So far I’m 5 for 5…..
5 days of skiing
5 days of power.
Can’t go wrong there! We had a great day of skiing at Sunday River in Maine.. snow like out West.. fantastic. Flash forward a week to Idaho… almost continuous snowfall around McCall, Idaho means skiing fresh powder every morning. I spent a lot of time in the trees, with at least waist-high powder blows at every turn.
A nice somersault through the powder resulted in this:
How good is that?
I’ve got a few days left in town, and hopefully there’ll be more powder before I head back East to ski the ice.
On 19 December 2007, Mike and I went up to the famous Black Dike climb on Cannon Cliff in New Hampshire. We were scoping it out for a possible attempt. The weather was great and the ice fat, so we headed up! The 1200ft gain on the approach had us well warmed up, although we had to wait for a party already on the route.
After quite a wait, Mike started up the first pitch of easy climbing. I followed as soon as he’d set a belay above and reached the bottom of the second pitch without incident. Again, Mike took the second pitch: the crux of the route. WI4 in it’s current shape. He dispatched with the two vertical stretches without issue, and I cleaned the pitch behind him. It was a fun pitch. Quite beat out due to the high traffic, but still a great climb. I took the third pitch, which was fairly easy although had some interesting turf-climbing at the end to gain the top of the cliff.
It was a fantastic day.. not cold, little wind. Couldn’t have asked for better.. Ignoring the time spent waiting at the bottom of the route, we did it car-to-car in 4.5 hours. No speed record, but still a respectable time.
Black Dike – (19 December 2007) on Flickr
I’ve uploaded more pictures from the Astronomy Ironman to my flickr page. I recently received my developed slides, and once they’ve been scanned in, I’ll upload those as well. In the meantime, more star trails (and a few cloud pictures) are available.
UVa Astronomy Ironman Collection on Flickr
Additionally, when we returned from the trip, another grad student and myself went up to Fan Mountain Observatory and shot some more star trails. We were hoping to catch the meteor shower that night, but were unable to record any meteors due to clouds. However, we did get some good pictures, which are also online:
Fan Mountain Observatory on Flickr
