New Job and Apartment Search

I've been at my new job for a week now and so far things are going well. I'm working for Siemens, which is a huge engineering company (over 400,000 employees worldwide). I'm working in the light rail electrification group which has about 15 employees, so it feels like working for a small company. Most of the other engineers (including my boss) are electrical. I'm one of three mechanical engineers in the group.

I've already learned a lot about light rail systems, especially the overhead contact lines (which are way more complex than I though). So far, I enjoy the work I'm doing and like the the people I work with. I've been doing 3D modeling in SolidWorks and stress analysis on overhead contact line components (we're getting a license for ANSYS which I'll probably be using early next year). So, I'm actually using some stuff I learned in school, which is cool.

Right now, I'm staying in an EconoLodge. I spent most of my free time last week researching apartments and went to see a few after work. I found a duplex on Thursday and put a deposit down for it. It's got a garage, two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a wood burning fireplace. I'm pretty excited to move into it, but won't be able to until next weekend. They are replacing the carpet in the living and dining room areas with engineered wood (similar to what I put down in the cabin, for those of you that have seen it).

As for living in Portland... it's different. From what I've seen so far, it's a very pretty city. There are massive trees and parks everywhere. It doesn't really feel like living in a city. The weather has actually been pretty good since I got here. We've had several days with sunshine (uncommon for this time of year) and not much rain. It is overcast a lot, but it's a different kind of overcast. It's more of an all-encompassing fog, which is actually kind of cool.

It's very green here. We're at the tail end of fall now with leaves still falling off some trees. The grass is all still very green, and vines or moss grow on almost everything. Roofs, sidewalks, and even some roads have moss growing on them. I definitely miss living in the mountains, but am looking forward to the new challenges and adventures of living on the west coast.

Drive to Oregon

I picked up my mom from the airport Tuesday evening. We finished cleaning the cabin and loaded the 4-wheeler into the back of the truck, then attached the trailer and loaded my Jeep onto it.

 

We were on I-70 heading west by 9.30 am, hurrying to beat a winter storm that was headed to the central Rockies that night. It was slow going (we averaged 50 mph through the central Rockies), but we made it to Salt Lake City around 8 pm. We spent the night there and woke up to to flickering lights and high winds. 

The winds were gusting up to 90 mph in SLC and had caused power outages throughout the city and had blown over several semis. The highway just south of where we stayed was closed because a semi was on its side, blocking the highway. The winds were predicted to get worse before they got better, so we ate a quick breakfast then headed north. I was pretty nervous driving the big U-haul truck, towing my jeep because the wind was mostly perpendicular to the highway. I could feel the gusts tipping the truck and blowing it left and right. After a strenuous hour, we made it out of the gusty winds. Luckily, it wasn't snowing during all this. The rest of the drive went pretty smoothly. After two-and-a-half days and 24 hours of driving, we made it to Portland (and averaged about 10 mpg).

Portland had unusually good weather and for the whole weekend. The sun was out and we got great views of Mt. Hood on our drive in.

 

Moving

The past few weeks have been pretty hectic for me. As soon as I accepted a job, I started packing all my stuff to get ready to move out of the cabin. I had to start early, because I've been out of town for the last two weeks.

The week before Thanksgiving, my dad flew into Denver. We went snowboarding one day (my first day of the season, but nothing great since we hadn't gotten much snow recently), then headed off to Utah for an Wilderness Life Support course. It was held near Zion National Park, which is a beautiful area in southwest Utah. The course was very similar to my Outdoor Emergency Care course, but geared toward medical professionals (doctors and nurses), so a lot of the information went right over my head. After the conference ended, we had one spare day and decided to drive down to the north rim of the Grand Canyon. I had never been, so it was pretty exciting for me. We also drove over to Lake Powell to see the Glen Canyon Dam. I'll post lots of pictures soon.

My Dad and I in Zion NP.


View from the north rim of the Grand Canyon.


There are a lot of great pictures on my flickr.

I got back to Colorado from Utah Monday evening, and on Tuesday morning flew out to Kentucky. I didn't go home for Thanksgiving last year (you may recall I ate Thanksgiving dinner at the Plume Saloon), so it was great to be home with my family and see my relatives that came in town.

My schedule this week gets even busier. I flew back to Colorado Sunday evening, picked up the U-haul truck and trailer (for my Jeep) Monday morning and have most of my stuff already loaded into the truck. I'm picking up my mom from the Denver airport Tuesday evening and we're leaving for Oregon Wednesday morning. We've got a 1200 mile drive through the mountains in the middle of winter ahead of us. Should be fun.

