Category Archives: On The Road

On the day after the snow and the storms, we piled the family into the rented Cherokee, and headed south to check out Crater Lake National Park. I was really excited to finally be able to visit this park. For years, I’ve had an inherited poster on the wall of my office, that describes sonic mapping of the volcanic caldera where the lake is located. Now I would finally have a chance to see the lake for myself.

The lake is almost 6 miles across, and at 1,943ft deep, it is the deepest lake in the US. The lake fills the volcanic caldera when Mt Mazama collapsed more than 7,000 years ago. This is the first time I’ve ever been to a place that a mountain used to be. Mt Mazama, once 12,000ft tall, is no longer in existence. Instead, a deep, lovely blue lake sits at 6,000ft. One of the most interesting things about this huge lake is that there are no inlets or outlets. It is filled with local rain and melted snow, and water does not overflow the caldera because of evaporation and seepage through the walls of the crater.

There are, of course, a bunch of photos in the gallery.

Crater Lake national park is about three hours south of Bend, or Sunriver, OR. The park mostly consists of just the lake and the surrounding ridgeline. A road runs all the way around the crest of the crater, weaving in and out of the edge of the crater, and providing a myrid of beautiful spots to stop and view the lake.

On our visit, the wind was blowing cold and bitterly over the edge of the crater. The lake below was rippled, blue, and beautiful. We arrived just before lunch, and took in several views before stopping to eat very tasty meatball subs and chilli dogs at the visiters’ center on the southern rim of the crater.

We spent the afternoon driving all the way around the lake, and stopping frequently to enjoy each new view. There were volcanic islands and rock features, old growth forests, waterfalls from ancient seeping springs, and amazing views in every direction. We all had a great day, and probably, as a family, took close to 1000 pictures in the course of the day.

Every turn of the road revealed a new profile or secrete of the lake. And the most astounding part of the day: we were nearly alone in the park. Throughout the day, we saw only a few other cars and a hand-full of families at the visiters’ center. For a park that receives millions of visitors each summer, we were very lucky to be there on a beautiful, sunny day, when the crowds were completely gone.

On Monday, the weather forecast looked awful. The skies were clear over our condo, but all of the weather sites promised that we were wrong, it was actually cold, raining and snowing outside. Mark and I relaxed for a while, but eventually we decided to get out for as long as we could. The rest of the family had arrived the previous Thursday, and had already done some local sight-seeing. Mark and I decided Monday was as good of a day as any to enjoy the local Oregon features.

I wandered around the resort at first, taking pictures of the lovely yellow aspens and the clear blue skies. There’s a lot of photos from the day in the gallery.

We then drove a few miles south to check out Newberry National Volcanic Monument. This area of mountains, forests, lakes and rivers contains a huge portion of the regions surrounding Sunriver, but we wanted to see some Oregonian waterfalls and the Big Obsidian flow.

The Obsidian flow was all it promised to be. A huge mountainside covered in sharp, glossy black obsidian and pumice rocks. The flow was a mere 1200 years old, and I wondered what it might have been like to be living in the area when this volcano erupted. The rocks were sharp, and beautiful. It looked like great stuff to make knifes and arrowheads out of, but none of the local museums and Indian stores carried obsidian replicas. Too bad.

On our hike off the flow, the sky darkened, and we started getting snowed on. Regardless, we hiked out to see the waterfalls at the mouth of the lake. The dark, overcast skies made for perfect waterfall shots, and I worked that camera until my fingers and face were numb.

And now, one more shot from the day. Mark caught this sign on the way into the monument. I couldn’t see anything wrong with it until Mark pointed it out to me. Looks like Oregon is getting good work from their inmates!

Mark’s parents got very lucky this spring, and managed to get their hands on two (yes TWO) condos in Bend, OR, for a week of vacation this October. Mark and I were completely excited to finally have a chance to visit the Pacific North West, and to get in some climbing at the legendary Smith Rock.

So, we packed and planned. With our climbing gear, flying would be very expensive. The easiest, and cheapest way out was to simply drive the Prius, and hope the 1000 miles went by quickly. We planned to camp along the way, and try to get out to Oregon as fast as possible.

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On Friday after work, we dropped off Liv at D-Liz’s house (her vacation home) and headed northwest into Wyoming. Even though we are still on daylight-savings time, the sunset came early, and we found ourselves driving across the inky dark desert of Wyoming just west of Laramie. We ended up camping for the night at a KOA set directly next to the interstate in Rawlins.

We set up the tent in the pitch dark, and Mark woke up at 6am, in the pitch dark. He made coffee and set up the tent heater for me. I woke up because my head got hot and the tent smelled like bagels. We had camp broken down and were on the road before sunrise on Saturday – around 7am.

The drive across the western states was beautiful and long and boring and lovely. We saw mountains and deserts, waterfalls and rivers, the Great Salt Lake, the Oregon Trail, and a lot of road. We didn’t stop much – we didn’t have to, really. And we rolled our tired but happy selves into Bend (and then Sunriver, where the condos were) at about 8:30p local time Saturday night. We spent $75 on gas in the Prius and $20 on camping. Not too bad for a long day on the road!

