First Rainier Ski Trip of the Season

With the first days of December, a record setting high pressure system settled over the Pacific Northwest and promised up to a week or more of good weather (and smog in the lowlands). My brother Alex and I decided to take advantage of the good weather and get in our first ski trip of the season to Camp Muir.

On Saturday December 3, we started out at 6 AM, arriving at the mountain 9:30. When we got to the parking lot we realized there were quite a few other people with the same idea. From the parking lot to just below Panorama Point we set a pretty good pace. But as we looked up the climb to Panorama Point it was clear all the other skiers were struggling. At first the climb was easy. Alex stated that he was going to try and skin all the was up. A couple minutes later Alex, who was ahead of me, yelled back to me to put on my ski crampons. A minute later he was hiking with skis over his shoulder. As I approached the area where he had given up skinning I thought I might be able to make it with my ski crampons, and I probably could have, but it would have been a long way to slide down if the crampons didn't hold, so following my brothers example, I put the skis over my shoulder and headed up hill.

After the climb up to and above Panorama Point, the skinning went well up to about 8,000' where the travel required navigating patches of ice with strong gusts of wind coming from all different directions. A couple of the gusts were strong enough that I had to stop and make sure I was well balanced against the wind. Around 8,800' the wind was just too strong, and most of the downhill skiers had warned us that it was extremely icy higher up, and most all other uphill skiers had turned around. So at that point Alex and I decided to turn around. So with high winds, and on an inch of snow on top of blue ice we carefully transitioned and headed down.

Here our GPS tracks from the day's adventure.

Navigating Panorama Point on the downhill turned out to be not as bad as going up. The skiing down was not great, but overall it was a fun trip.

Trying to impress 12 year olds

Being the slave to social media that I am, I have a YouTube account. I really don’t do too much with that account; I created it out of curiosity more so than anything else. However, I do upload the occasional video that I put together.

In 2009 my brother and I went up to Alpental on opening day. I brought my helmet camera and captured some POV footage of us skiing and made a stupid little video with that footage. I really didn’t imagine anyone other than my brother and I watching this, but I did upload it to YouTube and make it publicly visible.

Well, nearly 2 years after putting together this video, it looks like someone else has watched my video. I guess he didn’t care for it, but his comment is pretty awesome!

Im 12 and i did that run when i was 11 so do somthing a little harder

Thank you, The Gocarter for your constructive criticism. I will make a point of trying to capture some footage of me hucking cliffs in the Alpental BC during the 2011/12 season, or maybe ski Mount Rainier or Baker. Either way, I will strive ski runs harder than what an 11 year old can easily ski.

Ride in the Rain

 I was feeling pretty good about myself having done 1000+ miles of my commute this past year by bike; that is, until November ended. November was "Ride in the Rain" month at the University of Washington; basically the University’s transportation services department challenges bicycle commuters to commute to and from work as much as possible during the month of November (one of the rainiest months of the year in Seattle). The thing is it’s not that much of a commitment to say you are going to bike every day in November since November is generally one the shorter work month of the year with Veteran’s day, Thanksgiving, and the day after Thanksgiving as holidays. I did manage to make it though the entire month of November and only missing one day of biking into work; so despite the short month I managed to rack up more miles than any other month in 2009.

Then I saw the stats of the other “Ride in the Rain” cyclists. One guy in particular racked up 828 miles in the month of November (granted his one way commute is 23 miles!). Another guy with a commute that is just as long as mine made 28 round trips in the month of November (granted this means that guy went into work every week day, weekend day, and one of the three holidays). Clearly I am not hard core. Consider that in my attempt to commute by bike as much as possible during 2009 it took me 3 months of biking to rack up as many days of biking as one guy did during the cold rainy month of November, and it took me 10 months to rack up as many miles as one guy did in a single rainy cold wet month.

I’ve still got the month of December to commute by bike before the year of 2009 is over. If I bike every single day in December that I intend to be at work that gives me another 20 days of biking, but with family coming into town for the holidays I’m likely to take a few days off. Despite the fact that I don’t stand up against the best of the bike commuters (or even place in the top 40 for my place of work), I do feel that my attempt to commute 1000 miles by bike in 2009 was successful and I kind of feel the need to outdo myself in 2010. Maybe for 2010 I’ll shoot for 2000 miles commuted by bicycle! ...but don't hold me to it, I've got other things to focus on now, like skiing!