My first day of work is next Monday, which I'm very excited about. It'll be nice to have a mentally stimulating job for the first time in the past year-and-a-half.

Job Update

I just accepted a job offer in Oregon. Guess I'll have to change the title of my blog.

Halloween

My pumpkin last year was pretty challenging, but I wanted to make a better one this year. It's really a pumpkin sculpture, because the design goes all the way around it. It took several hours to complete, but I think it turned out pretty cool.

Job Update

This week has already been very busy for me. Over the past three days, I had three interviews for three different positions with two different companies in two different states. When I woke up Wednesday morning for my last interview, there were already ten inches of snow on the ground. The interview was still on, though, so I ate a quick breakfast, pulled waterproof pants and a coat on over my interview clothes, cleared the snow from my Jeep, put her in 4 wheel drive, and set off. I had about 50 miles to drive through the mountains on snow packed roads. It was slow going, but I made it to the interview about 15 minutes early. Dealing with snow is just part of living in the mountains.


I think all of my interviews went pretty well. I should be hearing back form the companies over the next two weeks. With any luck, by the end of the year, I'll have a real engineering job.

Fall Pictures

I just went through my pictures and found some pretty good ones from the fall around here.
This is a panorama I made from pictures taken around 12,000 feet on my way down from the top of Argentine Pass (around 13,000 ft) on the 4 wheeler.

Click the picture for the larger view.

This is the view across the highway from outside the cabin after the last snowfall.


There was a double rainbow over the cabin when I came home from work one day.

Click the picture for a panorama of the rainbow.

Finished Painting!

It's taken a while, but since the Railroad is only operating on weekends now, I've had plenty of time to do some work around the cabin. I finished painting the shed yesterday. Here's a before and after shot:


I painted the trim a little differently than it was originally. It matches the way I painted the trim on the house. I also finished painting around the new windows we had installed. The house doesn't look any different, though, because the new windows match the style of the old windows.

Winter Is Coming and more...

Fall was very pretty up here this year (it was short last year because it was very windy when the leaves changed). Here's a picture of the mountain side above the cabin.


We had our first significant snow of the season on Saturday. We got about eight inches of snow Friday night through Saturday afternoon. Saturday was also the first day that Loveland started making snow and they've been making it continuously since then. They announced their official opening date today: it's this Friday.


It was pretty cool to see snow on the mountain while the Aspen still had yellow leaves on them


I worked at the train on Saturday, so I spent the entire day scooping and shoveling snow and throwing salt on ice to melt it. I worked a double that day (12 hours straight), too, so the day was extra long. It's been relatively nice since then. A lot of the snow has melted, but there is some snow left on the ground.

A couple weeks ago I dropped the 4 wheeler off at a shop in Summit County to have the carburetor re-jetted for the high altitude. They had trouble getting new o-rings for the carb (it had to be totally rebuilt), but I finally got it back at the end of last week. I took it for a ride up Argentine pass and it ran great all the way up to 13,000 feet (from starting altitude around 9,000 feet). It's nice to have the 4-wheeler running, though winter will put a damper on being able to ride it.

I'm still on the job search and don't have much to update on it. The railroad is only open on the weekends now, so I only have to work on weekends, giving me plenty of time during the week to work on getting a real job.

I've spent a lot of time over the last couple of weeks working on my website. I'm still working on getting my custom domain name to work, and the website is definitely not finished, but it's getting better.

I haven't finished painting the shed yet. Between work and the poor weather we've had, I haven't gotten a chance to work on it. It only needs a couple more hours of trim painting, and it will match the cabin perfectly: bright green!

I finished my Christmas lights last week. It's nice to know I won't have to deal with them later, when it's cold and snowy. All I have to do is plug them in! I'll put up a picture of them closer to Christmas.

Climbing Huron Peak

Shannon and I wanted to climb one more 14er before the season ended. It's been gorgeous here the past week, so we took advantage of the great weather and planned our hike for last Thursday (my day off). After I got home from work Wednesday, I packed and we set off for Huron around 8 pm. We had a two-and-a-half hour drive to the trailhead, including a bit of 4-wheeling. We drove through intermittent rain, snow, and freezing rain, which concerned us a little, though I knew the forecast for the morning was for clear skies.

