Like tweets, but with grammar.
Jake and his dudes (and dudette) made it to the summit of Mount Hood. I’ve been hosting them here at my abode, and visiting upon them massive amounts of homebrew. All is appreciated. Tomorrow they set forth for the summit of Rainier.
Meanwhile, ever since getting back to Hood River I’ve been working way too late at the shop. Tonight I patched a small hole in my kite that’s had me grounded for a spell, so tomorrow it’s time to hit the water again with so much vigor.
I finally got out windsurfing the other day, though to actually call my actions windsurfing would be quite generous. More than anything it was swimming with gear, a new watersport that I am pioneering that draws on my skills at both kiteboarding and windsurfing. I am the ultimate crossover. I do both sports to equal degrees of mediocrity.
Perhaps I am unfair, as I now realize that is has been nearly four years since I last went windsurfing. That would have been the summer of 2003, the first summer I ever spent in Hood River. To speak of milestones, as of last Tuesday it’s been exactly four years since I first moved to Hood River. In my time since that summer I’ve been dabbling exclusively in kiteboarding, and my windsurfing certainly hasn’t progressed as a result of my monomania.
Luckily I still have my waterstarts down, but they’re pretty weak-sauce at this point. I’m familiar with using the footstraps and harness, but to be honest I get kinda freaked out when I flip into the water, and end up stuck under my sail while still hooked into my lines. Like, most people do these sports because they consider them fun, and I assume that’s why I do them as well, but it seems like I’m still at the point where my sessions are fueled by raw fear more than anything else.
I enjoy a good challenge as much as the next guy, but if these sports don’t start feeling more enjoyable and less life-threatening, suffice it to say we’re going to have words.
Anywho, today I went for a hike in the woods and learned that rural Washington celebrates Memorial Day Weekend with beer, guns and trucks. I was driving down a one-lane logging road outside of Trout Lake and every open space alongside the road had been converted into a makeshift campsite, filled with a truck, a tent from Sam’s Club, and people reclining in folding chairs. One group had a particularly impressive spread located on a beautiful stream, with ten mud-covered trucks and enough coolers to match.
In the end I wound up hiking around the Natural Bridges area, a section of trail where an old lava tube had mostly caved in, leaving behind a number of free-standing bridges. There were some neat cliffs and shallow caves to explore, but I turned around when I realized I was getting closer to the din of gunfire.
The Ham Lake Fire is now 100% contained on the American side. It’s still got some elbow room on the Canadian side, but it has mellowed out considerably over the last few days. Today it even snowed up at camp, and so we all breathe a collective sigh of relief as we realize it won’t be burning to the ground this time.
Now that Charter has kindly yanked me from the Dark Ages and fixed mine internets, I’ve finally gotten around to uploading our photos from our backpacking trip to Zion this past March.
As for Hood River, the early summer season is definitely upon us. Cars now stop where there aren’t any stop signs and keep driving where there are, pedestrians randomly dart out into traffic without any sense of self-preservation, all the real estate signs are going up again, and kiters and windsurfers are sparring with one another regarding the proper use of the Event Site.
The weather, too, has been beautiful for the most part. Sadly today it rained all day and was a chilly 50 degrees, which came as a surprise as we’ve been enjoying sunny, 80-degree days in the recent weeks.
Yup, today was kind of a wash out day for Canadian May Long Weekend, but hopefully Monday holds some promise for better weather and better wind. Another round of fisticuffs at The Spit, while unfortunate, would certainly liven things up a bit. Now that the kiters spent all day Saturday piling debris, burning logs and cleaning up The Boneyard, there’s plenty more room to host a tussle.
My beer’s fermentation was slow to start on its first day, but now that the yeast has had a bit of time to get its bearings things are cookin’ right along. My closet currently smells like a blue ribbon at an Appalachia science fair. For future reference I know not to pitch my yeast too early, but the good news is that this batch need not suffer for my haste. “Relax. Don’t worry. Have a homebrew.”
Today I went on an awesome day hike to Tamanawas Falls, a really popular hike near Mount Hood that has become a bit less popular ever since all the bridges washed out in last year’s Glacial Outburst. I parked at the usual trailhead (it seems you can still reach it from the Polallie trailhead as well) and found a 12″ diameter tree that had fallen across the river, granting a 20-foot span over the raging torrent.
