Around Mt. Ida, and back again

Today we are in Salmon Arm visiting my parents, but we have to take advantage of the good weather to get in a training ride in preparation for the Lake Chelan Century challenge. We rode around Mt. Ida counterclockwise, refilled water bottles, then rode around again, but clockwise this time.

Lots of farms around the mountain

We had one tire problem, but managed to get it fixed

The road rolls up and down a lot - lots of practice changing gears

In the end, we rode 150km in 5:57 - not bad at all, with 3 weeks to go. Ciel even managed to get up the "Devil's Elbow" - a steep hill at the east end of 10th avenue that gets up to about 15% grade. That was after riding 80km!

-mark.

Recent Jaunts in the Haunt

Sunny mornings downhill

Needless to say, I don't suffer enough. I stop to take photos

Just south of the border.  No traffic like north of the border

Where a town named Ferry used to be.

The poets wind blew out softly

Maya Angelou @DrMayaAngelou · May 23

Listen to yourself and in that quietude you might hear the voice of God. 

I found out today that Maya Angelou wrote poetry on twitter. Now that she has died - found out myself through social media, it's going to be someone's task to archive her writings - including 225 tweets in her twitter feed. What a cool job that person is going to have but what a challenge with digital documents. I wonder if she ever considered her twitter feed would be archived. I remember a stormy day listening to her on the radio giving a speech at the 1993 presidential inaguration. I was coming home after having the ski area where I was skiing shut down completely because of high winds that day. I remember thinking that perhaps that's why the wind blew. She blew me away with that poem.  
I'm with President Clinton when he wrote in his statement

"Now she sings the songs the Creator gave to her when the river

and the tree and the stone were one".

VSA!

This is an Agilent E4406A Vector Signal Analyzer that I bought super cheap on eBay. I used to use these at work, but I didn't know all of their capabilities. This photo shows the spectrum analyzer in its basic mode at a resolution bandwidth of 100 mHz (yes, millihertz!), measuring the instrument's internal 50 MHz calibration signal. Instruments with capabilities like this used to cost more than my house...now they cost less than a decent bicycle.

-mark.

Astronaut material? NOT! lessons learned

One, I need a checklist.  We were camping the first night travelling north and I realized, I forgot my jacket. The worst part of the night was remembering what I forgot, the best part was seeing the space station cruise across the sky with the |Soyuz re-supply following it.  Mark thought they might have been 200 km apart. Amazing to know there are astronauts living up there crusing at 370 km above travelling almost 7.5 km per second.  Going to the Columbia Icefield is as close as I'm going to get to being in space, but I blew the launch. But as Chris Hadfield writes - always best to think of worst case scenerio so to be prepared because adaptability is the prize.

The glacier has changed, there isn't a snow field anymore up the icefall, now it's ice bridges to navigate it looks like.
But we'll have to save that investigation for a later time. 

It's good for me to be adaptable.  We decided to go up to the toe of the glacier since we were there. I thought it would be really stupid to go up any further without appropriate clothing.  What could I have been thinking?  Really?  Spring skiing? So, we provided a photo opportunity for the snow-coach tourists as we cruised back down to the parking lot. It was very fast skiing down because of boilerplate conditions and the wind blowing behind our backs.

So, we made a decision to go to Lake O'Hara because neither of us had been there and we figured that it would be a bit more mellow.  There was hardly anyone there, either cause the weather wasn't so good, or maybe it's time for golfing.  Driving, we did see a lot of bicycles on cars - way more than skis.  So it was fun to be by ourselves, out of the wind, in peaceful solitude, listening to the spring sounds.

Wiwaxy was a companion at the campground

We ended up touring higher and wowed ourselves with the beautiful mountains surrounding us. Mark saw a wolverine track while I was holed up with yet another shitty blister.

Beautiful big mountains.

We built a snow cave where we slept for a couple nights - it was warm and cosy.

And winter was still happening as we skied out.