Reduced Thermal Activity

For those of you whom are not in Oregon, the Willamette valley has been hit (and is being hit) by one of the gnarliest cold snaps we have seen in a while. Being the filthy, despicable optimist that I am, there are some unforeseen benefits of all this nasty weather. The Jackson-Frazier wetlands, located a few hundred feet behind my place of residence, has turned into a winter wonderland rife with aesthetic ice formations, snow cloaked shrubs and other winter treasures. It is bound to excite even the most amateur photographer. That's right, even me.

With such great beauty comes great inconvenience. No, I don't mean figuring out how to get rid of that annoying guy at the bar. The wintry weather might not allow me to get down to California in time for the Gradek family Christmas party. Let me just say I've never left the chains on this long. As sad as missing family members during the holiday might be, with rumors of ice forming in the Gorge and frozen Mac forest riding on the horizon, I think I'll get by. If this new storm socks us in more than the last, I think most Oregonians aren't going anywhere for a while...'cept for those with tools and crampons.

Love at First Sight

Big Gray

This is Big Gray. She's the boss. Out of our 11 chickens at Shaun's house, she is first in the pecking order, first up in the morning and pretty much is the queen of the coop. She doesn't really have to peck at the other's to assert her dominance, but when that scrap of stale tortilla hits the ground the others know not to be in her way.

.

The other day, I observed her doing something curious. I've seen chickens peck at lots of inedible things like... say wood or rocks. But usually they figure it out after a couple of trys. Anyways, Big Gray was plucking the wire that the cylindrical feeder was suspended from. What was strange was that she kept at it, which made the feeder bob back and forth. Then I figured it out. The chickens feed from the rim at the bottom of the feeder. Their voracious appetites eventually exhaust the food supply for the day, but Big Gray has learned to cock her head into the top to see if there is food in the center. Then she expertly shakes the feeder back and forth and jostles the feed out to the edge where she can get it. Birds, as a rule are not said to be very intelligent (Ravens and Jays notwithstanding) but this impressed me.

.

Having chickens has been fun and beneficial in a number of ways, besides getting some mighty tasty eggs. Chickens will eat anything. ANYTHING. Have some chips that went stale, or some lettuce that is a little ratty? It's OK, they'll take care of it in matter of minutes. And yes, just because I was curious, I fed them some chicken one day (am I going to hell for that?). They enjoyed the turkey bacon I fed them today as well. I almost never have to throw anything organic away, and the rest can go in the compost pile. The only thing they will not eat, for a reason I can not fathom, are mint leaves.

.

With all the leaf litter on the ground in Corvallis this time of year, I figured I'd let the birds handle it. Inside the coop, with their constant scratching and movement, it only takes a few weeks for the leaves to get trampled into a fine duff that will be great organic matter for the garden. On top of that, the chickens deposit one of the finest nitrogen sources around in the leaves. One man's trash is another man's treasure...

Prop 8: This pretty much sums it up for me

A little satire to lighten the mood. Still worried about those ice caps though....

Ice Plants

Ice Plants... a misnomer perhaps? I've seen them growing in So Cal. Anyways, here's a few pictures from a couple of weeks ago during my visit to Stone Lagoon in Redwood National Park.

The Garden is Toast

The onset of raindrops the size of hockey pucks has spelled death for the tomatoes and just about everything else in the garden. The sunflowers are in a decrepit, rotting state, the squash are gone, the eggplant terminated, the sweet peas a distant memory and we even finished off the last of the potatoes the other day. But everything has a flipside. Coming from a farming family means it makes me smile to see the hills get some precipitation and the wetlands and reservoirs swell to their limits. The nights have been hinting at the promise of snow soon (and some fresh "pow pow"). It also makes for some vicious wet roots on the trails... but I digress. As much as the darkness and gray weather gets people down, scraping mud off your face after a ride and watching it hammer outside with a hot cup of tea in hand is just doing it for me right now. Bring on winter.

Below are some of the bounties wrought in warmer times. Our corn sucked this year and the brussel sprouts made aphids drop to their knees at the sight of the promised land. But there can be no denying that Shaun, Carl and I can grow some mean Thai hot peppers.


Our little watermelon plant strove mightily this summer, and despite cool weather and other abuses it produced one basketball sized fruit. We just finished it the other day. So tasty!