After that the hike was pure gravy, except that I was completely unprepared for the sheer scale of Tamanawas Falls. The cascade is fifty feet wide and 125 feet tall, and it roars over a sheer basaltic cliff. The water crashes with such force that it tosses up a thick mist that fills the valley like a cathedral. Thick coats of moss cover everything that the mist envelops, and with some scrambling you can get into a huge alcove that’s actually behind the waterfall.
All that, and I had the place completely to myself.
After hiking I jammed down to The Spit to do some kiting, and was subsequently nuked off the water. Damn, it was gusty today, even for the Gorge. Not even fifteen seconds into my reach I got slammed by a gust, and it was nowhere but downwind for me at that point. I bailed my kite with someone on the beach, and Boardin’ Bob was kind enough to drag my board back into the shallows where I could grab it. Seriously, I owe that guy a beer.
When I got back to the parking lot, I found Adrian nailing someone’s sandal to a post.
I suppose there are two approaches to lost gear.
This weekend I finally got a chance to catch up on what’s happening with the Ham Lake Fire, which is rapidly devouring one of my favorite places on the planet. This is by far the most current and detailed map that I’ve found for the fire, and it really drove home the locality for me. Like, the Gunflint Trail is my neighborhood. That’s where I lived for two summers. I paddled that border route at least a half-dozen times.
I don’t know what to say, except that Sue Prom’s photos already say it all. This one has its own eerie beauty that somehow gives me hope:
While this one breaks my heart:
I donno, I was just thinkin’ less purple, more green. For spring, ya know? That, and I’m becoming unhinged towards my existing branding, the whole “brown and ambiguously-purple” thing. Purple is out, green is in. Next in line is hot pink, but I wanted to ease ya’ll into this thing slowly. Imperceptibly slowly. Perhaps so slowly that it will never actually happen, which is a recurring theme of mine, so much so that one might even call it a branding effort.
Last night while waxing my snowboard I sliced a good hunk of skin off my knuckle. While scraping down the base my hand slipped, and the back of my finger slid clean across the edge of the board. It was a pretty good gash, one that took its sweet time to stop bleeding, but everything seems to be fine and clotted now. I actually had to dig out a Band-Aid (also known as an adhesive medical strip) for this one, which is a rare thing for me. I don’t even keep Band-Aids in the house, but luckily my backpacking first-aid kit was near the surface and I managed to find a couple in there.
I had my backpacking gear strewn all about my living room, for as chance would have it, Kate and I are going backpacking down in Zion National Park the week after SXSW. Our plan is to take two days driving down, spending a night in Salt Lake City in exchange for a few cases of Full Sail brew, take a day to explore the main canyon of Zion, and then spend the rest of our time exploring the backcountry.
When I went backpacking in Zion back in 2002 with Wuda Wooch! we had so many people that we had to split into two groups. Our group explored the Right Fork Trail while the other group went up Coal Pits Wash, so this time ’round Kate and I plan on hitting up Coal Pits. ‘course, we might be at the mercy of weather conditions, water scarcity or other rough-and-tumble groups, so it’s best that we stay flexible in this regard. The Right Fork was certainly no slouch, and we spent days exploring all the intersecting canyons and streams in the area.
Coal Pits seems to offer more as far as getting up on the plateaus and enjoying sweeping vistas, but I’m pretty much cool with whatever. The Southwest as a whole is one of my favorite places on this gol’ danged planet, ever since I went there with my father for spring break when I was in fifth grade. Over the course of a week we toured Las Vegas, Death Valley, the Hoover Dam, the Grand Canyon, Grand Canyon Caverns, and Zion.
In all honestly I spent nearly every waking moment playing my Game Boy, and yet it all seems to have left an impression anyhow. I think my only picture from the Grand Canyon was of the asphalt in a parking lot, when I finally beat Metroid II and set my Game Boy on the ground so I could snap a picture of the end-game sequence.
While I expect most of my pictures from Austin to hold true to a similar degree of pathetic nerdery, here’s hoping that this time around I can return from the Southwest with some better pictures.
What’s up, ya’ll? I was feeling bored and listless, so I rebuilt the desktop wallpaper gallery over at Brainside Out. The new version pulls from a database and generates thumbnails and other nefarious stuff like that, but the most important thing for you guys is actually three most important things:
So what are you waiting for? Go nuts!
UPDATE: We’ve got pictures of the carnage!
It has been raining here for the last two weeks straight. In case you haven’t heard, Oregon is pretty much fucked.
The Hood River was a raging muddy torrent when I went down to check it out yesterday. The river was running so high and so fast that it was producing seven-foot standing waves, which would make for some epic kayaking if it wasn’t for all the detritus coming down from the mountains. Along with the slurry of mud and water there was an endless barrage of logs, brush and sticks, and the occasional tree that was 20 feet long and a foot in diameter.