We stopped at a campsite along the 4-wheel drive road about a mile from the trailhead. Shannon set up the tent and our sleeping bags while I started the fire (we hadn't eaten dinner, yet). Starting the fire was a challenge because of all the precipitation we'd gotten. I had to break dead branches off of the lower parts of pine trees to get dry wood. It was also drizzling while I was working, making keeping the fire going even more challenging. I had planned on grilling burgers and baking potatoes. I knew the potatoes would take a while, so I placed them (in aluminum foil) on some flat rocks inside the fire ring as soon as I started the fire. Eventually, I moved them onto the coals to cook them faster. We were starving, so as soon as the burgers were finished, we pulled out the potatoes. We didn't have silverware, so we ate them like apples. Even though they hadn't quite cooked all the way through, they were delicious.

We woke up at 5 am the next morning to break camp and drive the last mile to the trailhead. When I got out of the tent, there was ice on the rain fly. There was also ice on my Jeep. The thermometer on my watch read 32° inside the tent. It was still dark as we drove to the trailhead, though by the time we got to it a little before 6.30 am, we didn't need headlamps to hike with. A little after 6.30, we were on our way up the mountain.

We'd chosen Huron partially because we'd read reviews of the climb that said it was a beautiful hike. And it lived up to our expectations. The trail was well built and not too difficult, and the views were amazing. Here's one of our first good views of the valley taken from near tree line.


You can see the Aspen were already pretty yellow. Most of them are yellow now and some have already lost all their leaves. Fall is pretty short at this elevation.

We also saw lots of wildlife on this hike. We saw a mule deer buck, but it was too far away for me to get good pictures of. We also saw three mule deer yearlings together. You can only see one in this picture. The other two blend in to the background pretty well (they're above the small bush in the center of the picture.


Above tree line, it became apparent that all the frost we thought we'd seen was more likely snow from the night before.


This small pond had a thin layer of ice on it from over night.

Most of the hike was pretty straight forward, until we got to were there was still packed snow on the trail. Apparently the upper portion of this trail keeps snow year round. We'd read trip reports were people mentioned wearing microspikes, but I didn't imagine there would be this much snow on the trail.


The last couple hundred vertical feet of the trail went through a rock/boulder field and required some very careful scrambling to navigate with the permanent snow on it. The fresh snow over night made the climb even more challenging and several icy spots required all four appendages to maneuver past.

After some careful climbing, we summited around 10 am. The weather on the summit was perfect. There was almost no wind and hardly a cloud in the sky. And though the temperature was close to freezing, the sun made it feel like it was 60 degrees.

We enjoyed the summit for over a half hour by ourselves (something rare on top of a 14er) before heading back down. We knew the climb down from the top would be even more challenging than the climb up, because the sun had softened the snow and ice. Despite the challenge, we made it through the rocky section and were able to enjoy the gorgeous views of the sunlit valley.

Here's a panorama I made from the summit. There are several more good ones on flickr.


After nearly 7 miles and 7 hours of hiking, we made it back to the Jeep and began the return trip to Silver Plume. We got our first good views of the valley on our drive back, since it had been dark when we arrived the night before.


There were several old mining camps in the valley, and two ghost towns with restored buildings.


We had originally planned on stopping at the ghost towns to look around, but most of the building are privately owned, and thus locked up tight with little more to explore than you could see from your car. That was a little disappointing.


We had seen evidence of beavers in the valley, and sure enough when we stopped to take pictures of a large beaver hutch, we saw three beavers swimming around! Unfortunately, you can't see the beavers well in any of our pictures.


We had a great time on our short trip and are planning on doing a fall colors trip soon. The rest of the pictures from this trip are on flickr.

Loveland Bench

My solution for the ugly top sheet on the snowboard I used to make the bench? Cover it with the dozens of Loveland stickers I had laying around (they have great coupons on the back). I had just enough stickers to do the whole snowboard. I liked the center graphic on the snowboard, so I worked around it. I think it turned out pretty cool. I need to find something to cover it with so that the stickers don't get peeled off when people sit on it. I'm open to suggestions.



Check out the larger version of the picture on flickr to see it better.

Placing the stickers accurately was a challenge. They are all lined up edge to edge. In order to get them all placed perfectly, I sprayed window cleaner on the board before putting each sticker down. That allowed me to slide the sticker around. After I got the sticker placed where I wanted it, I used a rubber squeegee to force out most of the liquid. The edges of some of the stickers didn't stick very well, but after the glass cleaner dried over night, all the stickers adhered pretty well.

