Recent hikes
Started: 2007-04-26 20:13:01
Submitted: 2007-04-26 20:48:46
Visibility: World-readable
Most of what I do these days on this page is document my hikes. Kiesa's mother visited last weekend, after some portion of the week at a conference in Colorado Springs. On Saturday, we took a short hike at Button Rock Preserve. On Sunday, I set out on my own and death-marched up Estes Cone, starting at Lily Lake, across the street from where I set out to climb Twin Sisters a week before. I took a trail not marked on any of my maps, but Google Earth told me it existed and the sign at the trailhead itself backed it up. It was a 3.5 mile, 2000 vertical foot hike to the summit, looping around the south-east side of the conical mountain to a four-way junction at Storm Pass and a steep scramble to the summit. I carried my snowshoes the whole way; there was snow on the ground most of the way, but most of it wasn't deep enough to justify snowshoes. Some of the snow was, but it was usually separated by bare earth. (The whole hike is documented, by someone else, here.) My new theory is I should look for small snowshoes that won't give me full flotation in powder but could give me enough to keep from postholing in spring slush.
While I wasn't hiking, I put together a pair of Perl scripts to help me manage my ever-expanding rounds of photos by keeping track of which photos I've intentionally ignored. (Normally I take three to five photos for every one that makes it on my public photo archive.) I now have a new "todo" directory which includes hard links to the raw photos that I haven't yet cropped or explicitly ignored. I now have a good idea how many photos are still in my todo list, and it's a pretty big number.
Sunday night Kiesa and I headed down to the Fillmore to see The Decemberists, a hyper-literate prog rock band from Portland. (I ranked their latest album, The Crane Wife, number two for 2006.) Immediately before they came on stage, the PA played a recording of what I'm pretty sure was the National Anthem of the Soviet Union. The Decemberists played a great show, including a sing-along contest (splitting the venue down the middle) singing "la de-da de-da de-da-de-da" from "16 Military Wives", and an intentionally-cheesy whale prop for "The Mariner's Revenge Song" during the encore. (This will mean very little to those who haven't heard the songs.)
The downside is we didn't get out of the concert until after 2300 (after the curfew the band tried to hit as penance for leaving early the last time they were in town) and home until 0000.
On Wednesday, I drove to Golden to visit a customer there; this would have worked better if their system had actually been running properly. Undeterred, I left at noon and hiked at Apex Park in Golden. Once I got into the canyon, there were six inches of snow on the ground from the previous day's snow with only a few sets of tracks.
Today I hiked to Royal Arch before gathering for pre-Hacking Society supper at the Mountain Sun. These two events probably didn't balance each other out calorie-wise.