Needless to say, for the last couple days the Hood River has been belching a constant stream of junk into the Columbia River, and as a result our waterfront looks like mayhem. There’s a debris field that extends downstream from the mouth of the Hood River past the Event Site, a distance of nearly a mile, and it is packed so tightly with logs that in places it looks like you could walk across it. As for the mud, sand and rocks that have been washed down, all that stuff has been settling just outside the mouth of the Hood River.
At the moment, Kite Beach has grown to the point that it pretty much constitutes the entire Hood River waterfront, and all the half-buried logs and trees make it look like a bone yard.
Things don’t get any better as you move upstream. I’ve heard that the Hood River crested at 14 feet above flood stage, and given what I’ve seen (which includes a picture of a railroad trestle mere inches from being underwater) it’s not too hard to believe. Highway 35 is closed between Hood River and Government Camp, as the road is totally fucked up. A section of the highway that parallels the river near Robin Hood Campground was under six feet of water, and in other places the road is chilling out beneath huge mudslides. The bridge over the White River is gone. Gone.
This past weekend Joe and I went on a hike to Burnt Lake, near Zigzag on the southwest side of Mount Hood. To reach the trailhead we took the Subaru on the rugged path around the west side of the mountain, which in many places is just a single-lane gravel washboard.
Even then, the road was nearly impassable because of all the downed trees from the windstorm we had two weekends ago (kindly recall my ghostly night at Smoky Campground). That road, part of which is the popular route to Lost Lake, is hosed as well. Not to mention Zigzag, where swollen rivers there have forced the evacuation of many of the homes that Joe and I drove by last weekend, remarking, “Man, just look at these awesome houses on the river! I would love to have something like this!”
Things aren’t much better elsewhere. The Oregon Coast got pounded, and one person died in Gleneden Beach. Tillamook, the small coastal town of cheese and ice cream fame, got hammered especially hard, with road closures and evacuations and the whole gambit. Record rainfalls have been shattered in places all over the state, with anywhere from 3 inches to 13 inches of rain in a 24-hour period.
That’s the view from here. Monday it was 65 degrees here in Hood River, and so humid it was tropical. Yesterday as I was watching the river do its wild thing, the wind suddenly picked up to 25 mph or so, pelting my face with rain that fell sideways. This morning I woke up to an incredible rainbow over the Columbia River. Across all of these episodes, the one thing that I remember is that it was always raining.
Or maybe it was never raining.
On Saturday night our endless summer came to a screeching halt, and I happened to be outside to witness the transformation. I’ve been feeling slow and lethargic lately, and needed some change in routine to shake out of my rut, so I decided I’d load up the trusty ol’ backpack and hit the trail for a couple days.
There is this place in the Cascade Range, somewhat close to where I’m currently living, that I have been trying to reach for the last three years. It sits somewhere between Mount Hood and the Columbia River, and it’s called Wahtum Lake. As far as lakes in the Cascades go it’s a bit bigger than most, but it’s pretty wimpy compared to anything I’m used to. Nevertheless, Wahtum Lake is a lake and it’s in the mountains, and I love lakes as much as I love mountains, so right there is a natural attraction. Not to mention Wahtum Lake is within 30 miles from Hood River, making it a worthy destination for a quick weekend in the woods.
As I said, this lake has eluded me for three years. In 2003 my friend Ryan and I flew out to Oregon for spring break, and spent a couple days tromping all over Portland, the Oregon Coast and Hood River. This was the first time I had even seen Oregon, so the entire time my head was crazy with all the green. I thought I was going to suffocate on the thick living air, and I figured that would be a dignified death, all things told.
We decided to hit up Eagle Creek for a few days, intending to hike up the canyon all the way to Wahtum Lake. It’s nothing too difficult as far as distance goes, and we had even brought snowshoes for the higher elevations. However, we hadn’t factored in the rain. Oh the rain. The incessant frigid drizzle, that quickly sapped from us all available energies. Ultimately we hiked in for two days, basecamped 7 1/2 Mile Campground for a few days, and hiked out soaking and cold.
That was the first time we tried to make it to Wahtum Lake. My second attempt was a solo trip executed within the warm cocoon of the Subaru, in the spring of 2005. See, you don’t need to hike to Wahtum Lake from the Eagle Creek Trailhead. There are logging roads galore that will, so long as they aren’t washed out or gated shut or being used for, well, logging, take you straight up to Wahtum Lake.