As our week of relaxation and humidity rolled to a conclusion, we had one more big event to look forward to: the celebration of the 4th. In the last 4 years, or so, Mark and I have shown our patriotism by finding the most remote backpacking or climbing local we can, and spending the long weekend there. This year, we got to eat my Dad’s famous Baseball Pizza (hotdogs, cheddar cheese and mustard on pizza crust – really tasty), my Mom’s famous macaroni salad and Miller’s infamous lime beer.

There’s a ton of fun fireworks pictures up in the gallery.

Amy and Murray spent the afternoon hanging out with us and playing song after song on Rock Band. It turns out, Amy has rhythm, Mark has strong hands and very fast fingers, and I am completely tone deaf and but know all the words to all of the songs. If we turn down the volume on my singing, we make a pretty kick-ass band.

In the evening, Amy headed to her friend’s house in Webster, and we rode our bikes down to Kirkwood park for the show.

It was fun being back at Kirkwood park with the family for the 4th again. When I was in highschool, we’d spend the whole day at the park, throwing frisbees and hanging out in the sun on the grass. This year we had just enough time for Mark and I to get a snow cone and Dad to beat me at cribbage before the lights went off and the explosions started.

Liv is terrified of loud noises these days (we had an unfortunate evening with a cannon firing into our apartment a few years ago), so we left her at home in the basement. She was pretty happy to see us when we made our way back later that night.

It was a great week and great vacation. I’m glad we had a chance to spend the holiday with old friends and family. Thank you everybody!

One of the best parts of our trip to St. Louis this summer was the chance to spend some time with my childhood friend Amy. She’s living a fantastic urban life in St. Louis, and loving it. Last year, she took a chance and tried out for a local Taiko group.

This is a Japanese performance art, with roots that go back thousands of years. The drums are huge and loud, and your chest and heart thumps along with the music. The drummers sing and dance as they play, with long beautiful lines and roaring passionate screams. Amy is incredibly, and surprisingly, good at this. Surprising because Amy has had very little in the way of musical, dance or performance instruction in her life. In fact, some of my fondest memories in highschool are of hanging out with Amy at football games and making fun of the band. Now here she is in, essentially, a hardcore drum line!

To see a cool video of the group performing last year, check this out. For more pictures of the thursday night practice, head to the gallery.

While Mark and I were in town, Amy asked permission, and Mark and I were allowed to come watch one of their practices. The group practices 3-4 times a week for 3-4 hours at a stretch. The drumming is a huge workout, with long arm swings and leg lunges. The drummers use their whole body to produce the music, and it is a sound unlike any other. Mark and I were entranced by even their timing exercises and the song which they practiced over and over again that night. I took about 300 pictures before the evening was up, and Mark took some video.

To get a real feel for what it’s like to just watch the 8 or so people who showed up that night practice, plug your computer into a 30″ bass amp and turn the volume up to eleven when watching this video.

Amy and I had long conversations the next day about how drumming and dance were so much like rock climbing. Both are moving mediations, ways for our restless western minds to focus pure attention on a single moment. In life, you learn more about yourself in those quiet times, those places between thoughts, than you ever do in the normal clutter and clatter of brain work. Whether it’s pounding a drum, jamming a crack, spinning and dancing or sticking that dyno, when we find a way to truly focus ourselves on a single task, we find the source of all of our personal power.

So, how do a couple of Colorado climbers keep themselves busy in St. Louis in the summer? Welp, we’ve been all over town and having a great time. There’s a bunch of random pictures up in the gallery.

Mostly, we’ve been enjoying perfect weather at home, relaxing in the afternoons and then heading out to buzz around town in the evenings. Our first night in we went for a walk down Zombie Road. I suppose Kevin heard about this one on one of his paranormal shows, and Mark and I went along for the ride on his “investigation.” Here’s a description from the website:

Those who recall the road when it was more widely in use have told me that the narrow, winding lane, which runs through roughly two miles of dense woods, was always enveloped in a strange silence and a half-light. Shadows were always long here, even on the brightest day, and it was always impossible to see past the trees and brush to what was coming around the next curve. … Strangely, even those that I talked to with no interest in ghosts or the unusual all mentioned that Zombie Road was a spooky place. I was told that one of the strangest things about it was that it never looked the same or seemed the same length twice, even on the return trip from the dead end point where the stone company’s property started. “At times”, one person told me, “we had the claustrophobic feeling that it would never end and that we would drive on forever into deeper darkness and silence.”

We were out there in the pitch black darkness, with only two headlamps between the six of us. It was a creepy spot. The road runs down the middle of a narrow, deep ravine, and was very, very dark. We didn’t see any ghosts or zombies. One guy on a mountain bike riding in the dark with no light, but that was it. A little weird, but nothing unexplainable. Of course, we didn’t last more than 10 minutes or so on that road. And it was definitely longer on the way out than the way in.

