much farther than 20 feet behind me. The trail kept going more and more downhill, and I couldn't hear anyone behind me, so I was getting worried. It was getting light out. I heard a louder and louder whooshing noise as I walked down the trail, and I was hoping it wasn't coming from 70 mph winds blowing through the Keyhole. It was getting light out, and I reached a part of the trail where I could see up a face of the mountain to a feature that looked like it might be the Keyhole. The only problem was that the cliff leading up to the Keyhole was sheer. And about 500 feet high. If that was the Keyhole, I sure as heck wasn't getting anywhere near there. I also saw where the whooshing noise was coming from - a huge waterfall falling down the cliff into the lake beneath. And surely that lake was Chasm Lake. Argh, I had taken the wrong path. I enjoyed the amazing view for a minute, and turned around to retrace my steps.

Posted at 11:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Allison, Maya, Joy, Dominic and I went hiking again today, this time on Section 16 of Palmer Trail. You can see from the picture that it was a wet, misty day, not so great for taking pictures but pretty nice for hiking, as long as the rain held off. It was a fun time, and Maya and Dominic are unbelievably cute. Here are some pictures from their trip to the zoo last week. Anyway, it's pretty nice to have some people to hang around with on a semi-regular basis. Although I have wonderful friends back home in Pennsylvania who I think I will have a connection to for the rest of my life, since I've moved away to Texas and now here in Colorado, I've found meeting new people to be utterly exhausting and not worthwhile. The thing is, I tend to enjoy being alone about 95% of the time, and I just don't have the patience to get to know people so that I have someone to be with the other 5% of the time. We were talking about Myers-Briggs personality types today. My personality type is INTJ (Introverted iNtuitive Thinking Judging), and the description of INTJs' challenges in the social arena goes as follows:


Personal relationships, particularly romantic ones, can be the INTJ's Achilles heel. While they are capable of caring deeply for others (usually a select few), and are willing to spend a great deal of time and effort on a relationship, the knowledge and self-confidence that make them so successful in other areas can suddenly abandon or mislead them in interpersonal situations.

This happens in part because many INTJs do not readily grasp the social rituals; for instance, they tend to have little patience and less understanding of such things as small talk and flirtation (which most types consider half the fun of a relationship). To complicate matters, INTJs are usually extremely private people, and can often be naturally impassive as well, which makes them easy to misread and misunderstand. Perhaps the most fundamental problem, however, is that INTJs really want people to make sense. :-) This sometimes results in a peculiar naiveté, paralleling that of many Fs -- only instead of expecting inexhaustible affection and empathy from a romantic relationship, the INTJ will expect inexhaustible reasonability and directness.


Anyway, like I said, I don't mind being a bit of a loner, but it is nice to have a few friends to spend time with, so I'm looking forward to some more hiking trips and some more pool games. Goodness knows I need a LOT more practice at pool, just so we don't have to pay for three hours of table time to finish a couple games (well, it wasn't quite that bad, I think we got in four games, but still).

Posted at 11:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Who's that handsome fellow giving finger guns to the camera? Why that's a guy who just climbed to the top of Longs Peak. That's right, I got to the Keyhole yesterday, and no altitude sickness. So I kept going and going all the way to the top. It was a great birthday, and I'm glad I did it. I'm going to have to go back out to Rocky Mountain National Park sometime soon, because there's tons to do there besides hiking Longs Peak. Some more pictures from the hike will be forthcoming, and I'm probably going to write a trip report about my climb on 14ers.com, since the trip reports they have on Longs right now make it seem a little more intimidating that I thought it was. If I do write a trip report, I'll simul-post it here as well (simul-post being my made-up webspeak for copy and paste). Some fun things to say when you pass hikers on a 14er:

Is this the top? (Say this when you're 3000-5000 feet below the summit, extra points if you remember to say it right at the beginning trailhead)

Can I bum a cigarette? (People don't smoke on 14ers for obvious reasons)

Uh-oh, I think I left my keys on the summit. (Say this on the way down. This one reminds me of one of Jack Handey's Deep Thoughts: If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let 'em go, because man, they're gone.)

Posted at 11:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (500) | TrackBacks (0)

