Tuesday, June 22, 2004

The Huntress

I dog-sat Maggie on Saturday for my mom, who was in Toronto over the weekend. Admittedly, Vespa did more watching than I did: Here?s a couple pictures of her hunting Maggie?s leash. That?s right, the leash, not the dog.

Maggie, of course, is too blind to see the cats anymore, so I’m not sure what she thought of the leash which seemed to constantly change length!

Friday, June 18, 2004

Mt. Daniel pictures

I received a bunch of pictures today of our second Mt. Daniel climb a couple weeks ago. We did summit despite the inclement weather.

Update: The pictures of the climb are no longer available. Sorry!

Summer Reading

I didn’t exactly sleep my way through high school and college science classes, but it’s safe to say I don’t remember a lot of the specific details of what I was taught. From primordial nothingness to this very moment, Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything aims is to help people like me, who tired of stale school textbooks and dry explanations, to appreciate how we have used science to understand the smallest particles and the unimaginably vast expanses of space.

What Bryson’s explanations and descriptions lack in sophisitication, they more than make up in wit and style. I’ve described it on occasion as Carl Sagan meets Robin Williams.

There are definitely some mistakes, and any scientist reading this would be embarressed on occasion for Bryson. On the other hand I have to absolutely recommend the book if you’d like to brush up on your history of the natural world for Trivial Pursuit and have a good chuckle in the process.

Bryson’s next job should be training high school science teachers.

Thursday, June 17, 2004

Raccoon

Who would have thought that at 5 a.m. this morning Nick and I would wake up to the sound of a huge crash in the kitchen? When we sat up and found our most likely suspects (the cats) staring back at us, we immediately bolted out of bed to see what it was.

Turns out a raccoon had entered through the cat door and was wrecking havoc in our kitchen and living room. When we finally caught up with him he was perched on top of our bookshelf in the living room.

We safely installed the cats in the bedroom (Bentley was very bushy tailed) and grabbed a trekking pole for defense. Then we opened the sliding door and proceeded to have a staring contest with it. Neither of us was going to budge…

It wasn’t until Nick went to put some clothes on and I looked distracted with the camera that it tried to make a run for it. The picture above was caught just as it was rounding the edge of the door to make its escape.

Sunday, June 06, 2004

Mt. Daniel, Part II

The plan was to climb Eldorado in a day yesterday. Due to an unfavorable weather forecast, we switched plans and decided to give Mt. Daniel another try. (You’ll recall we didn’t make the summit three weeks ago thanks to a variety of factors.)

Driving to the trailhead was almost as adventurous as the climb itself: In Cle Elum I narrowly missed hitting a skunk that appeared like a land mine in front of my car as I was turning onto a dark street. Then on the dirt road between the Fish Lake Ranger Station and Scatter Creek, I met a deer that proceeded to not just stare into the headlights, but run right at them. I slowed to a stop and still narrowly missed the thing!

Two large field mice and a mother and baby deer later I got to Scatter Creek, where I was going to spend Friday night.

On Saturday morning, five of us piled into Mike?s truck and drove to the Deception Pass trailhead. On the way there we saw two beautiful elk ? one with the beginnings of a really big rack ? and a black bear cub running down the road. Wow!

The climb was great, but fairly uneventful. We took the trail most of the way to the ridge below Cathedral Pass then ran it over to the pass where you traverse to Peggy?s Pond. We walked 2/3 of the way around the mountain (literally) to the Lynch Glacier, which we ascended in near whiteout conditions.

Our route finding was spot on and we summited at around 1:30. We then headed down the scramble route (also in near whiteout conditions until the basin adjacent to Peggy?s Pond).

By now the mileage was starting to take its toll. We wandered our way back down to Squaw Lake and then back down the trail. We finally reached the parking lot at about 6:20 p.m. ? almost 13 hours after departing that morning.

Pizza in Roslyn never tasted so good!