Archive for 2009

On Sunday morning, we were sore. 15 miles in the saddle the day before was rough. But TJ was excited and we still had a full day to enjoy the fine trails around Fruita. So, we ate breakfast slowly, and then headed north to the 18 Road trails.

Photos from the day are up in the gallery.

These trails run up and down the bottom edge of one of the large, sandy mesas north of town. While they don’t climb to the top of any mountains, the long, gradual downhills and uphills in the area make for some fun and hard rides. Plus other trails run over the ridges of petrified sand dunes, with steep drops and roller-coaster like single track.

We started up the road, getting the kinks worked out of our legs and the feeling drained back out of our sore butts. Eventually, we met up with Western Zippity, a “green” trail, and rode the 1 mile until it connected with the Frontside trail, a more difficult route.

Along the Frontside trail, you can hook up with any number of expert, scary looking trails. We ended up riding past all of them, having fun on the rolling single track until we met up with the parking lot at the north end of 18 Road. From there, we all agreed to try Kessler’s Run back to the car. This was a great plan.

Kessler’s Run was the best trail of the whole weekend. We flew down this whoop-di-woop trail, riding up and down an arroyo on the long downhill from the edge of the book cliffs to the trailhead: 2 miles and 500 feet below. We rode sooo fast and had soooo much fun.

When we got back to the car, we ate snacks and drank gatorade, and decided to do it again. This time, we rode straight up 18 road and right back down Kessler’s. I was pretty tired after this 4 mile jaunt, but TJ and Mark decided to do it one more time. So I drove them up the road and met them with the car back at the trailhead, 2 miles down the hill.

It was a great day, and an incredibly fun, fun ride. We logged another 16 miles even with the sore legs. We headed back to town and dropped off TJ’s rental. Next up were showers for $5 at the Fruita Fitness center, and finally, we chowed down on more pizza. In the evening, we played Fluxx for hours, and messed around with long exposure pictures of the lights of town so far below our lovely campsite.

The prelims are over, and I survived (and passed)! The day after the oral exam, we packed up our gear and headed west to the desert with my little brother TJ.

There’s pictures from our weekend up in the gallery!

Friday we drove, through a huge snowstorm, over the mountains and out to the western edge of Colorado. Where the mountains meet the desert and the big Colorado river starts carving its way through red sandstone. Fruita is a small town, west of Grand Junction, that has developed a huge system of great mountain biking trails and a great community of riders.

We spent the weekend camping at the Colorado National Monument, which is perched on top of a mesa south of Fruita. The camping is expensive at $10 a night, but there’s water available, nice bathrooms, picnic tables and charcoal grills. Plus the views are absolutely incredible. Pretty lux, all around.

Saturday we geared up after breakfast and decided to try and find some easier trails to get our groove back. We headed west to the Kokopeli Trailhead, and rode a few of the loop trails in the area.

We ended up riding almost 15 miles on Saturday, over beautiful trails, some fast and fun, some slow and technical, some scary and exposed. It was a beautiful day, a lot of hard riding, and we had a great time. On the map above, we started with the first, smaller loop on the east side, called Wrangler’s loop. This was a little hard for us at first, even though it was graded “green.” But after about 3 miles, we got our legs back, and had huge fun on a fast, long, downhill section of the trail.

Much “WOO-HOO”-ing commenced.

We then set out on the bigger loop – starting with Mary’s Loop, a “blue.” This was fun, but harder. The views were gorgeous, and we worked our way out into the desert. We stopped for lunch at the “Pizza” overlook, where an aid station was helping runners on a 50 mile trail running race. We ate a snack and relaxed for a while, then decided to head down Steve’s loop.

This was a steeper, but very fun trail. It dropped down a steep hill to near the river, and then winds back around some awesome slot canyons. We picked up Handcuffs to get out of the canyon – rated a “black diamond” it was steep and slow going, but we made it out and back to the car. Happy, exhausted, a little sunburnt and ready for pizza and an afternoon nap. In the evening we enjoyed some sight-seeing in the National Monument, endorphins, night steaks, and Fluxx.

Ding Ding Ding, the starting bell has rung for… PhD Entry Exams!

Let the PhD Commence!
Kate has submitted a proposal. Written Exams commence… NOW… and oral exams commence next week. Katy is going to be extremely busy.

Good luck Katy, you are totally going to kick ass.

This means for the next two-ish weeks, I am your blogger-extraordinaire. I suspect that when Katy does take a break it will be to do a quick tweet (click to check up on her).

To our faithful readers, you can expect picture-deficient blog entries about off-topic rubbish. Me? Blog? My magic 8-ball says “outlook poor”. Let’s give it a try anyway…

Cooking! (book review)
I have been a little burned out on cooking lately. I kept making the same meals over and over. When asked to make a menu, I’d get just a little bit depressed as I thought about what protein I was going to pair with what carb plus a veggie… Blah. So, at Katy’s suggestion, I bought a couple new cookbooks. One for the new pressure cooker as well as one from a PBS show I always liked called “America’s Test Kitchen”. Each recipe is made many times in there test kitchen: tweaking the ingredient list, amounts, and procedures until they have a tasty recipe which is quite repeatable.