Once again I began my assault on the summit of Wahtum, this time taking a route far less noble, with a support crew that included rear defrosters, fuel injection and a CD player. Despite being so grandly outfitted I was once again sent down without seeing Wahtum Lake, this time because the road was choked with snow. I did find a really cool rough-skinned newt, however, so the trip wasn’t a total loss. His belly was bright orange and he was pumped full of neurotoxins. How exciting!
So yesterday, it was with no small amount of trepidation that I set out for Wahtum Lake. The weather was clear and warm and beautiful, and despite a few near-collisions with oncoming traffic on the one-lane road, I made it to the trailhead without a hitch. Signs posted at the trailhead requested that I post some sort of “pass” or pay some sort of “fee” to leave my car in my parking lot, but I just told said signs to bugger off. I slouched into my backpack and hit the trail.
And after descending a couple hundred feet, I finally saw Wahtum Lake. It’s a nice blue lake, surrounded by steep hills and thick stands of pine. Splendid.
However, Wahtum Lake wasn’t the goal. I was gunning for Smoky Campground, a five-mile southbound hike from the trailhead. It was a wonderful hike with some spectacular views along a 4,000-foot ridge, and the sky was achingly blue. Mount Hood was looking over my shoulder for most of the ridge, and sometimes Mount Jefferson even poked his head up. At one particularly amazing overlook I could see Mount Adams, Mount St. Helens, Mount Rainier, and parts of the North Cascades all adorning the horizon.
I reached Smoky Campground (they call these campgrounds but really they’re just one-banger backcountry campsites) by late afternoon. I hadn’t seen another soul for hours, and I wouldn’t see anyone until I got back to the trailhead the next day. To save weight I had left my tent back at home, bringing only the poles, rainfly and ground cloth. This is the configuration that they often refer to as “quick pitch”, even though there is little that is “quick” about “pitching” with only these tools.
Since you don’t have the actual tent to keep the form, you’re at the whim of the poles, and in accordance with physics the poles tend to fall to the ground. This makes it difficult to do anything with the rainfly but throw it over your head, or maybe tie it around your neck so it blows in the wind like you’re some kind of superhero. Really, this is how I figure you “quick pitch” a tent:
I made dinner. I got cold. I made a fire (which was, strangely enough, the smokiest fire I have ever made in my life). It got dark really quickly, which is when I started realizing how creepy it is to be on a solo trip. I put out the fire and went to bed. It was 7:00.
Sometime during the night, it got cold. Then it got colder. Before long I was deep in my sleeping bag wearing every single layer I had, including my rain jacket. The wind started picking up, and I started cursing this campsite on the top of a ridgeline. Actually, I had no idea how windy it was until I stepped outside to pee. Wow, it was really rippin’ out there, but you could hardly tell from inside. Such was a testament to the fine construction of my tent, even without the actual “tent” part of it, and my awesome quick-pitch skills. Spooky! I slithered back into my sleeping bag and checked my watch, just to see how many more hours of darkness I had left.
It was 8:00.
Anywho, somehow I managed to sleep through the night, even though it was cold and the wind was howling and demons were tromping around outside. In the morning I awoke to more wind, and rain this time around. I gathered my crap, made a hasty breakfast of Milky Ways, and tried my best to dismantle the tent from the inside-out to avoid getting wet. Loaded up and hunkered down in my rain gear, I began the soaking trod back to Wahtum Lake. Whereas on the hike out I could almost see to Canada, this time around I could hardly see 100 feet in front of me. Clouds and fog boiled up and over the ridge, and a silent, relentless drizzle soaked me to the bone.
I was loving every minute of it. In its own dumb way I knew that this was exactly what I wanted.
By the time I reached Wahtum Lake it was snowing, my gloves were sodden, and my hands were useless. I hiked to my car, tossed down my pack, and began the arduous process of extracting my hands from their gloves, and then pulling my car keys out of my backpack. I started the car and loaded my gear into the back, warming my hands in the exhaust so I could summon enough dexterity to peel off my rain gear. Thus unclothed I tossed my dripping layers in the back, climbed into the driver’s seat, and wiped the layers of slush off the windshield.
The thermometer in my car read 34 degrees.
Last night we ran up into the foothills of Mount Hood and, in an effort to appease the winter gods, burned piles of skis at our Pray for Snow party.
It’s amazing how much of the stuff that goes into making a ski, how much of that toxic garbage just burns like hell when you lay torch to it. We also burned cardboard effigies of John Wayne and Fabio, the significance of which was ambiguous, beyond the fact that they were made out of cardboard and they weren’t nailed down. Which was really the reason we burned most of the shit we burned last night.
