Hiking in RMNP

Glacial water is cold! I'm not sure that Emerald Lake is still fed by a glacier, but the valley between the two mountains just behind the lake (Hallet Peak and Flattop Mountain) used to be a giant glacier. The melting snow on those mountains still provides the water for the lake, and after jumping in the lake, I found out exactly how cold it was.

Yesterday was our day of hiking through the Rocky Mountain National Park. We started around 8:30am at the Bear Lake trailhead and hike up around three lakes: Nymph Lake, Dream Lake, and Emerald Lake. The Spirit of the Rockies has a good description of the trail we took on our hike. You can also see some pictures from our hike over at my picasa site.

For the first part of the hike, I had Sydney strapped in a Björn baby carrier frontpack and was carrying our tourist gear (food, video camera, water) in a backpack. It really wasn't that heavy, but the altitude was starting to take a toll on me by the time we got to Dream Lake. Sydney had just about had enough of hiking for the moment and screamed for about 15 minutes, no doubt irritating the other hikers trying to enjoy the scenery in peaceful serenity. We got her quieted down and made our way to Emerald Lake, Sarah carrying Sydney from then on.

By the time we got to Emerald Lake, we were ready for a break and hungry. So as I snapped a few photographs, Sarah got Sydney situated in the shade and everybody started to prepare lunch. Lunch was light, consisting of some summer sausage, trail mix, and a few cookies for a good sugar rush. Bronson, Corinne, and I decided we were going to make our way around the Lake. Although there was no trail, we were determined to hike around the entire lake, sometimes having to climb rocks, sometimes having to walk through the lake in order to make a successful circumnavigation.

Just a little bit around the lake, we found a spot where some college-age girls had dived into the lake about 15 minutes earlier. They were still there drying off, and so I of course had to show my bravado and dive in as well. They warned me that I would want to scream but that the water was so cold that I wouldn't be able to. After diving in, I found that to be the case firsthand. Getting out, I put my shirt back on, packed my electronics in Bronson's backpack and we continued on around the lake.

Once we were halfway around the lake, I got back in and found the water to be much warmer in some areas. At one point, instead of traversing the rocks to continue to make my way around the lake, I decided to get in the water and stand on a shelf that put me in about shoulder-high water. Holding my digital camera above my head, I found myself slipping downward off of the shelf, which despite looking flat, was actually sloped downward and quite slick from the erosive nature of the water current. Grabbing on to the overhead rock for dear life of my camera (why didn't I bring my waterproof film camera instead?), I managed to get myself around to a place where I could pull myself up, but the frigid water had sucked enough energy out of me that I had to call on Bronson for assistance out of the water.

And so we made our way all the way around Emerald lake. Although not that difficult of a hike, it is a hike that is not for the timid. You must make good judgment calls about the specific paths you take. There were certain areas where you simply had to get into the water to get around or risk taking a jump onto some very unstable rocks or jumping onto some rocks that didn't provide enough surface area for a balanced landing. At one point I chose quite poorly and made a jump onto some higher rocks, thinking it would provide a good challenge. Instead, it left me with a later jump onto some rocks that nearly castrated me. I didn't try and be quite so brave or stupid after that.

Once we met back up with Sarah, Sydney, and Debbie as we rounded Emerald Lake, we packed up and went down the trail back to the trailhead. Sydney was starting to get sunburned and so we called it a day, it being about 1:30pm. Hiking is one of those things that babies really aren't meant to do. I would really like to make the hike up to Flattop Mountain and Hallet Peak. Aves and McNoldy hiked that trail in 2001 and wrote about it on their Hiking Colorado site. Unfortunately, at 9 miles round-trip and over half a mile in increased elevation, I wouldn't dare take my 3-month old on such a hike. Maybe when she's a little older we'll come back and tackle that hike.

All in all, a good day. But because Sydney was sunburned yesterday, we decided it would be best to stick around our house today. Mom-in-law and dad-in-law went on a hike to Cub Lake, which is a bit longer than our hike yesterday, but at about half the increase in elevation. Bronson and Corinne decided to go to lunch at Chick-fil-a in Loveland, and then were taking a trip to the Budweiser brewery in Fort Collins. They hoped to get some pictures with the Clydesdales, which Budweiser brings out on the first Saturday of each month.