In this book you will notice that there are few recipes, but those recipes are bulletproof and fully explained.

For example: Last night I made their Pad Thai and the directions to make perfect rice noodles were spot on. My rice noodles were not a sticky clump!
Hooray! I’m excited about cooking again!

Sports! (but not basketball)
In February, Katy picked up a couple soccer jerseys for me on her way back from Jerusalem and I thought that if I was going to wear them out in public, I had better watch a few games. And to my surprise, after watching a single UEFA Champions League match, I really liked it. And, I figured out why I never liked it before. You have to REALLY pay attention. When I watched with unblinking focus, I was getting nervous/excited as the ball got within striking range of either goal. If I allowed myself to be a little distracted and read some stats on my laptop, it didn’t even phase me when I’d see the goalie carrying the ball away from another saved shot. What was the final score of the match where I discovered that I liked to watch soccer? 1-1.

Go Man U!

Yesterday was a heart breaker when Porto scored in the final minutes to tie the score 2-2. As that was a home game for Manchester United, it puts them in a must-win situation for the second leg of the quarterfinals (4/15/2009 Man U vs Porto)

Games? sort of…
I’m also taking a shot at playing Dungeons and Dragons after a 20-year hiatus (you can blame my brother for that). This may be the last mention of it on the blog.

For the last few weeks I’ve been studying and preparing for my Preliminary Exam, so I’m spending all of my time thinking about clouds and climate. Which, really, isn’t such a bad way to spend time. It’s also springtime in Colorado, so the weekends have been snowy and cold.

While we’re shivering in the mountains, the rest of the climate is going through the typical spring seasonal shift. The sun has risen over one pole and set over the other. The northern hemispheric land masses are beginning their seasonal carbon sequestration. And climatologists are starting to look at changes in sea ice cover.

Two interesting articles went by this week, one from each pole.

In the north, groups studying arctic ice coverage announced that the 2008-2009 winter saw the fifth lowest maximum ice extent since monitoring began in 1979. They also mention that seasonal ice, the sea ice which melts and refreezes each winter, is up from ~50% of all northern sea ice to about 70%.

When I was flying home from Israel last January, we flew into the polar night over Greenland. When the plane flew back into the light of day, we watched the sun “rise” over the arctic sea ice north of Canada. I had the rare opportunity to see the glowing pink light illuminate the beautiful crystalline world below, without any clouds blocking the view. I was surprised to see that the sea ice was not just a blank, white, plain of emptyness, but, even in the depth of winter, it was a patchwork of peaks and valleys, with what looked like ice-rivers flowing around millions of big and little chunks of ice. It really is amazing how dynamic the polar oceans are, even in the deepest freeze.

In the southern hemisphere, the sun set a few weeks ago, and the summer melt season is ending. Satellite groups are reporting on the danger of a possible “imminent breakup” of the rest of a large ice shelf in Antarctica. The pictures (shown above) are really beautiful, and wild. This shelf already lost more than 650 square miles of ice to break-up and calving in the last year (old story with great pics here, new CNN report here). There’s a great and very interesting discussion on the ice shelf over at RealClimate.Org. If you have questions, I can try to answer them, but the ice dynamicists are all over at RealClimate. I highly recommend checking out that site.

According to CNN, the Wilkins Ice Shelf is (or was) about the size of Connecticut. And the largest ice shelf to be threatened so far, that we are aware of.

If you haven’t met me, or read the About Us page yet, I (Kate) am a graduate student at Colorado State University, working on my Phd in Atmospheric Sciences. More specifically, I’m doing research into the methods used to include the effects of clouds in climate models, and hoping to improve our ability to forecast weather, climate and future climate change.

Working in an academic environment, full of atmospheric scientists, has been a truly wonderful experience, and one thing we all end up talking about is our impact on the very thing we have devoted our lives to studying. Topics of conversations around our “water coolers” invariably end up returning back to ways to conserve energy and reduce our carbon footprints.

In Fort Collins, our carbon comes from the same general mix as the rest of the country. Electricity production and transportation are the two biggest sources, with electricity beating transportation by a measurable, but relatively small, chunk. This EIA report has great statistics all the way through the end of 2007. In Fort Collins, most of our electricity is generated by the Rawhide power plant, just north of town, which has improved emissions greatly in the last few years, but still helps Colorado into the “dirty” category on some carbon monitoring sites.

On Saturday night, between 8:30 and 9:30p, we participated in Earth Hour, by turning out our lights. While I know this really won’t reduce carbon emissions in the grand scheme of things, Mark and I decided to add our lights out to the rest as part of the “movement.”

It didn’t really look like a movement from where we were. Most of our neighbors were out for the night, so their lights were off anyway. Those that were home stayed on. I didn’t see any grand gestures or amazing splotches of darkness.

