Furniture 1
A temporary furniture arrangement using some furniture that sits around uselessly (note: some of the furniture items in the photograph are used daily). In a future furniture post, I’ll introduce you to other possible arrangements of furniture (both useless and useful).
Hey maaaan, just got back from a groovy shroom fest outside Eugene.
A week in the Italian Alps
I recently got back from a trip to the Italian Alps. I spent a few days at a conference and had a few days to do some extra exploring. Here are some photos of Roman ruins in Aosta, Gran Paradiso mountains, the conference hotel and village, and Cervino (Matterhorn). Enjoy.
Train ride to Valle d’Aosta
Citta d’Aosta
Parco Nazionale del Gran Paradiso
Torgnon (Conference Site)
Field trip
Larch forest canopy below and above
Cervino
Cali trippin’
September road trip through northern California: Redwoods, Lake Tahoe and Yosemite.
The Dilemma
Tombstone Pass Exploring
Tombstone Pass is the closest place I can go for snow in the Cascades; it’s about an hour and a half away. I finally got out there on the last day of April to explore the snow and look for some good lines (to dominate next winter). I hadn’t gone snowboarding in about a month, so I was pretty excited to finally get out after some busy weeks with research. Matt and I skinned up Cone Peak, and after finding hard snow all the way up, we hung out for a couple hours on the summit, waited for the sun to come out, and took a couple awesome runs. The verdict is that the place is rad, and the snow won’t be gone for a while. So, I’ll be scoping out the terrain here into June hopefully.
Matt Reilly looks over a snowless, clear-cut patched valley after ascending cone peak. He’s probably feeling pretty good.
You can totally see my tracks.
It gets all cliffy up in here.
So… the sun came out.
Iron Peak. You’re next. Or after South Peak. Or… I don’t know.
Free to move
I shoot most of my photos when I’m traveling. I would love to be more active in my photography in my everyday life, but most of the time I leave my camera at home – despite daily opportunities for interesting photos daily in my every day life. It’s just a real challenge to manage a camera on my bike commute each day (it’s heavy, it takes up room for groceries, and it turns out a grad student’s schedule is quite busy). This may highlight some need for life adjustments, but it also shows why it’s so easy to document one’s travels – no responsibilities, no time constraints, and views that are so different from everyday life.
I usually wait until I reach my travel destination before the camera comes out. However, traveling to a destination is one of my favorite parts of a trip – seeing how the environments change and how one place transitions into another. These sights, while moving from point A to B, are also routine to the ordinary lives of some people.
On my recent “spring break” drive to Idaho (wooo!), I captured the ordinary sights for some and the unusual sights for myself, which collectively describe the variety of landscapes in eastern Oregon and southern Idaho (mostly Oregon).
Cañon de Colca
Cañon de Colca is the second deepest canyon in the world. The deepest is Cotahausi, which is close by and only slightly deeper. I’m not quite sure of the exact measurements, but the canyons are more than 10,000ft from top to bottom at the deepest. This is more than twice as deep as the Grand Canyon, which I’ve never been to, but I know even that must seem insanely deep.
The canyon lies near the Peruvian city of Arequipa and is a popular hiking destination and place to see condors. Prior to going to Macchu Picchu, I joined a 3-day guided hike in the canyon along with several new friends. This involved getting on a bus in Arequipa at 3 in the morning to the town of Cabanaconde, some 5 or 6 hours away and hiking down into the canyon on the first day. Mind you, this was not a descent from the deepest part, but a 3,000ft descent to villages that have persisted inside the canyon long before the time of the Incas.
The bus ride there revealed how humans have been architecting and changing the face of the land for thousands of years with terraces dug out of the steep, rugged lands. The hiking trail into the canyon was not so much a hiking trail, but one of many roads that have serviced communities inside the canyon for – again, I’m not sure exactly how long – at least a thousand years. These roads are used by farm workers, traders, and now tourists like myself with the only “vehicles” being sheep, mules, llamas, or any other animal that can carry something or be eaten.
What I found most amazing of the entire trek was the ability for irrigation to transform a desert landscape into a luscious, green oasis of fruit trees and crops. The descent into the canyon saw us shuffling down a dry, gravel trail surrounded by sand and cacti under the hot sun. After crossing to the opposite side of the canyon, we moved into an entirely new atmosphere – one full of bright colors, a sense of life, shade from the sun, and nice place to rest for the night. All this is possible through the networks of irrigation canals channeling water from the glaciers high above to the bananas and oranges and maize and quinoa and life below.
