Simplifatico

Best Montana & Alaska Hiking Vacations (sic)

Chase and I are planning a car camping trip this weekend with our Boy Scout troop. We're going to camp at Mammoth Hot Springs, just inside Yellowstone National Park. Currently, Mammoth ranks as one of Chase's Top Five Best Ever Places on Earth. I think it's because one time we were there, we saw a big bull elk in rut tear the skin off some guy's brand new $100,000 motorcoach.

We'll cook outrageous meals in dutch ovens, take photos of the terraces, soak in the Boiling River, and enjoy the solitude of the campground because apparently, people don't go camping after Labor Day anymore.

We'll go hiking of course. I think we're planning on a descent down into the Black Canyon of the Yellowstone. Mammoth is a fantastic jumping off point for day and overnight hiking.

I think this will shape up to be a great Montana-style weekend vacation. Cheap, too.

My friend Andy is taking a vacation too, up in Alaska. Looks like he's going to do a neat loop hike out of Kotzebue.

Leafy Floor in Cedar Run, SNP

Photo: Panasonic GF1, 20mm, f/4, 1/40 sec.

Last weekend, I was hiking with Alan Dixon in Shenandoah National Park, and filming another episode of "24" - that is, 24 hours round trip from Washington, D.C.

Fall is disappearing fast here, and a thick layer of leaves covered the rocky trail up Cedar Run, making footing precarious, but softening the footsteps in most places.

Shenandoah Milk

Photo: Milky Way Galaxy from the summit of Hawksbill Mountain, Virginia, Shenandoah National Park. Panasonic DMC-GF1, 20mm, f/1.7, 60 sec. November 6, 2009, by Ryan Jordan.

This photo is being posted primarily for photographers interested in the performance of the digital image sensor in the Panasonic DMC-GF1.

I set the aperture wide open on the Lumix 20mm lens and captured a 60 second image. Obviously, there are quite a lot more stars in the photo than you could ever see with the naked eye. On some of my star photos this night, I saw satellite trails that I didn't detect while taking the image, either. I converted this one to black and white, and bumped up the blacks a fair bit, to compensate for the significant amount of light pollution that graces the skies along the Appalachian Trail.

I'm very impressed with this sensor. It allows me to see what the skies out here were like before cities were built, maybe.

Monkeyin' Around at Window Rock Cabin

We spent last weekend with our Boy Scout Troop at the Window Rock Cabin, another one of the rentals on the Gallatin National Forest.

It rained, it snowed, it blew, it was generally sort of a cold and pleasant misery.

This was our weekend to work on the Pioneering Merit Badge, so it seemed pretty appropriate to do other pioneer things, like sleep in an old log cabin, cook in cast iron pots in a wood stove, and realize that the pioneers didn't really take off bad weather days to work.

So we set out to build a monkey bridge* on the morning of our second day, and finally completed it after dark, once we whipped and spliced rope ends, taught the boys how to do lashings and knots, and set good enough 3-2-1 anchors for the block and tackle du natural so nobody would be taking a whipper at the wrong time. Whippers involving Scouts tend to get mothers of Scouts excited, and requires a little bit of explaining on the parts of fathers of Scouts, and we all know how risky that can get.

I was sharing our monkey bridge building experience with a friend, who lives a long ways east of Montana. She was horrified that we'd expose young boys to this weather, even more so that we'd think about "making them" build a monkey bridge in it. I was confused. Different cultures, I guess.

She asked me how I'd feel if they all got sick?

I replied, "then I'd guess they'd need a few days to recover at home."

"Ack! What about school?!" she asked.

"What do you mean, 'what about school?' They just had a whole weekend of it, a little break couldn't hurt."

* The origins of the rope-and-log monkey bridge are fuzzy. But, it does appear that it definitely came before the slackline, which some say is the result of a monkey bridge unfinished, by a slacker, of course.

Welcome Home 143rd MP Battalion

Chase is greeted by Spc. Welch (Above).

Michael's excitement of being greeted by a General cannot be contained! (Brigadier General Stanley R. Putnam, Commander of the Montana Army National Guard).

Welcome home, 143rd, and thank you.

Simple Pleasures

 
Photo: Ricoh GRD

I am challenged by the complexity of solving neat problems, and get a lot of satisfaction out of it, but some days, I love to do really simple things.

Like tying flies.

I used to be a commercial fly tyer. In part, that's how I put myself through graduate school. I recall one Montana winter, a particularly cold one with temperatures outside diving to 40 degrees F below zero - and that was without the wind chill. We lived in a 395 square foot apartment, but we had heat!

Stephanie and I would tie flies together, she would bead hooks, I'd tie on one of my soft hackle patterns, she would finish and seal.

We tied 550 dozen flies that winter.

Once I graduated, I also retired from commercial fly tying. It was the earliest retirement ever.

I also didn't tie another fly for at least five years!

But now, with Chase learning to tie, I'm loving it again. It gives me a chance to teach, him a chance to learn, and the both of us to engage in a really simple pleasure.

I will be working on a project at GruntWorks next week, where I'm sure that feeling the simplicity of tying a fly will be missed in lieu of the complexity of outfitting Marine rifle brigades with lightweight gear!

A Different View of the Same Thing

Grotto Falls, Hyalite Backcountry. Panasonic GF1, Lumix 14-45mm f/3.5-5.6, 14mm, 1/5 sec f/22, ISO 100, on a tripod.

I suffered (sic) to get this photo. So did my camera. We got soaked. It was cold. It was worth it.

I've been to this waterfall dozens of times. I've swam in the pool below it in the summer and I've climbed its ice in the winter.

But this time, during the transition season, something was different. The waterfall still flowed, but winter's edge was starting to form.

I was climbing up to the base of the falls to get a photo of a side view when I slipped in the small cave I was in. My eyes were now at ground level and this was my new, and unanticipated view.