I think there’s more than one ethical question to be had about “lights out.” Most of our per-capita carbon in the US comes from power going to industrial and municipal sources. Office buildings with lights and computers on all night, towns with lights on parking lots 24/7. But this isn’t necessarily a “waste” of energy as many people suggest. It is a safety issue. My dad often talks about New York and other cities turning off the lights to save energy in the 70’s, and the huge spike in crime and murder that followed.

So, in my mind, turning off the lights might be a nice thing for the environment, but I do recognize the reasons we keep them on so often as well.

But for our Earth Hour, I took the chance to happily unplug from the world. I took a wonderful long bath, and then fell asleep at 9p. The lights didn’t come back on in our house on Saturday.

As I’ve started to grow my garden, I’ve also started to grow a few houseplants. I have a couple succulents, including the ever useful and difficult to kill Aloe Plant. I also have an incredibly hardy orange tree, that I’ve tried to kill several times in the last year and half, but it just keeps plugging on. It’s got three little green oranges on it right now! In Colorado!

Last weekend, I repotted the tree into a much larger pot, and noticed a handful of these little wormy/catapillar bugs in the tray below the plant. When I repotted the tree, the roots seemed in good shape, and I sunk the tree deeply in moist, rich, dark compost and then brought it back inside. A few days later, I was examining the roots and noticed that there was an explosion of the little wormies. I pulled a few out and eventually identified them as millipedes.

I always thought millipedes were much larger, and lived in outside gardens. However, this tree sat outside all summer last year, and seems to have picked up a bit of an “infestation.” The new, moist compost has made them VERY happy as well.

I’m left with a sort of a quandary here. The tree is big, and the pot is huge and heavy, so soaking the plant or roots to kill the buggies is not really possible. I have, after reading a bunch on the interwebs, learned that potted plants should only use sterilized potting soil. But this is a tree. Do trees grow in potting soil?

In a few weeks, it will be warm enough outside to move the tree back out, and then I don’t really care if there’s millipedes in the pot. They don’t seem to be harming the tree at all, especially if they’ve been in there all winter. My current line of attack is to fill the top inch of the soil with Diatomaceous Earth. I think this will keep the ‘pedes in the pot, at least until I move the tree outside again.

The weather has been warm, beautiful and dry for months. Our soil is drying up and blowing away on the Front Range. The water managers are starting to wake up at night screaming about the snowpack. And Mark and I were able to get in spring climbing at Vedauwoo a full month earlier than usual.

We pulled out all of the reslung cams on Friday night. The week before, we invested in a new pair of double ropes (Mammut Genesis 8.5mm) to use on Lumpy and in the Park this summer. I also even bought a new Petzl Reverso 3 when I discovered last week that the edge on one side of my old one was worn to a razor sharp edge. So, all kinds of exciting new gear to play with this weekend too!

There are very few climbs in Vedauwoo that you can reasonably do with double ropes. The subset of these that are south facing is an even smaller number of climbs. Luckily, Ed’s Crack fits all of our criteria. It’s two pitches run straight up a beautiful hand crack to a short off-width roof. A double rope rappel gets you right back down to where you started.

Mark was so excited on Saturday morning that he taped up before we left the house. As we pulled out of the driveway, our neighbor stopped us to talk, and exclaimed “Mark! What happened to your hands!?!” We looked at the medical/athletic tape covering the backs of his hands and laughed. “Nothing, yet.”

The main area was still closed when we arrived, so we parked (for free) outside of the gate. There was snow back in the trees, but the road, the base of the climb, the crack and the top of the rocks were all completely snow-free. The sun was shining on us all morning, right up until we set up the rap for the trip down.

We ate lunch as the clouds and wind rolled in. Our ambition to climb more was eroded faster than the dusty topsoil in my garden. We hung out with a cool guy named Chris who was out ropesoloing 4th of July crack that morning. We hiked around the base of the main area and checked out Mainstreet (10a) and Fallout (9), both of which look like they’d definitely go.

It was a warm and mellow day. Shocking weather for Vedauwoo in mid-March. Though, two days later, the weather in Vedauwoo looked like this…

We might not be back for a week or two.

It’s spring, it’s my birthday, and I’m lucky enough to have my favorite group of friends together one more time. Over the weekend, Dylan and Ann came up from Santa Fe, and we joined them with Doug and Liz and Sean for a big dinner on Friday night and a hike up Greyrock Mountain on Saturday. There’s some pictures from the sunny Saturday hike in the gallery.

The hike to the summit of Greyrock is a classic jaunt, starting in the Poudre Canyon northwest of Fort Collins. Doug asked me how many times I’ve hiked this trail, and I came up with a number around 12. I think Saturday was our 13th! It’s amazing that you can do a hike so many times and still love it so much. It was a beautiful day, a wonderful place to get some more miles on my boots, an amazing view, and great friends to share it with.

Thanks, everybody, for a great day, and sore legs! Let’s do it again next year!