Biking update

I am still trying to deal with the fact that I'm not supposed to be running.  Swimming mostly sucks, which leaves biking until the snow falls.  I have been doing a mix of mountain and road biking and enjoy them both. 

I decided if this is something I am going to have to commit to, I was going to replace my 17 year old road bike.  If you go that long without buying something, chances are you will be stunned when you see the new prices.  High quality bikes now start around $2,000 and run up towards $10,000.  I decided I would rather get a used expensive bike than a new cheaper bike.  I started watching eBay, Craigslist and KSL.com.

I ended up buying one off eBay from a bike shop in Pennsylvania.  A customer had bought the bike, decided it wasn't the right fit, and asked the bike shop to sell it for him.  It only has a few hundred miles on it. I managed to get it for about 55% of the cost of a new one and it is in perfect shape.

My choice was a Specialized Roubaix Expert, which I think of as a racing bike for an old guy. It is designed to provide high performance, but also to lessen the shocks and vibrations from the road.  The name and design came from the Paris-Roubaix bike race, which is famous for having stretches over cobblestone streets.

There are a number of things they did to minimize the riding pain:

• The frame is all carbon fiber.  They can lay the fiber in such a way that the bike flexes in some directions, but not in others.  It is stiff and responsive to pedaling, but gives in the direction of the road shocks.
• You can see some odd bends in the seat stays and the fork.  Specialized calls these Zertz.  Zertz are elastomeric dampeners. They aren't really shock absorbers, but they are supposed to reduce the road vibrations.  Around here they slather the roads every summer with something called seal coat.  In theory, it seals the cracks in the road so water can't get in and freeze.  In reality, it just vibrates the hell out of bicyclists.
• It has a long wheel base.  You can see how the front fork angles forward instead of straight down.  This softens the blows from bumps.
• They also made it more upright.  They understood that us old(er) guys don't like folding into a deep tuck all day.

I also got a version with a Compact crank up front and a bigger freewheel in the back.  Now I finally have gears I can use on these mountain climbs and still keep my cadence up.

And finally, the previous owner upgraded the wheels to Mavic Ksyrium's.  Did you know that racing wheels often run well over $1000?  For entertainment, go shopping here for a minute or two.  Damn!

So, no more excuses.  I have a great road bike and it should last me many years.  I can ride it hard and fast (if I get into shape) but it will still take care of my poor, tired body.

I struggle with where to spend my exercise time, road biking or mountain biking?  I keep hearing about accidents my friends are having on their mountain bikes, and that has me a bit timid.  Serious mountain bikers answer "sure, but you can get hurt driving or even walking."   Yes, but I can't think of any other activities where in the past month or two, close friends have:

• got a concusion
• broke a jaw and lost 5 teeth
• broke 4 ribs, a collar bone, and punctured a lung
• broke a radial bone at the elbow
• punctured a thigh with a brake handle

I'm pretty sure I can go a good chunk of my life without hearing about that many injuries from walking.  Now I just wonder how much cycling I can get in before the roads ice up and the snow falls.  At least few weeks I hope.

Deseret Ranch

As a birthday gift to my birdwatching mom, I arranged for a guided birding trip of the Deseret Ranch.  The trips are led by Bill Fenimore, who lives in Farmington.  I have run across Bill several times before at the Swaner Nature Preserve.  He is on their advisory board and I am a volunteer.

We met Bill down at the Smith's grocery store and he drove from there.  It was about 45 minutes towards Wyoming and Idaho, covering some interesting back roads. Since we had an extra seat, Bill's wife decided to join us.  Here we have Bill and his wife with my mom (in the red sweater).

The Deseret Ranch is a 250,000 acre working ranch.  That's a square roughly 20 miles on each side!  Makes our half acre lot in Park City feel a wee small. It is owned by the LDS Church (the Mormon's).  They have done a very interesting mix of using it as a cattle ranch with about 8,000 cows, hunting land for elk, moose and deer, and a wildlife area for research and birdwatching. They test out quite a number of eco-oriented land use processes and then share their experiences.

I have been driving down the road and had to wait for a cow to get out of my way.  I think this is the first time I have had to wait for a herd to get off the road.