We'll be on the road home tomorrow. I'm not much looking forward to the drive, and I'm not much looking forward to leaving the mountains for life in Kansas. But all vacations must end, and with the end of this vacation, I'll start looking forward to our next one, whatever that may end up being.

-RMz

A day of White Water Rafting

This is the day Sarah and I had been waiting for during this trip. Steve, Bronson, Corinne, Sarah, and I were going to be getting on the Cache la Poudre (pron. cash le poo der) River a ways northeast of Estes Park. The day started at 6:00am, as we prepared Sydney to go to breakfast at a restaurant called The Egg and I. Corinne and Bronson found their meals unsatisfying, and just average. Sarah had French toast, which both her and I thought was absolutely delicious. I had some omelette with bacon, tomatoes, and artichokes, which I likewise found very tasty. Their dark roast coffee was also excellent.

Steve was not feeling well all morning, and by 8:30 had decided not to go on the rafting trip with us. We met as the Estes high school, the "home of the Bobcats." By 9:30 everybody was there (the scheduled departure time was 9:15) and we embarked on our hour and a half bus Journey through Big Thompson Canyon. We then went up through Loveland and Fort Collins, where we stopped at Ted's Place, a little gas station in La Porte, CO. We drove up the mountain, went through two separate sets of rapids over about a 3-hour interval. I was hoping for somewhat wilder waters, but it was exhilarating nonetheless. According to our guide, Jesse, at its peak in early June, the Cache La Poudre flows at 1500 cubic feet per second past any given point. It was only flowing at about 1200 cfs today.

Eating is always a highlight of the day, and dinner tonight was spectacular. As we sat down in a little italian kitchen and steakhouse called the Dunraven Inn, the decor reminded us of Savute's back home. Sydney was being a bit fussy tonight and required constant attention and shuffling as Sarah and I tried to eat our dinners. Sarah ordered Filet and Lobster, which she though was excellent paired with a Pinot Noir I had selected. I had a garlic and gorgonzola-stuffed filet that rivaled steaks from high-end steakhouses. At three inches thick and a perfect warm red center, the filet dissolved in my mouth and left me wanting for more. While Sarah's Pinot was good, I much preferred the Cabernet that I had ordered, although I did not make a point to remember the producer or vintage of either.

The night ended with a relaxing mix of conversation, cards, and cans of soda. I stayed out of the card game and just relaxed playing with my daughter and writing of the day's activities instead. On tap for tomorrow: hiking in the Rocky Mountain National Forest.

-RMz

Chaos and some fine spirits

Yesterday's activities were rather tranquil and easy-going. The parents-in-law went on an all-day horseback riding trip. I'm not really in to that, and Sarah isn't either. So the rest of us spent the morning lounging around the house. Sarah and I have a deck outside of our bedroom, and I went out there early in the morning, checked my email, and just enjoyed the mountain wilderness. This house has a small library of fiction and nonfiction works that you have to scour a bookstore to find. I picked up a book by James Gleick, call Chaos - Making a New Science. Chaos is, according to this book, the study of non-linear systems, and often is described as the "Butterfly Effect". Although as of now I am only about 15% through the book, it is enthralling. Though I know what fractals are and understand what the so called Butterfly Effect is, I never really understood the beginnings of this discipline, which interestingly has at its roots a strange intersection of meteorology and pure mathematics.

Observing the clouds passing by and having a hummingbird fly three feet in front of my face, stop, face me, and fly away again, I could see Chaos in action -- why do clouds not move in regular patterns? The answer of course is turbulence, but what causes turbulence, and why does it not have the same effect on an object at different times? Chaos theory attempts to explain the phenomenon.

