Brooke was invited by an old friend (as old a friend as an 11 year old can be) to hike Mount Timpanogos last Saturday. While we didn’t make it to the saddle or peak, we did make it all the way to the upper meadow just below the saddle. What a great little hiker! Here are some photos and video clips.
A little stinging nettle. If you’re in the hills and feel like you
have to go potty, these leaves are a great choice to help you
eliminate that desire.
(full size)
A medely of trickles.
We made it to Scout Falls.
(full size)
The cliffs of insanity.
A well-worn stump.
Here’s the slope up to Pika Cirque that Ana and I took in 2005. It was still covered in snow at the end of September that year.
Sassy!
(full size)
Girls and dads (but me).
(full size)
Looking north to Little Cottonwood Canyon ridge.
Tiny spheres of rain trapped in the leaves (view the full size).
(full size)
Mountain Brooke.
(full size)
Scott & Brooke.
(full size)
So close and yet so far.
(full size)
Brooke, Emily, & Katherine
(full size)
posted on Tue, 08 Sep 2009 at 09:16 | permanent link | view comments
We finally made it up to the cabin this year. Between school, finishing the basement, layoffs, and scrambling for work, we haven’t set aside any time to get away until this weekend. Here are some of the highlights.
Here’s a tick I picked off of Preston’s neck (it hadn’t embedded itself yet, thankfully). The lines on the paper are a quarter inch apart to give you a sense of scale.
Some forest shots:
A little archery:
A variety of mushrooms this year:
I also spotted a small flock of wild turkeys wandering around our lot:
We also went on a hike. We were intending to go to Shingle Mill Lake, but it was just a little too far for the time we had.
We went about half way instead and visited an old hunter’s hovel on top of a glacial moraine.
Old frying pan:
But a beautiful view of the Shingle Mill drainage and beyond. Looking north.
Looking south-ish:
Me and the kids:
Brooke and Ashton on the way back:
Arches National Forest?
C. Wilde left his mark over 80 years ago in this forest. He was a rancher from the Oakley area. I wrote a Wendigo-style ghost story about him a few years ago.
I’m not normally into scatology, but this was pretty fresh cougar scat. I noticed this on the way up and took a picture on the way back.
My uncle Dave carved this about 30 years ago with his then fiancée Linnea (now my favorite aunt):
We need to do this more often! (I say that every time).
posted on Sun, 05 Jul 2009 at 11:24 | permanent link | view comments
Whenever you adopt science as your religion, you should be prepared to deal with the atheists, agnostics, and general skeptics with grace, civility, and respect. Those who fail to do this do not deserve the honorable title of scientist.
The world is full of plenty of things to believe and plenty to doubt, and a real scientist withholds judgement on both sides, knowing that the jury is always out in the face of new evidence.
Scientists who have signed up to turn climate change science into climate change dogma by ridiculing or ostracizing any nay-sayers are giving all true scientists a black eye. Science is about open and honest inquiry. Leave the political jockeying to lesser minds.
Wall Street Journal: Climate change is changing.
posted on Fri, 26 Jun 2009 at 10:36 | permanent link | view comments
Taken in Tibble Fork, American Fork Canyon, Utah on June 13, 2009.
posted on Sun, 21 Jun 2009 at 20:50 | permanent link | view comments
I took this shot of Mount Timpanogos from our van just before we pulled onto the freeway.
I guess it would have been more impressive with a panoramic lens. Trust me, it was breathtaking.
Here’s a landscape view:
That’s the problem with photography: it’s a lie.
Something amazing and good is often made to look stupid and terrible, and vice versa. One of my favorite sayings in recent years goes something like this:
A picture is worth a thousand words, but only those to describe the picture. Hardly any meaningful sets of a thousand words can be adequately described with pictures.
I hereby award myself “ironic post of the day” with this one. The fact that I am here in front of a computer writing about being out in nature is slightly off-putting for me, but I will also point out that it’s very dark outside and I am in my pajamas. I’m not looking for any mountain lions right now.
Here’s the passage from Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods (p. 58, 59):
Nature is about smelling, hearing, tasting, seeing below the “transparent mucous-paper in which the world like a bon-bon is wrapped so carefully that we can never get at it,” as D. H. Lawrence put it, in a relatively obscure but extraordinary description of his own awakening to nature’s sensory gift. Lawrence described his awakening in Taos, New Mexico, as an antidote to the “know-it-all state of mind,” that poor substitute for wisdom and wonder:
Superficially, the world has become small and known. Poor little globe of earth, the tourists trot round you as easily as they trot round the Bois or round Central Park. There is no mystery left, we’ve been there, we’ve seen it, we know all about it. We’ve done the globe and the globe is done.
This is quite true, superficially. On the superficies, horizontally, we’ve been everywhere and done everything, we know all about it. Yet the more we know, superficially, the less we penetrate, vertically. It’s all very well skimming across the surface of the ocean and saying you know all about the sea…
As a matter of fact, our great-grandfathers, who never went anywhere, in actuality had more experience of the world than we have, who have seen everything. When they listened to a lecture with lantern-slides, they really held their breath before the unknown, as they sat in the village school-room. We, bowling along in a rickshaw in Ceylon, say to ourselves: “It’s very much what you’d expect.” We really know it all.
We are mistaken. They know-it-all state of mind is just the result of being outside the mucous-paper wrapping of civilization. Underneath is everything we don’t know and are afraid of knowing.
Some of us adults recognize the know-it-all state of mind in ourselves, sometimes at unlikely moments.
Todd Merriman, a newspaper editor and father, remembers an illuminating hike with his young son. “We were walking across a field in the mountains,” he says. “I looked down and saw mountain lion tracks. They were fresh. We immediately headed back to the car, and then I saw another set of tracks. I knew they had not been there before. The lion had circled us.” In that moment of dread and excitement, he became intensely aware of his surroundings. Later he realized that he could not remember the last time he had used all of his senses so acutely. The near encounter jarred something loose.
How much of the richness of life have he and his son traded for their daily immersion in indirect, technological experience? Today, Merriman often thinks about that question—usually while he is sitting in front of a computer screen.