Productive Day

I had a productive day today. I mowed the lawn for the second (and probably last) time this summer (grass grows slow up here). I also started putting up the Christmas lights. Since I never took them off the trees from last year, all I did was move the lights from the trees to the roof, which is where I had originally intended on putting them. Before you question why I am doing the Christmas lights in September, know that last year I put them up after Thanksgiving and had to do it in two feet of snow in the freezing cold. The weather is pretty good here right now, so I'm taking advantage of it.

I also built a bench out of an old snowboard today. I used some scrap 2x4s I had laying around and I think it turned out pretty well.


I made the bench to put under the kitchen table. We normally have the table pushed against a wall. When we have more than three people eat, though, we have to pull the table out and put folding chairs behind it. Now, we have a bench ready to go when we pull the table out. The top of the board is pretty ugly, but I plan on doing something to make it look better.

I also built a display case for the 20 year old food I found when I cleaned out the cabinets last spring. I used some more scrap would I had laying around and plexiglass leftover from when I replaced the plexiglass in the storm door last summer. You can't really see it in the picture, but there is a piece of plexiglass closing the front of the case. I used the table saw to cut grooves in the wood to hold the plexiglass.


The rice in the bottom right was the official sponsor of the 1992 Olympics. The baby food in the upper left expired in 1987, so it was probably mine. The Mac & Cheese doesn't have any dates on it, but the price tag says "4 for 88¢". It must be old! I'm going to get a bracket so I can hang this gem on the wall.

Shed Update

I finished painting the green on the shed. Just have the trim left and it's finished.


I had some company while I was painting Monday evening, a couple of mule deer hanging out on the other side of the street, just 15 yards from where I was. They stayed for a while, until Piglet came and chased them off.

Climbing Mt. Massive

Labor day weekend was pretty crazy for me. I worked at a ski show for Loveland selling 4-Paks and season passes down in Denver on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday afternoons. Friday evening, after I got home around ten, I packed my bags and set off to climb Mt. Massive, a 14er, with some friends.

I made it to the spot where my friends had already set up camp around 11.45 pm after about a two hour drive. I rolled out my sleeping pad and sleeping bag in the back of my Jeep and slept until my alarm went off at 3 am. We had originally wanted to reach the summit at sunrise so we could watch it from 14,421 feet. We didn't leave quite early enough for that, but we were at the trailhead by 4.30 am (I had a slow crew to break camp with).

It was pretty close to a new moon, so it was very dark and the first two hours of our hike were in the pitch black, hiking through the woods with headlamps. Without the moon, though, the stars were incredible. We stopped several times and turned our headlamps off just to admire them. About the same time we made it to the tree level (a little over 11,000 feet), the sky had become just light enough that we could hike without our headlamps. Here's the sun just starting to glow in the valley 1,000 feet below.

From there, we had another 2.5 miles to hike and nearly 3,500 vertical feet to gain. That is a very steep assent. The hike was similar to climbing thousands of loose, rocky, steep stairs for three hours. By 8.30 am, after around 4 hours of hiking, we'd reached the summit. I was in a bit of a hurry to get back down because I had to be back in Denver to work at the ski show by 3 pm. I spent about a half hour on the summit basking in the sun, eating, and relaxing before the hike down.

I left my group at the summit around 9 am, hoping to make it back to my Jeep by 11. After I'd gotten only a couple hundred yards from the summit, I saw a family of mountain goats. I think they were as interested in us as we were in them.

The hike down was as challenging as the trek to the top. I maintained a pretty quick pace on the way down, nearly jogging at times. The hike up and the brutally steep decent had my quads shaking with each step down. I had to stop several times and sit down to rest my legs. I didn't have time to waste, though, and forced myself to keep moving. In spite of my breaks, I made it back to my Jeep before 11 am, less than two hours after leaving the summit and less than half the time it had taken to reach it.

It took every bit of the four hours I had left to drive back to the cabin, shower, and drive to Denver in time for work at the ski show. I was physically exhausted, but made it through the show and the drive back home before collapsing in bed. My legs were incredibly sore the next two-and-a-half days, but climbing Mt. Massive has been one of the highlights of my summer.

The rest of the pictures are on flickr.

Primed Shed

I got the shed primed and ready for paint at the end of last week. It already looks significantly better. Can't wait to put the bright green paint on it and have it match the cabin!

Job Update

I've been applying for engineering jobs in Colorado like crazy. Almost every day, I apply for new positions that have been posted. I have also made some connections in engineering companies that I'm trying to leverage for a job opportunity. In the meantime, I've been working at the local tourist railroad, The Georgetown Loop. I'm a platform attendant there, which means I take peoples' tickets and help them board and unload the train safely. I also have to clean the bathrooms. It pays the bills, though, and will hopefully only be temporary, until I get an engineering job.