My 1000 Mile Commute in 2009

I’ve always been a bit of a fair-weather bike commuter, but with each successive job I’ve had over the past 12 years (there has been 4 of them), I’ve moved a little closer to home. With each new job, I’ve added a few more days of commuting by bike. At my current job at the University of Washington, the route I take when I commute by bicycle is just over 13 miles round trip (a little more according to Google Maps, a little more still according to my bikes odometer).

As a fair weather biker my bike usually doesn’t get pulled out until late May and gets put away in early October. During a normal year I will commute to work by bike a couple days here, a couple days there. Eventually I find a good book to read and start taking the bus so I can read my book, and my bike gets put away. However, this year will be different; I have set a goal of using my bike to commute 1000 miles in 2009. That’s roughly 80 days of round trip commuting by bike if I take my usual route. There are 261 work days in 2009. However, if I exclude most of January, and half of February (I started on February 12), exclude planned vacation days (2009 is already totally planned out) and only count work days based on my alternative work schedule (9-9s, or 9 hour days with every other Friday off), I am left 191 days to complete my task. So I will need to bike a bit less than half of my scheduled work days in 2009.

The rules are I have set for myself are as follows: Regardless of the route I take I can only count a maximum of 13 miles round trip (6.5 miles each way). If I put my bike on the bus for any part of a trip in either direction, that half of the commute does not count. I can only count miles biked in the commute to and from work (no going on a long bike ride on the weekend and counting that). I have to publicly post how I am doing here.

So to most bike commuters, this is nothing (the guy I share an office with bikes every day that there isn’t snow on the ground), but for a fair-weather cyclist like myself with a delicate posterior this is a bit of an undertaking.

To the non-bike commuter who asks “why bother?” Sadly the reason is cycling and skiing is the only real exercise I get. I really don’t have time to go to the gym on a regular basis, and wouldn’t go even if I did have time (don’t really like gyms). I need to get some kind of exercise and taking care of it during my commute seems like the easiest way.

EDIT: I fully admit that biking 6.5 miles at a time can hardly be considered "exercise", but I gotta start somewhere.

The Legend of Blue Ribbon Expeditions (Part 3)

Yah, I know, I skipped part 2. I'm working on it. There seems to be some gaps in my memory of that particular trip.

However, to avoid the same problem for part 3, I decided to just video tape the event...

Ski Lessons

This year is my four year old daughter's first year of ski lessons and it didn’t start off too well. During the first 3 weeks of lessons she got more and more apprehensive about lessons (“I don’t want to go skiing daddy! Can we just sit in the car daddy?”). With my love of skiing, this was really breaking my heart to hear her say this. However, it was easy to understand my daughter's attitude; her classes were made up of six of more 4 year olds who had never been on skis and one 16 year old instructor. The instructor was doing her very best, but ultimately the kids spent most of their time sitting in the snow interrupted by an occasional horrific few moments that involved grabbing onto a fast moving rope, ultimately falling over then being dragged up the hill as a lift operator ran behind yelling “Let go! Let go of the rope tow!”

When the scheduled date of the fourth week of lessons rolled around, a huge snow storm hit Cascades. Due to too much snow(!!!), lessons were canceled for several weeks. When the ski area was finally reopened for lessons I wasn’t tooWhen the scheduled date of the fourth week of lessons rolled around, a huge snow storm hit the optimistic about what would happen with my daughter in her lessons; she did not want to go. So I spent the first half of that fourth week of lessons skiing with just her, and the second half skiing with her and her class. It took a lot of bribing with gummy bears, but by the end of that fourth week of classes she was skiing down the chair on her own (even as I write this a tear comes to my eye due to my extreme pride in my daughter right now who now tells me, “Can we go skiing every day daddy?”).

At the end of that fourth day of lessons I had two thoughts: 1)the words of my supervisor back when I was a ski instructor, “No matter how terrible your kids are in classes, the fourth week is a magic week and everyone skis on the chair lift.” 2) I really wish I had brought my camera.

For week number five I did bring my camera, and I wanted to share one of the images of what wife says put the biggest smile she has ever seen on my face. Enjoy!