Allison posted some more pictures from our hike in Waldo Canyon over on her blog. If you go on to read the comments, you'll see that she accuses me of injuring a poor watermelon, but I think she's just mad that I beat her at pool last night. So, I've been thinking that maybe I don't want to spend my birthday hyperventilating my way up a dangerous mountain. I might instead want to spend my birthday doing something that's pleasant or relaxing. So, I'm thinking now that instead of trying to climb Longs Peak on Thursday, I'm just going to leisurely hike my way up the Longs Peak Trail, going very slow and taking lots of pictures and not worrying about getting to the top. This will be my scouting trip for Longs Peak, and sometime in the future, when I do try to climb it, I'll have a better idea what to expect. If, by chance, I reach the Keyhole, which is at about 13000 feet, and I'm feeling pretty well, and I feel like it'll be no problem to go on, then I'll go on a little further. And if I keep on feeling well, then I'll keep on going on. But, judging from past experience, I'll be huffing and puffing and feeling like dying when I reach 13000 feet, which means I'll probably just turn around when I reach the Keyhole, or maybe even a little bit before that. I'm still going to try to get started at around 4AM so that in case I feel like doing the whole climb, I'll have time to do it. One thing that will be working to my advantage is that the weather forecast is favorable. Right now, there's only a slight chance of thunderstorms after noon on Thursday, so hopefully the weather won't be a problem. The plan for tomorrow, then, is to leave work around noon, stop home for a quick lunch, and drive up to my campground. I'll be driving right by Denver, so I'm hoping to beat rush hour traffic. And then I'll set up my campsite, eat a peanut-butter-and-jelly dinner, and try to get some sleep so that I can be up and about at 3AM. I bought a head lamp this past weekend so I'll be all ready to do some night-hiking. And if all goes according to plan, I'll be back at my campsite on Thursday afternoon, and then, maybe after a short nap, I'll be driving back home on Thursday evening, once again trying to avoid rush hour.

Posted at 11:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I went hiking in Waldo Canyon today. Actually, I should say "we" went hiking in Waldo Canyon today since I came along with some newly-found hiking partners - Allison, Maya, Joy, and Dominic. Allison is the nice blogger I met last week via PZ Myers's Pharyngula blog. As much as I talk about and brag about the difficult hikes I do up 14er mountains, I had a cakewalk today compared to Allison and Joy because they carried Maya and Dominic with them in child-carrying backpacks, which added an extra ~50 pounds to their load (the weight of the backpack + child + extra water you have to bring because of all of the extra weight you're carrying). So I don't think I'll be so quick to brag about my 14ers after seeing what they did on our hike today, which is a tough hike even without the extra burden (7 miles round trip, 2000 feet elevation gain). Speaking of 14ers, I've started seriously scouting out my planned hike up Longs Peak next week. One of the people I work with has been scaring the heck out of me by telling me about the dangerous weather conditions on the mountain and saying that, if I don't get below treeline before noon, I'm going to be in lots of trouble. Here's a trip report about a guy who climbed Longs a couple weeks ago, and he says that he faced 70 mph winds as he passed through the "Keyhole" which is a feature which marks the last 1 mile stretch to the summit and the beginning of the most dangerous hiking. All of the 14ers I've climbed so far have been rated "Class 2", based on a standard rating system for hiking difficulty. Class 2 hikes are described as "(H)iking that may be off-trail. You may also have to put your hands down occasionally to keep your balance. May include easy snow climbs or hiking on talus/scree." Longs Peak is Class 3, which means "Scrambling or un-roped climbing. You must use your hands most of the time to hold the terrain or find your route. This may be caused by a combination of steepness and extreme terrain (large rocks or steep snow). Some Class 3 routes are better done with rope." After reading the route description for Longs Peak, I think that I will be perfectly safe as long as I'm careful and the weather stays calm. If the weather looks dangerous, then I will definitely turn around. But, based on the warnings I've been getting from my friend at work and based on the information I've been reading, I'm going to get started hiking as early as I can. I was planning on waking up at 4AM at my campsite and hopefully being at the trailhead by 5AM, but now I'm thinking that I'll set my alarm for 3AM and plan on being on the trailhead by 4AM. And because I have not slept well at all on any of the camping trips I've been on, there's a good chance I'll end up leaving earlier than that if I can tell around 1 or 2 in the morning that I'm not going to get any decent sleep. Leaving so early will let me hopefully avoid any rough weather which tends to roll in in the afternoon. Also, it will hopefully allow me to go on a really slow pace so that I'm not worn out when I get to the Keyhole and have to go through the most difficult hiking/climbing. Anyway, after the guy at work told me basically that it was a terrible idea for me to try to hike Longs Peak and that I was going to be in a lot of danger, I was questioning whether I should even bother going. But I feel a lot better now, and I think I'll be fine as long as the weather doesn't turn crazy. And I'll be paying close attention to the skies to make sure that I don't get caught in a dangerous weather situation.

Posted at 11:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (599) | TrackBacks (0)

I've spent the last several weeks in the lab trying to take a type of data called Maker fringes. And it's driving me crazy. Maker fringes are essentially light interference fringes. The specific type of interference fringes you observe in Maker fringe experiments is the change in the power of frequency-doubled light (in many experiments, this is infrared light converted to green light) as a sample is rotated in a laser beam. The figure immediately below shows what Maker fringes are supposed to look like:


The important thing to notice is that the fringes look the same for positive (+) angle rotations (the right-hand side of the figure) as for negative (-) angle rotations (the left-hand side of the figure). Keeping that in mind, look at my Maker fringe data below:


As you can see, the right-hand side of the figure looks nothing like the left-hand side. What I'm finding out is that the Maker fringes are incredibly ridiculously sensitive to the positioning of the optics directing the laser beam and also to the positioning of the sample as it is rotated. So, I think I've finally got things lined up correctly, and I'm hoping that tomorrow and on Monday and Tuesday that I can finally finish up with the lousy stinking Maker fringes. I'll cross my fingers.