Eventually, all of us became hungry and we decided to go to town for lunch. We found some Mexican restaurant to lunch at. I'm not normally one to start drinking before noon, but after the day we had yesterday, I needed some relaxation. A Negra Modelo hit the spot. It also made up for the total absence of service at this restaurant. We toured around town after that, not finding much of interest other than a wine tasting room. At $5 per person, we got to choose eight wines to sample.

I am convinced that Colorado does not have the weather or soil for growing wines that match my palate. We tried some wines I had never had before: a Gewurtzaminer, a Blaufrankish, as well as a Claret. None of those were very good, and in fact of all of the wines we tried, including the Cabernets and Pinots, really did not have flavor markedly similar to their Sonoma or Napa counterparts. Their Blaufrankish had won some awards, so it could be that I simply have not yet acquired the taste for this sort of wine. We ended up really enjoying a local Riesling and Sauvignon Blanc and bought a bottle of each. Everything else was extremely earthy and overly acidic.

We returned back to our house, where I continued reading my book on Chaos until Steve and Debbie returned. We grilled out hamburgers and watching thunderstorms roll over our house throughout the evening. The night ended with Sarah and I getting in an argument with her parents, at which point everybody went to be except for me. I stayed up, thought about posting to this blog, but then decided against it, at the risk of it turning into a rant that nobody would have enjoyed and I likely would have regretted.

...you can see a couple of photos of the rain coming in, as well as some unique illuminations of the snow-capped mountains from a mostly-cloudy sunset on picasa.

-RMz

One task completed

As described in my profile, I always try to find Bell System central offices when I am on vacation. Not sure why I do it, but it is a fascination of mine. On our way to get pizza tonight, we ended up parking right behind the Qwest CO. A perfect picture opportunity.

As for connectivity at our house, I am barely able to pick up someone's WiFi signal, which gives me connectivity, but my aircard does not work at all here. We are just below the peak of the particular mountain we are on, and the cell tower is a couple of mountains over. Needless to say, the signal just doesn't reach.

I have a handful of work tasks to get done tonight. We don't have a big day tomorrow, so I'll sleep in a bit tomorrow. It will be a late night tonight.

-RMz

The Wrong Way ...Part 2

We finally got here, and Sublime is no longer going through my mind. I have uploaded some pictures to picassa and you can access the full gallery once it is uploaded at http://picasaweb.google.com/rmzink.

Several years ago, this same group of people (the in-laws) took a trip to Lake Texoma over Memorial Day weekend.  I think this was in 2002.  Because we booked this very close to when our trip was taking place, we were only able to get a room at Tanglewood for Saturday night.  Sarah was able to locate a "cabin" on the lake.  This was no ordinary cabin, though.  It was a fishing cabin.  I'm sorry to say that we don't have digital pictures of this cabin with accommodations rivaling a Four Seasons resort.  Nor do we want to spend the money to convert them.  Let's just say the place reeked of formaldehyde and had roaches crawling up the shower drain.  It was a fun trip, but the Friday night stay was memorably bad.

So coming here, we were wondering how Sarah would do as a travel agent this time.  Well, she was a total success, making up for the miserable failure five years ago.  The house we are staying at here is simply fabulous.  There are separate rooms for each of the three couples here.  But the scenery is delightfully serene.  We are literally at the top of a mountain, and have chipmunks running around outside.  Being the nature lover, I'll try to get a picture of a chipmunk in a compromising situation like I did with a ground squirrel in Alaska.

Anyway, we are trying to find a place to have a casual dinner tonight.  We'll likely find some local pizza joint to have a good homemade pizza and a cold beer.

-RMz

The Wrong Way... Part 1

Waking up at 5:00am is never very much fun, even if you are getting ready to go on vacation. Today's early rise was no exception. While I very much enjoy driving early in the morning, I was going to be a passenger, and completely without control of navigation. I really despise driving in a car for long periods of time and would much rather have a short flight somewhere than spend all day in a car getting there.  But I cannot describe how much I abhor having to ride in a car all day long.