The ranch has well over 200 bird species during the year.  We were there to see what we could see, but ideally finding mom two new life birds: the Sage Grouse and the Clarks Grebe.  One of the advantages of the ranch is that it has so many different micro-climates.  We journeyed past a reservoir, steep canyons, rolling hills, forest, sage, farm land, and more. 

Our first find was a Dusky Grouse.  Close, but no cigar.

Less than an hour later we find the Ruffed Grouse.  Same thing.  Interesting, but not what we were hoping for.

We finally saw the Sage Grouse, a pair actually, but I was on the wrong side of the truck to catch a photo.  Amazing to see three different grouse in on day when lots of people never see their first.  We also found the Clarks Grebe on one of the large ponds, but to see it we were using a powerful spotting scope, so no pictures there.  For someone with over 1600 life bird species (mom), getting two new ones in one day, all without leaving the country, is pretty amazing.

We also spotted quite the collection of mammals.  First we saw these two bull elk.  I'm not a hunter, but they certainly seem like a good rack.  You can hunt in the ranch, but it has to be guided and I think a permit for an elk cost $15,000.  You have to want it bad!

We also saw a number of deer, a coyote, and a lot of prairie dogs. I think the prairie dogs are cute, but apparently they can be quite invasive and the ranchers don't like all the leg-breaking holes they leach on the range. Between those and the chipmunks, the predators should be quite full by winter.

The Deseret Ranch is very scenic and an incredible site for bird watchers.  It is unfortunate that the only way you can see it is with a guide.  Just the same, I imagine that without Bill we wouldn't have seen as much and we might still be out there driving around lost.

Antelope Island with my mom

My mom is visiting Park City and we decided to do a birding and photography visit to Antelope Island.  The birds are migrating, which is both good and bad.  Some of the interesting ones have left but others are journeying through.  There were thousands of Eared Grebes floating around eating brine shrimp.  I like them because of their Damien-like eyes.  Cute, but with an evil slant.

The thing I can't really capture is the number of birds out on the Great Salt Lake.  They are everywhere.  Flying, sitting, eating, diving, stalking, all by the thousands.

It is sad to see the birds changing to their fall colors.   While the trees get bright and beautiful, the birds no longer need to be sexy for their mates so they switch to their feature equivalents of sweats and a t-shirt.

Our big success was the Burrowing Owls.  I finally found the owls on this trip back in July.  I knew where to look for them but had no idea how lucky we would be.

Almost immediately we found this one, sitting by his (or her) burrow.  I slowly crept up, taking each photo as if it would be the last before the owl bolted.  It was amazingly tolerant of my presence.

Another shot of the same owl.

Once he flew, we got back into the car to drive further down looking for more.  "Further" ended up being about 150 yards.  We discovered this man-made burrow with three owls camped out front. I never saw this back in July, probably because of the tall grass. Fortunately a dry summer and fall months mean flattened weeds.

Mom took some shots and then I tried to get in close.  One by one, they grew wary and flew off.

Across the road we approached the burrow that I had found before. Two owls flew off from it (now totaling 6) but I never go a great shot of them.

As we drove down the road towards the far end of the island, I told my mom that I wanted to photograph a coyote hunting voles.  It turns out that I need to be more specific.  I need a coyote hunting voles closer than 100 yards out.  This one was about 400 yards away.  Sure enough, he pounced and nailed a vole or mouse.  Look closely and you can see it in his mouth. It's a soft, distant fuzzy photo.

Of course, there were the ever-present bison all over the island.  We also saw some Pronghorn, which are now displaying some impressive racks.  It seems that every trip to Antelope Island results in a lot of interesting things to see and photograph.

Almost success

If you follow my blog, you know that every fall I go out hunting for elk with my friend Chad Rexroad.  I am looking for photo opportunities and Chad is looking for where he will go when hunting season starts.  We gave it our first effort on Monday.

We have to drive about an hour to get into the right area, but almost immediately we found two moose cows, each of which had one calve with her.  I wanted a photo of the calves, but they were both nicely hidden in the brush.

 There were tons of deer, usually in groups of 2 or 3.

 And we did find one of the best defended porcupines I have ever seen.  He had thousands of very long quills. Even so, he figured we were worth running from.