Posted at 11:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (473) | TrackBacks (0)

If you had tried yesterday or any time within the last several months to read my Diary page or several other pages on my website using the Mozilla Firefox browser, you would have seen something like this. The reason why the pages looked like that has to do with boring web-programming stuff (I was using the incorrect file extensions for my external stylesheets - see, I told you it was boring). Anywho, I would have gone on forever blissfully unaware of how ass-ugly my website looked to anyone using Firefox, but luckily I finally found out about it yesterday. The way I found out involved a kooky Six Degrees of Separation-type set of connections between myself and this very nice blogger, who also happens to be a resident of Colorado Springs (well, the Colorado Springs metropolitan area, but I'm getting ahead of myself). So, yesterday afternoon, I was enjoying my day off by surfing the web. One of the sites I read regularly is P.Z. Myers's Pharyngula blog, which is a mixture of science-talk, politics-talk and religion-talk. Yesterday, he wrote a post about a Christian-based charity in Colorado which gave a million dollars to a sham museum that spouted anti-science creationist propaganda. The post was basically asking what the heck is going on in Colorado, since we seem to have more than our fair share of far-right rabid religious fundamentalist groups here. Many of the commenters said something along the lines of "Colorado is OK, the problem is all the crazies living in Colorado Springs". But then someone came in to defend my new home city. A commenter named Allison said that she lives just outside of the Springs and that, in fact, she had found a "vibrant liberal community" in the area. Her name in her comment linked to her blog, so I clicked on it out of curiosity. And it turns out that her latest post talked about her visit to Garden of the Gods Park the day before. Which was the same day I had been in the Garden of the Gods (see my previous post). So I wrote a comment on her blog saying, well what I just said, that I had been in Garden of the Gods at the same time as her. And I also linked to this Diary page just to point out the entry I had just posted (the post before this, just in case you forgot). So she came to my website, and I guess also read some of my background info. about how I lived in Houston before I came here, and she replied to my comment saying that she had lived in Houston before she came here, and in fact we overlapped there for a year or two. Who would've thunk it? Reading the website of a biologist from Minnesota led me to meet someone who lives in Colorado Springs, just like me, and who moved here from Houston, just like me. Oh, and she also emailed me to let me know about the problems with my website in Firefox, so now that's fixed. But here I was thinking I was the only liberal Colorado-Springs-resident former-Houstonian blogger. I now stand corrected.

Posted at 11:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I went hiking around Garden of the Gods Park yesterday. The park is named for its unique rock formations, which seemed to have been formed by the hands of gods rather than by natural processes. The rock formation shown in the picture above is named "Siamese Twins". There was a steady rainstorm the whole time I walked through the park, so it wasn't such a great day for a hike and certainly not a good day for taking pictures. But I managed to get a few nice photos and not get too soaked in the process. Today, I made reservations at Moraine Park Campground in Rocky Mountain National Park for August 16-17 in preparation for my birthday hike up Longs Peak.

Posted at 11:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (337) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm reading Joyce Carol Oates's We Were the Mulvaneys right now. I bought a copy of the book from a discount book store when I was in Houston in May for Rice's Commencement. My reading is going very slowly because I only have time to read on the weekends. It's a combination of excessive TV watching and trying to stay in shape so I can climb more mountains. I've been going to the gym after work every day to run on the treadmill, and after getting changed, working out, taking a shower, and getting dressed, I usually don't end up getting home until 7 or 8. After making dinner and watching a show on TV, it's pretty much time for bed. I've read two Oates novels before this one, and they were both very dark and very twisted. For example, Wonderland is the story of a boy who becomes orphaned when his father murders the entire family and who is then adopted by a family of morbidly obese academic overachievers. So far, We Were the Mulvaneys seems to be more conventional, but there is a deep dark secret waiting to burst forth into the lives of the ridiculously happy and well-rounded Mulvaney family, so we'll see what happens when the secret emerges (I don't know what the secret is, but it's been hinted at since the beginning of the book). I'm going to try to leave a work a little earlier so that I might have more time in the evening for stuff like reading. Anyway, tomorrow I'm going to go hiking in Garden of the Gods Park. It's called Garden of the Gods because of the spectacular and strange-looking rock formations, that look like they were sculpted or molded rather than naturally formed. I'm also going to try to call tomorrow to make reservations at a campsite so that I can drive out to Rocky Mountain National Park and hike up Longs Peak in a couple of weeks for my birthday.

Posted at 10:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I helped my friend Matt move out of his place on Monday. Right now, he should be in St. Cloud, Minnesota getting settled into his new place. I gave his dad, Dave, my phone number, so hopefully he'll be my mountain hiking partner every now and then. I bought plane tickets today to fly to New York for my brother Joe's wedding at the end of September. He's getting married at Heron Hill Winery on September 30. I ordered my tux on Saturday, and I "upgraded" it by adding on a cane and top hat. Leanne, Joe's fiancée, said that she was going to make fun of her brothers for getting canes and top hats, but I told her I had to get the upgrade 'cause I'm cool like that.

Posted at 10:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (555) | TrackBacks (0)