To make matters worse, we cannot take a direct route to our destination. Rather, a song by Sublime comes to mind, "The Wrong Way", as we have to take the backroads through rural Kansas in order to make a stop in Great Bend. Now I must admit, the scenery along secondary highways in Kansas is much more interesting that what you will see on the Eisenhower Interstate system, but that doesn't make up for the time lost. Despite my father-in-law's claims that we made slightly better time than staying in the Interstate, I think we lost between 45 and 60 minutes via this "shortcut."

I had planned on getting some work done in the car to make the time pass by. Much of my work, however, requires connectivity. I had prepared to be able to use my Sprint Aircard up through I-70. Instead, going through rural Kansas, while I did have a connection, it was excruciatingly slow; no work was able to be done. Maybe this will be a work-free vacation after all.

And so the trip began with me in a bad mood, hungry, without my morning coffee, and crammed in the back seat of a vehicle shared with my wife Sarah and my daughter Sydney in her baby seat. What I thought would be the worst part of the trip, a 3-month old screaming her head off, ended up not being much of an issue. Other than her screaming a little when she was hungry, she slept for most of the trip. At least that is what I thought until we hit the intersection of CO-470 @ I-76 just outside of Denver International. Sydney bursts into uncontrollable crying and we pull off at a rest stop to quiet her down.

At this point we were trying to reach a decision between two routes to go for the remainder of the trip. One takes us up through Loveland on US-34. This is the more scenic route, but is 10 minutes longer than getting off on CO-66/US36. Needless to say, the in-laws are much in favor of the longer route, despite the screaming baby, which has been temporarily appeased by changing a soggy, drippy diaper.

We're not there yet. We of course decided to take the long route, because it is much prettier but is "more highway."

...to be continued.

-RMz

iWant an iPhone

Before I get flamed for this, let me come out and say that I have not understood the hype surrounding the iPhone. However, being a gadget guy, I am suddenly feeling like I am missing out by not having the latest, and most hyped about toy in quite some time.

But I digress. Why do I want an iPhone? Let me count thy reasons.

1. I currently carry two phones. I need a Blackberry or other type of smartphone to check email on.  It is a work necessity.  But Blackberries are terrible phones.  The voice quality just atrocious.  I need a phone to be first and foremost a phone.  But I would love to carry one phone around and not look like Mr. Technology.  Isn't part of technology supposed to be that it is low key or that it is fashionable.  Carrying around two phones is neither.
2. Having a full web browser like Safari on my phone would be fantastic!  Some websites just don't render well on micro browsers that are found on other phones today.
3. The stock widget is just what I need to keep tabs on my day trades when I am out of the office.

That's a fine list.  But nothing really iCan't live without.  In fact there are more reasons I don't want an iPhone than there are reasons iDo.

1. The AT&T network is junk.  Despite GSM being the standard for the world's mobile phone infrastructure, and the convenience of SIM cards (ahem, on unlocked phones), I have always found CDMA technology to deliver much clearer sound quality.  AT&T may brag about the least number of dropped calls, but I have always found the problem with AT&T just that: it doesn't drop calls when it should.  I would rather drop a call during a tower handoff than suffer warbling noise and be asking people to repeat themselves after not being able to understand their last two sentences.
2. The AT&T network is junk.  Earlier I posted about my yagi antenna experiment.  My sprint wireless card delivers 1.5Mb/s downstream data on 1xEVDO rev. A.  My Samsung SPH-A900 via Bluetooth gave me 800-900kbps on EVDO rev.0. AT&T's EDGE is claimed to deliver only 300kb/s and my AT&T blackberry never actually gets that speed. My stance on the junkiness of AT&T's network (part 2) will change once UMTS / HSDPA comes to my home town. Having never tried it, I can't comment, but from what I understand those technologies blow EVDO away.
3. My contract doesn't expire with Sprint for quite some time.  I'm not that desperate to make a fashion statement that I'm going to pay for a new phone plus an early cancellation fee on my existing service.
4. Blackberry's push email is really quite good.  I'm not about to trade that off for an unknown.  iPhone's email may ultimately be better, but at this point I don't know, and its not worth the risk.
5. Having service through two providers through Sprint for my main phone and AT&T for my business account blackberry provides good redundancy in the event of a tower outage or some other service problem (it has happened to me several times).