 I tried to get him to pose but he wasn't interested.  Thank the photo Gods for long lenses.

As for the elk, I generally seem to be elk repellent.  Chad will go out and see several groups of them and then go with me and see none.  After spending an hour and a half quietly stalking them, we gave up to drive home.  Thankfully, one cow elk was kind enough to be in a stream bed and we got a decent look, but the light was too low for a photo.

The other thing we saw was 50-100 free range cows.  They are all tagged, but they are wandering loose around the national forest.  They seem happy and healthy, but for the life of us, we can't figure out how they round them up at the end of the year.  They tend to hang around in very small groups and are spread out for miles in the forest over steep hills and valleys.  Unless they come when called, I just don't think this should work.

Any free range cowboys out there?

City Tour to Vegas

Every year a group from Park City heads to another town for an information gathering visit.  The idea is that every town has things they are doing right and wrong, and some of the "rights" are things we haven't done yet in Park City.  The goal is to steal the best ideas and duplicate them. Over the years, there have been some very significant impacts on our town.

Because of this, the trips tend to be to cities that have a lot in common with Park City.  The easiest destinations are the other ski towns, but other resort destinations work as well.  This year was a bit odd:  Downtown Las Vegas.  They picked Vegas because of the massive efforts they are undergoing to revitalize downtown and to find new business beyond their core of gambling.

When most of us think Vegas, we think of the Strip.  Bad guess though.  The entire Strip is in unincorporated Clark County. Of course this makes a huge difference in where tax dollars go and improvements are being done.

The city of Las Vegas encompasses the older downtown area.  There are a few casinos but they don't look at all like the massive Disney-esque ones on the Strip.  Walk a few blocks from the casinos and you are in a land of homeless people, pawn shops and bail bondsmen.

This is a fairly typical crowd outside these casinos.  Notice:

• The heavy guy in the "Ass Man" t-shirt.
• His girlfriend with a beer in her hand. Open containers are on par with New Orleans.
• A complete family dressed as super heros, for no obvious reason.
• A motorized wheelchair coming into the picture.  I can't tell you how many hundreds of these I saw.

You can't have guests without some nice restaurants in the area.  About two blocks from our casino/hotel (the Golden Nugget) was The Heart Attack Grill.  They pride themselves in making some of the least healthy food on the planet.  If you weigh more than 350 pounds, you can eat for free.

To draw people into area they built a giant roof along Freemont Street and every night they have a mix of live and recorded music with a video display that feels somewhere between a laser show and a MTV video.  It definitely had the effect of drawing a crowd.

I stayed at the Golden Nugget a decade or two ago.  It was a dump.  They have done a nice job of remodeling it.  The rooms were nice and spacious.  The beds were comfortable and the rooms had new flat panel TVs.

In the lobby area, there was a pool with a giant aquarium.  The highlight was going down the water slide, in a tube, and through the aquarium full of sharks.  If you look closely, you can see the tube behind the sharks.

So, I haven't painted a glowing description of the new and vital downtown.  What are they doing?

One example is their new government building.  It is nice, modern, and meets LEED energy standards.  Even better, the shoe/clothing company Zappos bought their old city hall building and is moving a company of 1500 in from the burbs. We got to go visit Zappos and learn more about the company's unique (odd) culture.  If you are interested, the founder has a book called Delivering Happiness, A Path to Profits.

Looking out from the new city hall, you can see the new performing arts center (right) and the humongous furniture mart (left).  As a North Carolinian, I hate the idea that they worked so hard to steal the annual furniture shows from High Point.

With private donations (and big ones!) they managed to build a new 470 million dollar performing arts center in the middle of a recession.  The place was drop dead gorgeous, but I have to think that they could have found better uses for that much money. It's not mine to spend or donate though.

Another addition to downtown is the Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health. It is run as an extension of the Cleavland Clinic and they are doing trials for Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and other brain-related diseases.

The building was designed by Frank Gehry, a famous architect who has designed some of the funkiest buildings in the world.

I think staring at this building too long would either give me a headache or make me a research candidate for the building.

