Today I got out of Salt Lake City’s stifling inversion for a little while.
Until now, my department hasn’t done any kind of formal, department-wide evaluation of our graduate students and their progress. A number of people, including me, have argued for some time that we should be doing something like CMU’s Black Friday. This semester Suresh, our current DGS, has made this happen; the meeting was today. Overall [...]
Pano taken from near the alpine loop road behind Mt Timpanogos, Oct 16 2011. Here’s a high-res version suitable for printing (36 MB).
The San Rafael Swell is a large uplifted area in southeast Utah that has eroded into numerous badlands and canyon systems. The Swell is not particularly well-known outside of Utah because it contains no visitor centers, motels, restaurants, or any other services — it’s the kind of place you enter with maps, plenty of water, [...]
Over Labor Day weekend I climbed Mount Nebo, the highest point in the Wasatch Range, with Dave Hanscom and Bill Stenquist. Dave has run me into the ground before and Bill came close to winning the Wasatch 100 a couple of times — so I should have known something was up when we met in [...]
I have a hiking book that refers to Box Elder Peak as the red-headed stepchild of the central Wasatch Range. This is true: Box Elder is a lonely 11,000′ mountain stuck right in between the big and impressive Timpanogos and Lone Peak massifs. The other day Dave Hanscom and I decided to climb it. Neither [...]
Yesterday the local news had this story about a guy who took an uncontrolled slide down a chute in Maybird Gulch in Little Cottonwood Canyon outside of Salt Lake City. The slide took him over some rocks and he was lucky to survive — the video accompanying the story is terrifying. Video Courtesy of KSL.com [...]
With some travel coming up and hot weather rapidly eroding our epic snowpack, I decided to sneak in a quick snow climb on July 1. Since I couldn’t convince anyone else to go along, I made a conservative choice and climbed Red Baldy, whose northwest slopes present one of the easier and safer routes found [...]
Incredible to see so much snow at the end of June; these pictures show what Lake Blanche (at 8900′) more commonly looks like on Memorial Day.
Near my house the other day.