Crossfit Park City rocks!

Chris and Eric, our two Crossfit trainers, went to the regionals to compete this weekend. They were competing against 70 other Crossfit studs from around the northwest.

Chris, on the right, won three out of four events and won the region. Eric, on the left, was in third place. Not sure who Jerome is, but he's a good bit bigger than Chris.



Hopefully at least a smidgen of my Crossfit trainer's conditioning will rub off on me. Of course I am typing this blog entry, sitting in bed in a B&B, with a glass of white wine.

It may take a while.

Just a few quick shots

The trip is going great and we have had a lot of fun so far. We got to Morro Bay this afternoon, so we are done with the mountains.

With all the snow this year, the Yosemite waterfalls are outstanding!



The huge presence of Half Dome.



Julie, next to the most massive tree in the world.



And a black bear who ran across the road, but then stopped down the hillside to tear apart some logs looking for bugs.



Lots of gorgeous scenery. Lots of wildlife. Great hikes. Tomorrow we go kayaking.

I'll post more later.

Look at the pretty new retaining wall

Not too far from our house, they are cramming a little development onto the side of a hill. That guarantees you will need some retaining walls. This one was nice looking with big timbers and a decorative fence at the top. That is, until it started falling down.



Looks quite a bit worse from this side. Part of it has ripped out from the hillside and is falling. Most everything else is leaning enough to be worrisome.



But the worst view has to be from up top. There are two nice houses that have been there a good while and aren't part of the new neighborhood. I wonder how bad it has to get before they start having foundation problems.



I guess they never said that building on the side of a mountain is easy. Our house's retaining wall is built with 700,000+ pounds of concrete blocks. You can see it here.

OK, we're leaving

I want to take some pictures of something other than snow, so we're leaving town and heading to California. We will be visiting Yosemite, Sequoia, Morro Bay and Carmel.

Meanwhile, it keeps snowing here. I am hoping this is the last picture of snow this spring. I shot it from my car window on the way to CrossFit.



Double click on the image to see it bigger. In a dreary, cloudy picture, almost in black and white, there is one little yellow house right in the middle. I didn't see it until I pulled the image off the camera. A nice little surprise!

Saving pictures in Outlook

Julie and I both use Outlook for our email. We have been frustrated lately when we get pictures that are embedded in a note. We want to save the pictures, but there is no easy way. You can't drag the image to a folder. You can't right-click and pick save as.

Here is a very easy to follow set of instructions to fix this. Follow them very carefully or it may not work. Once you have set it up one time, saving pictures is just a click of a button.

http://www.howto-outlook.com/howto/saveembeddedpictures.htm

Yes, this should definitely be built into Outlook, but it isn't.

Jasper's best friend

This stunning young lady is Hannah. Her parents are renting our condo and they came over for dinner the other night. Hannah got dressed up for the occasion with some stick-on earrings.



She's as cute and friendly as she can get and she just loves Jasper. It's great to have such nice people right next door!

Update: here is a picture Hannah's mom, Sally, just sent from her iPhone. Hannah has on her stylish biking helmet.

Local guests

Our friends the Benson's are on a nice vacation. Meanwhile, some squatters came in to take over. As best we could tell, it is a mom and a little one. They tried to be very uncooperative by waiting until I was there with my camera to walk over and sit down in the shade. I understand that for a hot day, but it was only 30 and there was a stiff breeze.

They seem to have a pretty shaggy looking coat right now. Perhaps it is the transition from winter fur to summer.



It took me about 30-45 minutes of slowly creeping closer. They never seemed terribly worried about me and I always had a mapped out plan to run for my life.

Quite the lovely pair.



I think Junior told mom a joke. Looks that way...



I've seen dogs scratch behind their ears, but it is quite something to see with a young moose.



They were mostly pruning back Bill's lovely lawn. It is tough to do when you are tall and awkward though. I like this adaptation. Something half way between standing up and laying down. It seemed to work quite well.



I'm going to have to get better at judging males vs females and ages. Everything I have found on the web says that to age a moose, you should look closely at its teeth. I am guessing this applies to a hunter who has killed the moose, because I can't see anyone snuggling up close enough to check a moose's molars.

Exercise is hard

I have been trying to get in the habit of going to my CrossFit workouts three times a week. I am enjoying it, but most workouts kick my butt. Here was today's, with some notes.

• 100 Double Unders (jump rope, spinning two revolutions per jump)
  
• 10 Burpee Box Jumps (stand, down to the floor in a plank at the bottom of a pushup, back to standing, jump up on a 24" box, jump down, repeat)
  
• 20 Ring Push ups (instead of hands on the floor, your hands are on gymnastic rings lowered down to a few inches off the floor)
  
• 30 Wall Ball (hold a 20 lb medicine ball at your chest, go into a deep squat, rise quickly and push the ball up against the wall, over a 10' line. Catch and repeat)
  
• 40 Power Cleans (take a barbell with 95 lbs, from the floor, lift it quickly up to your chest, as though you are about to do a press. Repeat)
  
• 30 Wall Ball
• 20 Ring Push ups
• 10 Burpee Box Jumps
• 100 Double Unders

This is how the workout is prescribed. If you have to back off things, that is allowed. The workout is timed, and you are trying to finish as quickly as possible.

I was able to do most things, but I used 75 pounds instead of 95 and I haven't mastered double unders, so I had to replace each with 300 normal jump ropes.

I can't tell you how tiring this is. Everything but the double unders uses your triceps. Mine were melting by the end. I just keep telling myself "whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger."

Snow in the Cottonwood Canyons

We have had some annoying April/May snows the past few days, but it is melting off in the afternoons almost as fast as it comes down. However, this week has been the perfect example of the difference between the snow at Park City and the snow over in Little Cottonwood Canyon, about 5 miles away.



In the last four days, Snowbird has had 7 feet of snow. They have been getting the lake effect snows of the Great Salt Lake, just like you hear about with NY and the Great Lakes. Snowbird's peaks are about 3500 feet higher than where we live, which has made an important temperature difference. The moist air gets pushed up the canyon, rising from 4,000 feet to 10,000+ feet. The temperature drop forces all the moisture out as snow.

Great for the water supply. Great for the only ski resort still open. And mostly great that we didn't have anything like that on our side of the Wasatch range.

Stop the ski season damn it!

Park City cracks me up. On one hand, everyone is tired of winter and wants to move on. Hiking and biking, not skiing and snowshoeing. On the other hand, it keeps snowing, so everyone gets bored and hits the snow again.

Because I am a long ways off with a little camera, this may be hard to see. In the middle of the picture is a ski run with some big jumps, all made of snow. In the middle of the jumps, you can see dirt. This is because PCMR wants to keep kids from coming over to the closed resort, hiking up, and skiing or boarding down. So, they actually plow out all the snow in between jumps.



Meanwhile, I was driving past Deer Valley and looked up the hill. I thought I saw skiers coming down so I pulled over. By the time I stopped the truck and took this picture, the sledders (not skiers) had gone down behind the trees.



It turns out that eight or ten adults (no kids) had hiked up 1200 feet of vertical (the Carpenter Lift for those who know DV) just to sled down one time. That's either serious dedication, boredom, or both.



Their sleds were little high-tech adult toys. Click here to buy one at Amazon.


Oh well, perhaps spring will grace us with its presence again sometime soon.