From downtown Vegas, we hopped on the bus for a ride to the Hoover Dam. Quite the engineering marvel.  We had a good presentation on the water issues of the Western US, which will be critical for Park City and everything around it.  Water will definitely be the next big resource shortage unless someone comes up with a spectacular improvement in desalination.

After 9/11, they built a new bridge so that they don't have to deal with everyone driving across such an interesting terrorist target.  I have to guess that if the dam burst, life downstream would get very interesting, at least for that brief few seconds.

We broke up our return trip from Vegas with an overnight stop at the Brian Head ski resort in southern Utah.  These guys have some real challenges.  Their small ski area is a long drive from most population centers and it isn't close to any airport of consequence.   Ove the past few years, their full time population has dropped from over 100 to 83.  We are talking about a serious fluctuation between ski season and the shoulder seasons.  Park City has some of the same problem, but not nearly the same magnitude. 

One thing Brian Head has going for it is that it's next door neighbor is the Cedar Breaks National Monument, which offers no place to overnight.

Do you know the difference between a National Park and a National Monument?  The parks are created by an act of Congress but a monument can be created by a declaration from the President.  Other than that, they follow the same rules and regulations.

Cedar Breaks looked amazingly similar to Bryce Canyon, which is about 40 miles away as the crow flies. 

In addition to the hoodoos, the park has some incredibly old trees.  This one is 1800 years old!  I am always amazed at how rugged these trees can be.  This one is growing at over 10,000 feet in altitude, in crappy soil, and where about 400 inches of snow fall every winter.

I saw a lot. Did I actually learn anything useful?  Sure

• Most important, Park City has a lot of cool, interesting, motivated people and they are excited about doing things to keep the town vital and interesting.  I got to spend a lot of time talking with everyone and I hope I built some long term relationships.
• Riding a bus anywhere beyond the normal Park City transit routes is further than I care for.  All the way to Vegas is why they invented planes.
• Revitalizing downtown Vegas is a 20+ year effort.  I hope they can stick with it.
• Our group had several  builders and they thought Vegas's relaxing building restrictions and speeding up planning approvals were wonderful.  I disagree.  I think Vegas is in a ditch and needs to do extreme things to get out.  I think Park City is in good shape and wants to stay there over the years.  We don't have to make as many tactical sacrfices.
• Climate change is real and water shortages are going to become worse and worse.  I don't think anyone has even imagined a real solution for the Southwest yet.  Someone needs to remind Vegas that they live in a desert.  Unlimited growth is not a reasonable option.
• With a little creativity, you can draw a lot of people into a downtown area.  In our short stay, we witnessed a huge parade, a 20,000 person First Friday and a big arts event.
• We should invite the leaders of Brian Head to Park City.  They could get a lot from how we have solved issues similar to their own.

I'm sure there's more but I'm tired of typing.

Mucking and Drilling

Julie and I have lived in Park City for eight years now. In our town, we don't really celebrate Labor Day, we celebrate Miner's Day.  I'm not quite sure how this occurred, but it does allow us to honor our 100+ history.

Every Miner's Day, after the Funky 5k race and the parade, they hold the Mucking and Drilling competition.  After eight years, I finally decided to go see what it was all about.  First let's start with mucking.

When the miners were digging shafts they would use dynamite to blow out some rock.  Somehow you had to get that lose rock out and haul it to the surface.  Park City's mines were mostly producing silver and you mine that by hauling out tons of rock and filtering out the small amounts of silver.  It doesn't exist in big veins like gold does.

Enter the Muckmeister 2000 (my name for it).

This old monstrosity has two parts, the scoop/engine and the empty car.  The engine allows the driver to drive back and forth on the tracks and to manipulate the bucket like a front end loader.

The contest is to fill the empty car up as fast as possible. This required a balance between things like:

• Taking the time to get a really full scoop versus moving much faster and only getting 2/3s of a scoop each time.
• Taking the time to back up further, to get more speed, but that takes more time for each shovel.

The winning times were around a minute.

This gentleman was very competitive but didn't manage to defend his title from last year.  By the way, his 88th birthday is next month.  A huge, huge crowd favorite.