Sawtooth Mountain

Continuing my trend of ass-whoopin' this summer, my brother and I hiked over 20 miles and 5,000 vertical feet only to get thwarted a couple hundred feet shy of the summit of Sawtooth Mountain in the Trinity Alps wilderness. The summit pyramid was a maze of castellated granite spires and we were out of time (turn-around time was 4:00pm and it was 3:52 I believe). We also had a good 10 miles back to the truck, so it was a wise decision to bail. I found out later you don't need gear to summit, but weaving your way to the top must take some pretty clever route finding.

The trip of course was not a total wash. Far from it in fact. The clean, white granite of the Canyon Creek watershed is absolutely stunning. I've said it before and I will say it again, the Trinity Alps are one of the greatest mountain ranges that almost nobody has heard of.

Beautiful Upper Canyon Creek Lake

Right at our turn-around point at about 8,500 feet

Upper Canyon Creek falls behind me flowing over stellar granite slickrock

Another reason the trip was not a wash is it gave the chance to scope out some of the obscure climbing in the Trinity Alps. If roads got anywhere near the high country here I suspect this would be a pretty decent climbing area. Information on the area is very hard to come by but you can bet I'll be doing some more research. Here are a few pictures of the so-called Stonehouse Pinnacle. My old Tim Toula's "Rock and Road: a Climbing Guide to North America" describes the formation as 1,000 feet tall with granite that is "almost as good as Yosemite." (citation needed). It didn't look quite that big, but it looked quality from where I was standing.

That chimney looks like a man-eater

Look at those cracks!

This is another formation across the canyon that I dubbed "the Great white face." Guess I'm going to have to head back with some gear sometime in the future. Anybody keen?

North Sister 2

So after climbing at smith one weekend, my brother and I decided to see how high up on south sister we could get. He had climbed middle sister the week before and was keen to get on top of another one. Both of us damn well knew that N. Sister is called "the black beast of the Cascades" for a reason (or even Ugly Sister), but we figured we would turn around if the going got sketchy. The standard route is normally done in the winter or spring when the rubble is well frozen over. One ascends the southeast ridge, weaving your way around gendarmes to the so called "terrible traverse." Then you gingerly scoot your way up a groove called the bowling alley (man it seems there's one on every high cascade peak) and up onto the mass of Prouty peak, the summit pinnacle. It turns out we wouldn't have to worry about all the technical stuff, as we turned around at around 8,000 feet when the wind cranked up to gusts of 60 mph +. The blasts nearly knocked you off your feet and we got mighty cold in our thin shells. Being on a ridge, you could never predict which way the next blast of cold air would come. The rain coming in sideways didn't help either. I'd rather have below freezing and snow than just above freezing and cold, cold rain like we did. So before we bailed we made a couple of videos and a few phone calls to confuse people. Anyways, I'd do it again in a heartbeat. Even a quick defeat still makes for an excellent day.

Before the steep parts with a shrouded North Sister in the background

A completely unnecessary move on crumbly rock

Right before the real action began above the first gendarme

The wind was so strong it ripped off my wilderness permit!

We. Were. Freezing. It took us a couple of hours to warm back up again on the way down. Here I am starting to dry out once we got back down from the ridge.

North Sister is #1 in my book

A few videos of Tim and I on Mars... I mean North Sister, accompanied with horrible sound due to high winds. We're a peppy group I'll give us that.

McKenzie River Trail

About 7 of us and a couple of energetic dogs rode the McKenzie river trail in its entirety this past Sunday. Along its length, one will see some of the bluest water you've seen, several incredible waterfalls and more log bridges than you can shake a stick at. A single speeder has to spin at about 250 rpm during the last half, and that takes it out of you after 30 or so miles. It's normally 27 miles but none of us had been on the trail recently and we took a few wrong turns. On top of that we got rained on, almost lost a dog and got scraped up in the lava rock section as well. Yep, pretty much a great day on a bike.

Greg leading the pack after the first few miles

You just have to stop at the Blue Pool. The entire river comes up from underground and heads downstream.

Mt. Mcloughlin

Also a few weeks back, my fit parents came up from California to climb Mt Mcloughlin with my brother and I. Perched at 9,495 feet, the summit is gained by hiking the steep trail to the top. It's one of the nicer summits I've had the pleasure of sitting on. Continuing the trend from Mt. Washington earlier this summer, there was nothing but sunshine and hardly a breeze up on top. Sadly that trend came to and end when I got blown off of North sister last weekend (more on that later). All in all it was a great way to spend the day. There were some other old farts attempting the summit that day, but my Ma and Pa smoked 'em to the top. Here are a few pictures

The summit within sight

Mom conked out on top

Timbo: there was a bit of a cliff behind him

The parents about to gain the summit

Tim, remeniscent of this painting

One of the Best Rides in Oregon

A bunch of us bums with several thousand dollar steeds rode the North Umpqua River Trail a few weeks ago. It is arguably one of the best trails I've ridden. The weekend served as a goodbye party for fellow mt. biker Fred, who is setting up shop as a history teacher over in Salida, Colorado. Anyhow, I snapped a pic of many people in spandex and an expensive collection of bikes just before a ride below the dread and tear section of the trail.