Repainting the Shed

I've started work on repainting the shed. The first step was scraping the sides. I finished that in a day, but in usual Fletcher fashion had to do some other work before I could finish scraping the shed. I had to clean out all the junk that's been stored behind the shed for the last 40 years. There were several broken sleds, lots of wood, broken PVC pipes and several pairs of old skis. I kept the skis and the wood that was still decent and threw away the rest.

I'm ready to prime the shed, but it has rained every afternoon since I scraped it. I have to wait til the wood dries out to put a coat of primer on it. Here's a before picture of the shed. Pretty soon, it's going to match the iridescent green of the cabin.

Canoeing the Colorado River

Shannon and I just got back from one of our best adventures in Colorado, yet. Shannon works at REI (a huge outdoor sports store) and can rent equipment for free. We'd been talking about planning a canoe trip in Colorado for a while, but only recently had the time for it. Planning was somewhat last minute, but we did a lot of research on the rivers in Colorado and which sections were doable in a canoe. I wanted something that would challenge us, but not kill us. I've canoed plenty of rivers around Kentucky and didn't want another boring trip on flat water that required paddling to get anywhere. We settled on a 30 mile section of the Upper Colorado River that included mostly class I and II rapids with a few class II+ and class III rapids. We read about each of the more difficult rapids and marked them on our map so that we knew were to expect each of them.

We packed our bags Wednesday night and woke up at 5 am Thursday morning for our two hour drive to the river. Both of us had to drive because we had to leave one car at our take-out location and drive the other, with all our gear, to the put-in. We arrived at the put-in at 9 am. It took about an hour to get the boat ready, tie in our dry bags, and secure all our equipment (extra paddle, water bottles, bailing bucket, etc) and we were finally floating around ten. I sat in the back and Shannon sat in the front of the canoe. Shannon hadn't been on whitewater in over eight years and though I have a moderate amount of experience canoeing and whitewater rafting, this would be my first time whitewater canoeing. We were both a bit apprehensive as we began the trip.


There were only a few class I warm up rapids before our first big challenge, a class III rapid called Needle's Eye. It was in a canyon with steep walls on either side and a large rock in the middle of the river. The drop in the water level on either side of the rock was about two feet. One description of the rapid reads "at higher flows, the hole in the center can easily flip a raft." We weren't quite prepared for the rapid and approached it from the center of the river. We learned the hard way that it wasn't easy to maneuver the 16 foot canoe in swift water. The front of the canoe struck the rock before we had time to turn away from it. Luckily, the current pulled the boat around the rock and through the rapid without flipping it. We made it through a few class II rapids following Needle's Eye, then had to stop to bail a few inches of water out of the bottom of our canoe. The low sitting canoe allowed lots of waves to crash over the sidewalls.

Here is an early cabin from the area we stopped to explore. There was a geocache nearby, too.


About three miles into the trip, we learned our next hard lesson. We were floating down a relatively benign (but fast flowing) section of the river when we noticed a tombstone rock in front of us. We tried to maneuver to the left of it, but again found the boat to be unresponsive. We struck the rock with the front right of our boat and this time paid for it. The canoe flipped. The current was very swift and Shannon and I both grabbed onto the boat as it floated down stream. After several seconds, I was able to get my feet on the bottom of the river. The current was so strong that I had to let go of my paddle and hold the canoe with both hands to keep from losing my grip. The water was about five feet deep, so I couldn't stand, but drug my feet along the bottom of the river as I slowly pulled the boat closer to the shore. I was wearing sandals, so my feet and ankles got beaten up as they dragged across the rocky bottom of the river. After a long, frantic minute, we had wrestled the canoe to water shallow enough to stand in. We flipped the boat over and secured it on some rocks. It was full of water, but all of our gear was still in place and attached to the canoe. We had at least done a good job tying everything down. The only thing we lost was a battery and a roll of toilette paper that had been in a mesh bag I'd forgotten to close after the last time I'd opened it (and the paddle I let go of). We actually watched the roll of toilette paper (inside of a zip lock bag) float by as we were pulling the boat to shore.

We were both ok, but had learned another valuable lesson about whitewater canoeing. In order to effectively maneuver the boat, I had to paddle backwards (and HARD) to slow it down in the swift water and give us time to move the boat to the proper position in the rapids. Flipping our boat in such a simple manner also made us even more nervous about the tough rapids ahead. If we couldn't keep the boat upright in this section of river, how were we going to survive the toughest set of rapids we'd face, only a few miles ahead?