Now I'll be honest, while I like the Sprint network better, I hate the fact that Sprint always gets the hand-me-down phones.  Its about time that Sprint get some first-rate, brand new phone designs before everybody else.  Oh, I don't count the paper thin Samsung that doesn't offer me anything noteworthy over my SPH-A900.

You're probably thinking you just wasted three minutes reading this, and you're probably right.  But I just couldn't be a self-respecting tech geek without having some sort of iPhone entry on my blog.

-RMz

Yagi Madness

Ok, so any of you who know me know that I am somewhat of a work- aholic. I always take my laptop with me on vacation. Our Colorado trip this year no different. But what is different is that this time I have a Sierra Wireless Aircard 595U. For those uninitiated to mobile broadband, this is an EV-DO card that plugs into my Macbook's USB port.

I was examining the Sprint coverage maps for Estes Park yesterday, trying to figure out what kind of coverage I would have. We are staying South of the city a few miles in a somewhat mountainous area. There is 3G service available about two miles NNE of our house, but coverage at the house is unknown. Windcliff Properties, who manages the house, warns tenants that the coverage is spotty. Not good for trying to use my aircard.

This morning I start reading about building yagi antennae. I read about the reflector, the directors, and the driven element; figuring out sizing and placement on the boom. All sorts of interesting information with limited practicality. I decide to build a yagi with 4 directors and figure out the dimensions for each of the elements based on the 1900MHz PCS frequency.

This did not turn out as well as I had expected. The first problem I ran into was that I couldn't find a connector locally to hook up to my Aircard. The lady at Rad Shack was nice and she thought she had the appropriate part; but no. Then I go to the Sprint store, and the lady there was not helpful at all.

• "It's not supported."
• "It doesn't work with CDMA technology."
• "You can damage the device."

I'm not sure what kind of damage I could do hooking it up to a passive antenna tuned to the right frequency, but I am guessing that is just their legal department covering themselves from people hooking the aircard up to amplified antennae.

Strike 1. But I have a plan. I remember that a similar connector is used to hook up Airport Extreme cards to macs. I have an old, broken Powerbook at the office and tear it apart, and bring the connector home. It doesn't fit.

Strike 2. I don't have a plan anymore. But I am going to continue to build the antenna just for the fun of it. I go ahead and pull out the soldering iron, the solder, the flux, and a couple of paper towels (ok, I know I should use a wet sponge, but its already not going to work, so what). I have drilled grooves in the wooden boom and super glued the elements in place. All I have to do is cut the coax and solder the coax to conductors to the driven element (DE).

Strike 3. It was a nice plan, but it didn't work out that way. The cheap soldering iron I bought is too hot for the outside conductor of the coax and burns it to bits, but is not hot enough for the copper DE, so I can't get a good solder joint. Instead, I use crimp connectors (but I know that's going to cause terrible reception. Oh well. I don't have a way to connect it to the air card anyway.

I'll keep the yagi in my archives; maybe someday I'll decide to tear apart the aircard and hardwire it for fun.

-rmz

Vacation Time!

It has been a really long year so far having not gone on our annual family trip in the spring.  This year, we decided that having a baby would be more fun.  Go figure.  While we didn't take a trip in the spring, it just didn't feel right to not go on vacation sometime during the year.  While in years past we have tried to find ways for our vacations to take us to exotic locations, this year's voyage will be to a more easily-accessible location, Estes Park, CO.

We have decided to share our adventures with Sarah's extended family.  Her mom and dad, as well as her sister Corinne and brother-in-law Bronson will be going with us.  The highlight of the trip will be white water rafting, which I have never done before.  Sarah and I went on a rafting trip on the Chulitna river during our expedition to Alaska in 2004, but since we went at the end of the season, the river was more like a big creek in someone's back yard; hardly what I'd consider white water rafting.

So I figured that our trip to Colorado would be as good of a time as any to start a blog.  Come back here to read up on excitement, or lack thereof, depending upon what is going on each day.  I'll try and update this at the end of each' days' shenanigans.

-rmz