The second day involved hiking through various communities of the canyon, including getting turned away from one village over a loud-speaker. Four of us, got up early and separated from the rest of the group to check out the village of Tapay. We hiked up 2,000ft in elevation along staircases, terraces, and canals while following our guide’s confusing hand-drawn map. After an hour or so of climbing, we rounded the corner to see that we were finally where we intended to be. After a quick break, we started on up to the village until being stunned by a man speaking over a loud-speaker. It was loud, and sounded very directed – towards us. We agreed, from a our combined Spanish knowledge, that the message was roughly – “To the group of three (they must not have seen me, as I was off taking some photos), do not enter the village. All the people have left to work in the fields. If you would like to come back later, please do so at 3 in the afternoon”. Or something like that. Not really what we expected to happen when walking into a remote village in a canyon in Peru – I guess they have a lot of tourists wandering in there.
And on the third day, we hiked out of the canyon back to Cabanaconde and returned to Arequipa. In hindsight, I would have avoided a guided trek and made my way to the canyon by my own effort. It seems like there’s no shortage of hostels in and around Cañon de Colca, and going alone (or with a friend or two) would allow you to see the other sights in the canyon not seen by the regular 3-day trekkers. Give me a shout if you want to get there sans guided trip.
First day – hike to community at the very bottom of the canyon. Second day – hike to Tapay, at the top, Cosnirgua, the other community, and to Malata and the resorty tourist town, Oasis.
Chewing coca leaves as a good way to ameliorate the effects of the high-altitude.
I added this picture to point out that everything used to build this bridge was carried into the canyon – by people and their animals.
Trying to interpret the map.
Being turned away from Tapay – over loud-speaker.
Oasis, where they keep the tourists.
Enjoying winter snowboarding in the backcountry
I managed to get out and snowboard today. It appears that winter is returning. I enjoyed snowboarding. Winter might bring a couple feet of snow this week. I would also enjoy that. Snowboarding in the backcountry is fun. I intend to do so following the upcoming winter storm.
Enjoy these (mostly) backcountry snowboarding photos from earlier this winter in Wyoming. Sorry, there are no photos of anyone snowboarding.
Grand Teton (and Mount Owen and Middle Teton) viewed from Mary’s Nipple at Grand Targhee. Best view I’ve had from a ski area.
Same three, but from Teton Canyon.
Shredding and cuttin’ down trees.
Mountain pine-beetled tree
Radio reflector
El mirador
Mount Glory summit, and hut. It can be hard to forget you’re in the backcountry with the high traffic.
There’s certainly no other place like it. I’m guessing the Old West was a bit different though.
Surface hoar.
Winter sunshine
I have a pretty warped perception of Oregon winters. I know this. It’s supposed to rain all winter, and when it’s not raining it’s supposed to be dark and cloudy and gloomy. This winter hasn’t exactly been like that. In the past month, there’s been more days of complete sunshine and cloudless skies than there has been days of rain. This is the only Oregon winter I’ve experienced, so it’s the only one I have to base off of.
Fortunately, an intense la niña in November and December has helped me appreciate this wonderful weather. In those months, it would pour (I mean literally pouring) for several days in a row. It was cold too. It even snowed a few times. That’s unusual here, but not unusual to me. Anyway, after that weather, a day with only a little bit of rain and little bit of sun was a pretty nice day. So give yourself a warm, sunny day and you’ve got a really fucking nice day. And we’ve had lots of those this past month; it’s been really fucking nice month. People can’t believe how nice it is.
But I came here to snowboard. That was one of my big motivations for moving to Oregon – the massive amounts of snow. When it rains here in the valley (at 200′), it snows in the mountains (at ~5,000′+). And I haven’t gone snowboarding in over month since it stopped raining and got warm. On New Year’s Day, I was snowboarding on Mary’s Peak, the tallest mountain that is close to where I live. A month later, in February, the snow is gone. But I’ve been able to enjoy the peak with a hike and a mountain bike ride.
And now I’m desperately waiting for some snow (which means rain here) so I can get on my new splitboard. If this winter has taught me anything, it’s that there’s something good to come of any type of weather (I’ll make an exception for weather events that destroy homes and kill people). So, no matter the weather, there’s fun to be had in one form or another. You can’t make the weather, so learn to appreciate it.
And here’s some photos of me learning to appreciate a warm, sunny day at the beach in January. (Don’t hate me. I can appreciate this weather more than Californians do.)