The answer came in the form of a commercial rafting group that we happened upon at the last put-in point before the next set of class III rapids. I'd been nervously excited about Yarmony Rapid, the crux of our entire trip, since I first read about it on several river guide websites. Shannon and I had been discussing how we were going to make it through Yarmony, especially after flipping the canoe earlier. Before we left for the trip, one of Shannon's co-workers warned her that we would flip going through Yarmony.

As we floated down river after our capsize, we were also looking for the floating toilette paper and our spare paddle. We didn't want to litter, and were concerned that we'd already lost our spare paddle only three miles into the trip. We managed to find both the toilette paper and the paddle floating in separate eddies down the river. We'd recovered everything we lost during the flip, so our confidence was somewhat boosted. At least we had a spare paddle if anything went wrong in Yarmony.

At least I look like I know what I'm doing...


The scenery along the river was beautiful.


We stopped at the last put-in before Red Gore Canyon (which contains Yarmony and several class II+ rapids before and after it). A commercial guide was preparing to run the section with several clients in a raft and a ducky. We asked the guide about how Yarmony was at the current water level and if she though we could make it in a canoe. She agreed with Shannon's co-worker, saying that she'd "never seen anyone do it in one of those right side up." She gave us some helpful pointers about the rapids and offered to let us follow their group through the challenging section. We gladly accepted the offer.

Along with the two rafts were two kayakers, who also knew the section of the river. While we floated toward the rapids, we talked with the kayakers and raft guide about how to best approach the rapids. Basically, we just needed to try and follow their line, a challenging task, considering the kayaks were significantly more manueverable at about 1/3 the length of our canoe and the raft could easily bounce off of rocks without flipping.

As the rapids approached, I got down on my knees in the bottom of the canoe (to lower the center of gravity). The first rapid, Red Eye, was a class II that required us to stay left of a large rock. Using my new strategy of paddling backwards to steer the boat, we made it through Red Eye with little fuss. Next up, Yarmony. Yarmony consists of a few drops with boulders to avoid scattered through the rapid. As we entered the first drop, huge waves crashed over our heads and poured into the boat. We kept the canoe lined up well, though, following the raft in front of us. After the first drop, the nose of the canoe got caught in a slow moving eddy while the back remained in the fast moving current, spinning the canoe backwards in the middle of the rapid. I wrestled the back of the canoe into the eddy and forced the front of the canoe back into the current, spinning us back to face the correct direction. Fierce back-paddling as we went over the next drop kept us away from a wall on the left. From there, a long wave train poured water over the sides of the canoe, but we'd made it through the toughest part of the rapid. Without flipping. A few more class II rapids in the canyon poured more water into the boat, but were a breeze to navigate compared to Yarmony. The four inches of water that had accumulated in our canoe had made it significantly more unstable, so we thanked our "guides" and stopped the canoe on a rocky beach to bail out the water. We'd made it through the toughest rapids of the trip and could finally let our nerves relax and enjoy the beautiful scenery around us.

We camped over night at a sandy beach around the halfway point of the river. Here's a picture of our campsite. It was taken after the camera got wet, which is why it's so hazy.


The second day consisted of a lot of flat water with several class I and II rapids interspersed. We were able to relax and just float with the current most of the day, though it was overcast, so it was quite a bit cooler than it had been the previous day. Unfortunately, Shannon's "waterproof" camera got a little too wet and was unable to take pictures for the most of the trip. Guess we'll have to do it again to get some pictures.

Trey's Visit

Trey spent five days in Colorado before he had to fly back to Kentucky. We packed a lot into those five days. The first day we spent mostly unpacking the Jeep and cleaning the cabin up from the month of neglect while I was gone. The grass was over knee high. I was only able to mow a quarter of the lawn before the motor on the old electric mower burned up.

After working on the yard Wednesday morning, we went on a short hike to an abandoned mine and explored it. We were both pretty sore and winded after the short hike at altitude, which concerned us about our plans for Friday: climbing a 14er. We'd both just come up from sea level, so the altitude was really affecting us.

We went on another hike Thursday to check out a mine we'd seen from the highway for a while. I'd never been to it, so I didn't know if it was open or not. When we finally got to it, we discovered that the entrance had collapsed, but there was enough of an opening left for us to climb down into it. It turned out to be a very cool mine to explore.