How to Climb at Smith in the Summer

Climbing at Smith Rocks in the summertime takes some careful planning, a good strategy and some very persuasive talk to get people to go belay you on your "proj" in 90+ degree heat. Or, that is... it usually does. Famed "get a bunch of people to go climbing" expert Richard Burton managed to get several of us out there last weekend. To get the most out of a hot, dusty day, you need a bit of luck; such as not getting stuck behind a party of 12 on monkey face like Greg, Inga, Kristin and I did. But most of it comes down to planning. You need to:

1. Rise early to avoid the heat- well... that's tough when you drink a lot of wine and climb with Tim "rise at the crack o' noon" Gradek
   
2. Climb in the shade- rope-de-dope block and northern point: check
   
3. Take a siesta during the hot afternoon- Below is a pic I shamelessly stole from new climbing buddy Rick. Man I love steelhead falls (sucks they took out the zipline though)
   
4. Climb well into the evening- check

One word of caution though kids. Be careful doing kneebars or you might end up with something like this:

Bear Necessities

I thought I'd take a little time to talk about the aforementioned bear take out menu. The first day in Yosemite for Inga, Kristin and myself was largely devoid of climbing. We spent most of the day scrambling around on the Talus all dehydrated and looking for some 5.5 pinnacle that we never found. Can you believe I'm headed back? Yes the rock at Yosemite is that good Anyways, earlier that day when we were setting up at Camp 4, we had, as the ranger told us, dutifully removed all food related objects from my parent's station wagon...or so we thought. A few days prior, one of my coolest relatives had given me some soft, sweet smelling cranberry quickbread that I stowed in my day pack for a special occasion. Turns out the special occasion was for the bear, who we think sniffed the orange juice spilled on the car door and thought," Oooooh I think I'll see what behind door number 2!" The broken window only ended up costing about 50$, and you actually can get a fine if you leave food in your car. So the lesson is just don't leave food in your car, ever.

The scene of the crime. We were parked between this car that was completely covered in tiles on the left and another one with more stickers than I've ever seen. An alternate theory as to why the bear chose our car was that it looked "normal."

Actual bear print. Radiocarbon dating and DNA evidence place the burglar in the Camp 4 region.

I just had to get the girls to pose with their thumbs up for this ubiquitous sign.

Oregon Trail

My recent adventures have all seemed to revolve around finding my way back to the Willamette valley. The Norwegians and I were at certain points of our trip a couple hundred miles from both Canada and Mexico. We traveled through suffocating heat, vicious mosquitoes, bear attacks and were forced to eat brown cheese in our quest to find our way back to Oregon. I couldn't help but be reminded of the old Oregon Trail game for the Apple II. Granted, our axle didn't break and none of us died of dysentery, but the similarities can't be denied. OK OK so they can. The pioneers wouldn't have crossed Nevada twice on purpose, and they probably did a bit less climbing than us. But in honor of me hunting 2568 pounds of bison meat in second grade, here goes nothing. Let's do the numbers:

Number of windows smashed by bears (Sorry Mom): 1



Number of Cranberry Quick bread loafs eaten by said bears (sorry Auntie): 1

Approximate number of hangs per climb by Jake in Yosemite: 24.37

Odds that a pair of Norwegians would be freezing and wet in a desert in Utah during the Summer: 2000 to 1


Number of Rock Types pulled on: 7 (Granite, sandstone, tuff, basalt, andesite, dacite and whatever the rest of that crap on Mt. Washington is)

Average number of times per day the word "boring" was uttered: 38.72

Hottest Temperature Seen: 117 degrees Fahrenheit (47.2 degrees C)

Coldest Temperature Seen: No data

Time needed for the "novelty" of Nevada to wear off: 16.32 minutes

Amount of times Greg peed in the Willamette river: 4397

Amount of Coronas consumed on top of multipitch sport routes: 4



Gallons of sunscreen applied by fair-skinned Norwegians: 2.3


Number of poses Tim did for the camera: fabulously many



Net number of Ice creams promised as wager material: a buttload

and.......

Number of amazing pictures and memories that will last a lifetime: ∞








more to come later... but you knew that already. Happy summer!