And on to the drilling.  This is much easier to guess what is involved.  To blast rock with dynamite, they had to drill holes in the rock.  Speed and accuracy are the keys.  First, we need a rock, and a big one. I have nothing but my own landscaping experience to base this on, but I would guess this rock weighs at least 20,000 pounds.  It was cut and then engraved with the events sponsors.

You start the competition by picking up the 125 pound pneumatic drill  and running to the rock.  You are assigned a pair of roughly 3" square spots where you have to drill. I'm thinking this guy is a bit stronger than I am.

Once you got a hole started in the right place you move behind the drill and crank up the speed.

I would suggest that you not wear your favorite dress shirt to compete.  His was clean about 30 seconds ago.

Some competitors chose to put their fairly significant weight into it.

Others seemed to take a much more casual approach.  Surprisingly, it seemed to work just as well.

When you finished drilling both holes, about 30 inches deep, you grabbed the drill and ran back to the starting line.  It does not look like anything I need to try.

This isn't something I'll go to each year, but it was definitely something to go see once.

Responsive Local Government

We normally think of government, whether federal, state or local, as being glacially slow and unresponsive. I would like to offer one fine example to the contrary.

About two weeks ago, a couple of neighbors were chatting about the fire risk from cars parking at an informal trail head in our neighborhood. They pull out of the street onto a nice flat area.  That would be fine but the flat area has grown with foot high, bone dry grass.  The car's hot exhaust can light the grass on fire and something like this started a huge wild fire in Utah this year.

I sent a note to Park City's head of trails and open space, Heinrich Deters, voicing our concern.  Within a few days he came up to meet me on site and discuss possible solutions.  A week later we had this:

The tall grass is cut down.  Gravel is in place and big stones are there to prohibit driving any further.  Simple.  Fairly inexpensive. Effective. 

Funky 5K run

Julie and I had planned on running in this local 5K fun run.  It's part of the big Miner's Day celebration in Park City.  Julie has been fighting with a pinched/bruised/damaged nerve on the bottom of her foot.  It has been messing with her biking and really minimizing her running, especially anything off a treadmill.  It wasn't clear that she would even be able to enter the race.

She saw a podiatrist and an orthopedic doctor, both of whom gave her some tips and told her to give it time.  Based on some feedback from friends, she tried one more thing, acupuncture.

Of course they poked needles into her foot, but they scattered them around her body in general. I guess it's because of the belief that the body parts are tightly intertwined.

Well, it seems to have worked. Her foot didn't hurt during the race, which meant that she didn't have to walk. The result? Her first running medal!! Go Julie!

My little neighbor and future Olympian Hannah also ran. She smoked everyone in her "up to 13" age group. Again. She's only 7.  Monty, Hannah's dad got second in his age group.

Me, I did OK, but not from a competitive standpoint. I finished one step behind Hannah, which if I could continue over the next few years, would be spectacular.  The guy who won the race is Bill Demong.  He's competed in the last four winter Olympics in the Nordic Combined (cross country and jumping) and in 2010 came home with one Gold and one Silver.  This doesn't seem fair for a local fun run.

At this summer's Bark in the Park 5k, I won my age group, mostly by being in a ridiculously slow  group.  In today's race, the 50-59 group was apparently full of ex-NCAA runners. I missed a 3rd place medal by over 4 minutes.  At least I would have won the 60-69 age group, but only by 30 seconds or so.  The winner of that category was running just over 8:00 minute miles at 7000 feet in elevation.  An update, now that I have the final results:  Of the 34 people who finished in front of me, 7 of them were in the Men's 50-59 group. Damn.

It is a beautiful crisp, clear day and now we get to go have lunch with friends and celebrate Julie's medal!

Fall and Football

To kick off the college football season, we invited some friends over to watch the Michigan-Alabama game.  It was supposed to be a good one, with #2 playing #8 the first weekend of the year.

Chef Julie, already wearing her Michigan garb, was busy in the kitchen baking some cheese scones before the game. 

The finished product looked and tasted delicious.

The bad news is that this was the peak of the evening.  As friends arrived and the game started, Alabama covered the 13.5 point spread in the first quarter, 21-7, and never looked back.

Between NC State's terrible play against Tennessee and Michigan getting whomped by Alabama, I am left feeling that this isn't going to be a good year for Joyce family football.

At least we have leftovers!