Friday morning we woke up at 5 am to set off with Shannon and one of her friends, Sarah, for Mt. Bierstadt, a 14er above Georgetown on the road to Guanella Pass. We were at the trailhead a little after six and to our disappointment, so were 200 other people. It turns out that we picked the one day of the year that a group hikes Mt. Bierstadt for a fundraiser, putting 200 extra people on the trail. I had hoped that since we were hiking on a weekday, there'd be few other people on the trail. Instead, we looked more like a long line of ants walking on the trail.

Here's the view we had from the parking lot at 6 am.


We could definitely feel the altitude, but after about three hours of hiking, we made it to the top. We spent about 45 minutes on the peak (along with 100 other people) eating lunch and enjoying the view. We made it back to the parking lot by 12.30 pm and spent the rest of the afternoon napping.



Trey's flight out of Denver left a six in the afternoon on Sunday. We left early to take the Coors Brewery Tour in Golden. When we got there, we were at the back of a 45 minute to one hour line waiting to get on the shuttles that begin the tour. After standing in line for about 15 minutes, one of the brewery employees walked by asking if there were any groups of two. I shot my hand up and yelled that we were. That got us a ticket straight to shuttle, bypassing about a half hour of the line. That extra half hour gave us plenty of time to enjoy the brewery tour and drink the three free beers they give you at the end, before dropping Trey off at the airport.

Back to Colorado

I spent over a month away from Colorado and was definitely ready to head back by the time I left on August 8th. Trey had decided to drive out with me and spend a few days in Colorado. On the drive back, I had about three times as much stuff as I had come to Kentucky with. The Jeep was packed full and I had a trailer with a 4 wheeler on it. I was most nervous about the trailer. The wood on it is rotten, the frame is rusting through in places, and the wheel bearings were in bad shape. In the last couple of days before the drive, I'd spent most of my time working on the trailer. I replaced the lights, lowered and supported the sidewalls, and most importantly replaced the wheel bearings. Here's a picture of the trailer. Notice I have two spare tires, just in case...


The trailer severely limited our speed as I had to stay in 4th gear to have enough power to pull it at highway speeds. We averaged about 55 mph and a mere 15 mpg during the whole trip. We worried about getting a flat tire every time the trailer went over a bump or pothole. It only has 12 inch tires and I had them inflated to their max of 60 psi. Fortunately, the trailer made it all the way to Colorado with little fuss.

I was grateful to have Trey with me to help with the driving. We spent the night just east of Kansas City. The whole trip took us about 31 hours with about 22 hours of driving.

Maine

The day after I got back from the family reunion, I left for Maine to visit Shannon and her family. I didn't even unpack my bag from the family reunion. I had washed my clothes at the condo, so I just took the same stuff with me to Maine.

I had a lot of fun in Maine. Shannon had planned a lot of great stuff for us. Her parents made a lobster dinner for us all one night. Shannon's dad had called a friend of his who owns a lobster boat and told him we wanted some lobster for dinner. At 4 am the next morning, the guy with the lobster boat called Shannon's dad and told him to meet him at the dock. They went out on his boat, pulled a lobster trap and so we had fresh Maine lobster to eat the next day.

Shannon had also arranged a surprise sailing trip for the two of us. I'd never been sailing before, so I was pretty excited. We sailed on an 88-foot schooner that was first launched in 1912.


We got to help put up the sails.


We also went on the Allagash brewery tour. Allagash is a microbrewery in Maine. It was very cool to go on a tour of such a small brewery after having been on the Coors brewery tour in Colorado, the worlds largest brewery.


We spent one morning at the beach, but the water is so cold that you can't get in. I had a lot of fun in Maine, though I was told it's really only a good place to visit in the summer.

Family Reunion

Only two days after I got back to Kentucky, we left for our annual Gordon (my mom's side) family reunion. The Reunion was at the lake of the Ozarks, which I had just driven by two days earlier. We stayed in condos on the lake and had great weather for the whole trip. It was great to see so much of my family that I hadn't seen for a while.

We rented a pontoon boat and went swimming from it in the lake one morning. We had rented the boat for the whole day, but the left pontoon started sinking, so the boat was listing badly. We had to call the rental company from a restaurant that we'd stopped at and have them come rescue us. Unfortunately, they didn't have an extra boat to give us, so our day of boating was cut short.

Trey, Kaela, my Aunt Nancy, and I rented two Jet Skis on our last day on the lake. That was a lot of fun, but with so many larger boats on the lake, the water was very rough.