We had our obligatory stop at Ted Drew’s for tasty custard. The place was packed and had quite the party atmosphere of an iconic roadside eatery on a summer evening. Good food, fun stop, a must do.

We’ve also spent a good bit of time catching up on our movie watching. We saw Wanted, and thoroughly enjoyed it. It had the surrealistic feel of Fight Club, without too much of the disturbing insanity bits. I’ve got to say, watching the trailer just now, the movie wasn’t quite what it seemed to be advertised to be. A very twisting plot. Angelina Jolie was not a love interest. And the main character never said “Whoa!” once.

And, there’s always food and beer. My mother is an amazing cook, and this week we’ve had the best bar-b-que in years, fantastic macaroni salads and I had my first SLT (Spam-Lettuce-Tomato) sandwich today. Pretty good, really. We’ve also hit up local breweries a bit, including Fitz’s in my old stomping grounds in the Loop, and Schlafly’s in Maplewood. All good food! Climbing might be a bit harder when we get home.

Not that Kansas isn’t an exciting place. In fact, Mark and I have probably come closer to disaster in this state than in any other. But, after living in Colorado for a few years, it’s easy to become a little elitist about adventures and vacations. After all, don’t most people come to my town on their vacations? Doesn’t it seem like the tourists from the midwest are the ones getting themselves into trouble in the mountains? (Actually, thinking about it, most of the people I read about dying in horrible accidents are Coloradoans).

So, when Mark and I decided to scrub our trip to the Tetons, and cancel our climbing plans up the iconic alpine test-piece that is the Grand Teton, we didn’t say it, but we were a little disappointed. After all, we exist in a world of adventure and excitement, surely a trip to the midwest would be, comparatively, dull.

We left Colorado on Saturday morning with the Prius packed full of camping gear and CSA veggies. We drove east at a leisurely pace, stopping to talk to motorcyclists and having picnics outside of Arby’s. At about 2pm, we were driving along the country side when our last bar on the electronic gas gauge started blinking. The computer screen on the Prius warned us “Refuel now!” Mark and I started discussing where we should stop for gas. After all, our tank has an 11 gallon capacity, and we had gone 450 miles at an average 51 mpg, so we should have only burnt 9 gallons of fuel. A minute later the Check Engine light came on, the computer screen blinked the word “Problem” and the car lost power rapidly.

Mark and I pulled over, and after calling Toyota and panicking for several minutes, we determined we had just run out of gas. In our Prius. Obviously, expensive technology cannot save us from ourselves. Mark had only been able to put in 9 gallons of gas the day before, which had been enough to read “full” on the gauge. And get us 450 miles across Colorado and Kansas before running out.

We were able to drive the last mile to a gas station on battery alone, where we topped off the tank with a full 10.5 gallons, and headed out to find a campsite for the night.

After our adventure in bad math, we were near our originally planned campsite in Kanopolis. It was early in the evening, so we decided to keep going the next park was outside Manhattan, Kansas, home to KSU, and was hosting a HUGE country music festival on Saturday night. We were stuck in traffic for an hour and never got a site. We finally found ourselves at Lake Perry State park, north of Topeka, at sunset. We got a primitive site on the edge of a huge lake, and had a great night of camping.

Camping in the midwest was full of wonderful surprises. There were lightening bugs everywhere! I had forgotten how wonderful and magical lightening bugs were. We saw huge deer, a skunk, beavers, and HUGE wild turkey’s in the forest around the lake. We slept in the warm, still, night air, not worried about wind or bears for the first time in a long while.

At sunrise, we were woken up at dawn by a giant cricket under our tent. Mark helped me with some yoga shots on the banks of the fantastic lake, and then we packed up and finished our drive to St. Louis.

I suppose it’s only fitting that the adventure and beauty of a place are indirectly proportional to the amount of time you spend there. Mark and I have started to find camping in Rocky Mountain national park tedious and crowded, if you can believe that! But our one quiet night on the banks of a midwestern lake made me remember that there are plenty of beautiful spots east of the Front Range too.

Pictures from the fantastic campus are up in the gallery.

I have to admit, my last trip to LA was a lot of fun, but also involved a lot of traffic and a lot of freeways. I can’t say I fell in love with the city. And I won’t say that it happened on this trip either. Though, the city did improve itself in my eyes when I got to spend a few days working at the UCLA campus. I always imagined UCLA being a huge city school, in the heart of downtown Los Angeles – which was never pretty in my mind. And the school is huge, and it’s just north of downtown LA, but it is amazingly … lovely.

Of course it helped that the days were sunny and warm, with highs near 70F and never a cloud in the sky. I was surprised at how much I subconsciously missed things like green grass and feeling the sun on my neck. There were flowers everywhere, and trees with green leaves or even avocados still hanging on them. And the buildings on the campus were amazing. Just covered in detail carvings, tilework, arches, porticoes, balconies and towers. You really got to check out the gallery.

My college was functional. I learned a lot, I had some fun, and I always felt safe during my four years of living in the middle of a corn field in Indiana. But if I had known UCLA was so nice, I might have reconsidered my options at the time!!