Once our plumes of black, acrid smoke are finished enveloping the globe and blocking out the sun, we’re bound to have a killer winter this year. That is, assuming that our attempt to decrease the global albedo wasn’t offset by our contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions. Which is very likely.
So.
I had a post here, but as the martini was taking hold I inadvertently closed my browser window. This should be a lesson that the web is not a proper development environment for the discipline of writing, and instead we should write our drafts on something less ephermeral, like composition books or soft clay tablets or coffee mugs.
Thus, this here post is being written in my wholly over-priced and sadly disappointing text editor of choice, which I continue to use because I can’t afford the competition. Or at least that’s what I keep telling myself, given the current weakness of the dollar in the global economy.
What is a euro, anyway? As far as I’m concerned, it’s nothing more than a fancy keystroke, an ASCII-equivalent, an extended character in my font library. Either that, or a brilliant attempt by the mindflayers of the European Union to drag Scandinavia down into the dirt with the rest, to try and force them off their noble crowns and kroners and kronas and the whole lot.
Anyway, BBEdit really isn’t all that bad. It just feels… clunky. I mean, I continue to use it because it has really robust RegEx support, but even its search-and-replace dialogue is disappointing. Seriously, hitting the “return” key doesn’t start a new line, but instantly executes my half-baked script? And yet the paltry three-line textareas aren’t resizable? And your HTML toolbar wastes more of my time than it saves? And your automatic code-coloring, in a word, sucks? BBEdit, you’re fucking lucky the Euro is roaming around these days, because it’s the only reason I’m still with you.
That and inertia. Curse you Newton, for inventing both.
I don’t know why, but my mind keeps drifting to trolls. Not the trolls in World of Warcraft, mind you, but the little ugly ones that roam the northern reaches of Minnesota. As I recall, trolls were introduced to Minnesota by the early Scandinavians who settled the area. They smuggled over from the Old World while hiding in liquor barrels and tiny, tiny thatched houses and rotten moss-covered logs that the Scandinavians brought over to remind themselves of their homeland.
These trolls look like they’re made out of wood and grass and nuts and pine needles, and if you ever caught one and brought it to your nose you would say the same for the smell (though some are thought to bathe infrequently and may smell slightly of duff as a result). However, it is important to remember that trolls are indeed made of meat, just like the rest of us, as it would be silly to think that a living thing could be made of anything besides meat. How absurd!
It is said that every time you say “I don’t believe in trolls!” a troll somewhere dies. I find this to be a ridiculous notion, and I demand those who researched the matter to cite their sources. Even for a humanoid species as closely tied to the environment as trolls are, it’s hard to believe that the mere utterance of a few words would have a direct causal relationship with their untimely deaths.
Now, it’s feasible that when the above statement is said it will set into motion a chain of events that inevitably brings about the death of a troll. If that is the case, however, it becomes a question of whether or not the person who said “I don’t believe in trolls!” is morally responsible for the death. I suppose that depends if the person who made the utterance said it with autonomy (in that he or she was not compelled by another to say it), and if the chain of events involved any other autonomous beings that knowingly could have chosen one way or the other to cause a troll’s death.
Genocide or not, I still haven’t figured out if trolls live in the forests of the Northwest. My friend lives across the river in Snowden, and most of his neighbors claim that they have seen sasquatch and aliens… he also adds that his neighbors are the kind of people that have always seen sasquatch or aliens. A few weeks ago there was a creepy event where a number of goats had their udders surgically removed, which as far as I’m concerned neither proves nor disproves the presence of sasquatch, aliens, neighbors, or even goats for that matter.
Trolls, though? I have no idea on that one. Really, no idea. Maybe I’ll find out while camping under the stars for our Pray for Snow party at the base of Mount Hood tomorrow.
Dane Petersen is a one part interaction designer, one part design technologist, and three parts troublemaker. He enjoys playing outside, talking loudly and waving his hands around.
Dane has worked as a wilderness guide, snowboard instructor, windsurf technician and envelope stuffer. He loves space, airplanes, saunas, running, backpacking and homebrewing.
At GE he designed diagnostics apps for monitoring jet engines, at Filament he built cross-platform apps for managing industrial IoT sensor networks, and at Adaptive Path he helped companies like PG&E, Sunrun and Nike strategize great digital products.
His portfolio is at thegreatsunra.com.
You can email him at
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