Patrick and I introduced the rest of the family to geocaching. We took a group of about eight people geocaching in a small park near the condos. Unfortunately, it was basically just a forest with very few trails. We had to do a lot of bushwhacking, so it wasn't ideal for the group of (somewhat) older people we had. Despite the less than ideal conditions (and my uncle spraining his ankle) we got two of our relatives hooked on geocaching. One of our aunts and our uncle who sprained his ankle both loved geocaching and are now caching on their own.

Drive Home

Matt and I decided to caravan back to Kentucky since we were both driving most of the same route. We left a little after noon on July 4th after eating at the Georgetown barbeque. We made pretty good time the first day and stopped about an hour west of Topeka, Kansas to rest over night. We left early on the fifth but ran in to trouble pretty quickly. One of the shifting solenoids in Matt's automatic transmission went out, leaving him without first and fourth gear. That meant he had to take off from stops in second gear and limited his cruising speed in third gear. Fortunately, he was able to make it back to his parents' in Alabama on just two gears.

I made it back to Louisville around 9 pm after about 21 hours of driving over a 30 hour period.

Matt's Visit Part II

After our failed attempt at exploring the vertical shaft we found, Matt and I decided to explore some other mines that were easier to access. I-70 is the main highway running east - west through the Rockies and the road that I have to take to get anywhere. Every time I travel along it, I see several mine openings that I've always been curious about. It was the perfect time to check some of those out.

Turns out, we hit the jackpot. We found the largest mine I'd ever explored. We entered through the upper level adit. The upper level was not very large, but a winze about 100 yards from the entrance led to a lower level. The winze was a diagonal shaft the went down at about a 45° angle. We tied a rope to a piece of a metal that was secured to the floor of the upper adit and slowly lowered ourselves down to the lower level.

The lower level of the mine turned out to be huge. We probably spent more than an hour-and-a-half exploring it. As we got deeper into the mine, we had to climb over several sections of collapsed rock. When Matt was climbing down the backside of one of the debris piles, the candle he was carrying went out. Our first thought was that he had accidentally blown it out as he was scrambling over the rocks. I climbed down to meet him with the lighter. We decided not to move any further until we got the candle re-lit. I pulled the lighter out of my pocket and tried to light it several times, but couldn't get a flame. I'd dropped the lighter in the dirt and thought that maybe that was preventing it from igniting. So I pulled a book of matches out of our mine exploring bag. I struck several matches, but each time got the same result: the sulfur on the head of the match burned, but never created a flame. Matt and I looked at each other, both knowing what we were experiencing: bad air. We scrambled back to the top of the rock pile we'd climbed down. There, the lighter and candle both lit very quickly. There hadn't been enough oxygen lower in tunnel to support a flame. We knew from our research that carbon dioxide is more dense than oxygen and often displaces oxygen in mines, creating bad air.

At that point, we decided to turn back, very grateful that we'd run into the old geologist that recommended we carry a candle. He may well have saved our lives. Neither of us felt short of breath in the area with bad air, but we later learned that fire needs at least 15% oxygen to burn (normal air contains 21% oxygen). I haven't been able to find out what oxygen content is required for humans to survive.

On our way out of the mine, we climbed up a stope we had passed. A stope is were the miners pulled the ore from that they were going to process. This one went up at a 45° angle. We had originally hoped that it was a raise that would lead to another level and were slightly disappointed when we discovered it was only a stope. Overall, though, we were very excited about the mine and all the exploring we had done in it. We were still curious about what might've been passed the section with bad air, but we won't be able to find out without supplemental oxygen.

On our last full day in Colorado, we went on another hunt for abandoned mines. We decided to take the Jeep up the trail where I had gotten stuck in the snow with my dad this spring. My dad had told me there were several mines in the area to explore. We stopped to take pictures were my dad and I had gotten stuck. This picture shows the tree that we cut and the rocks we piled to fill in the side of the trail.


The ashes from our fire are still there.


The snow had all melted on the lower portion of the trail, but it was still a solid 4 wheel drive road. As we got higher on the mountain we came across several mine sites. Unfortunately the Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining and Safety had beaten us there. There were placards in all the mines we stopped at that indicated the mines had been made "safe" in 2007. The entrances to all of them had been blasted closed. We were very disappointed.

We did make it up to some snow, which Matt was excited about. Part of the trail was blocked by snow.


Vanity picture of the Jeep at the highest point we made it to.


We drove to the end of the Jeep road where there was a huge mine with several cool structures that were still intact. As we expected, though, the entrance to the mine had long since collapsed. There were some cool structures left.




Check out the rest of the pictures on flickr. There are some good ones.

That marked the end of our mine explorations for this trip. We left the next day to drive back to Kentucky.