blog.macalicious:Pacific_Northwest

Crystal Mountain Spring

18 Apr, 2006
Posted at 00.10 PDT

Adapted from a recent email to family and friends:

As mentioned in the previous post, I was most fortunate on Easter Sunday to visit Crystal Mountain ski resort in the Cascades here in Washington state. It’s where I first tried out snowboarding, with initially mixed results, but also where I really began falling in love with it. As with most mad endeavors, it was close friends that conned me into it. And thank goodness for close friends. Thanks, guys!

Sunday marked Crystal Mountain’s last regular day of the season, and it turned out to be nearly perfect for it. It felt a little strange—leaving and returning with the sun still in the sky was decidedly novel for something that I’ve been associating with Winter—but despite the relative warmth of the morning in Seattle, up in the mountains it was quite chilly. Better yet, a late season storm had dumped 15 inches of fresh powder on the slopes over the previous two days, setting the stage for a fantastically beautiful day when Sunday turned out bright and sunny.

A few months ago I picked up a snowboard, an Arbor A-Frame 162, and have been thrilled with it to no end. Snowboards tend to be garishly designed, and this one, with its strong echoes of mid-century design, immediately appealed to my sense of aesthetics. Without fail, it draws comments every time I take it out.

The amount of gear needed for this sport is astounding to a Southerner.

• Snowboard Boots
• Thermal socks
• Thermal underwear, tops and bottoms
• Snow pants
• Layers of shirts
• Snow jacket
• Goggles
• Helmet
• Gloves
• Snowboard (!)
• Bindings

A shot taken from the lifts on the way up.

This is where I’m heading on that chairlift; down into the valley is where I’ll be going. The snowpack is more or less the city’s water supply, and this year has been a very good season for snow. There’s nine FEET of snow. The day was gloriously beautiful.

A shot against the back-country on a later run. That’s Mt. Rainier over my shoulder, almost entirely hidden by clouds — it’s so tall it generates its own local weather patterns. In this shot I’m currently at just under 6,900 feet. Rainier is more than twice that high at 14,400 feet. After this photo I end up descending about half a mile before catching the chairlifts back up.

Crystal Mountain, with those 15 inches of fresh powder, was sheer heaven for snowboarding, even for people like me who haven’t quite got the hang of the nuances of boarding in it. Even if you take a tumble — and I’m still taking several (note the helmet) — powder’s so soft you come up laughing. It’s like being eight years old again. And it’s much better than going superman onto hard snow when you catch the front edge of the board and are sent flinging forward. Last time I went I hit so hard I knocked the morning clear out of me. I was disoriented for half an hour, and boy did THAT one hurt. This is certainly NOT a sport for the faint of heart. I think it took me two weeks or more to recover from that incident, and my knee is still giving twinges.

Still, it had one good effect: I spent Sunday on the slopes taking much more care with my boarding. What got me in trouble last time was having a new insanely fast board with a fresh coat of wax. The tempation to point it downhill and let ‘er rip was too much for me, and I ended up finding myself at speeds beyond my skill level. Ouch. Sunday’s trip by contrast was full of pleasant surprises. It was the first time I noticed myself not getting particularly tensed up over the lifts, which are a bane to noobs on boards. I was pleased that my last trip of the season marked the first time I took no tumbles getting off the lifts. It was that, weirdly enough, which finally made me feel like I was really getting comfortable on the board. Sunday was also my first trip out to the mountains which didn’t result in any new and unsual pains from various strained bits and pieces, just pleasantly sore muscles.

No new injuries on the season’s last outing means I’ll just look forward that much more eagerly to the next one this coming winter. In the meantime, boy do I wish Summer would hurry up and get here.

 

 

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SpringBoard

15 Apr, 2006
Posted at 20.50 PDT

Friends of mine have heard me say more than once that Florida has only two seasons: Summer, and Not-Summer. And though much the rest of the country may find it hard to believe, it’s already Summer in Florida. Daily highs are pushing 90°F and the humidity…well, let’s just say being outside is like walking through a big wet sponge. I speak from bitter experience.

You grow up there, and it doesn’t seem the least bit odd, naturally. Now that I’m here in Seattle, I appreciate Spring, but it still throws me for a loop. I look at the calendar and think I should be in shorts and a tee-shirt, not throwing on a jacket every time I leave the house.

Still, Spring is obviously in full swing here. Despite the need for a light jacket, the temperatures are definitely on the rise, and the plants are simply going batshitinsane. It’s a glorious time to be here, especially considering you can taste the anticipation of shorts, warmth, and three months of gloriously cloud-free skies. I love summertime in Seattle, and am practically stamping my foot with impatience for it to get here.

Which makes tomorrow’s planned adventure seem decidedly odd. For while Seattle is drowning in flowers and getting warmer every day, the mountains to the East are still—once you get high enough—quite chilly. And this weekend the region has seen a weather pattern develop unusually late in the year that is dumping crazy amounts of powder on the slopes.

So as described in an earlier post, I’m heading out snowboarding. In the middle of Spring. Très étrange. Last time I got out on the slopes I was so eager to test my limits and my new board, I ended up taking a nasty tumble that knocked my memory of the morning clean out of me, twisted my knee, and left my ribs either cracked or severely bruised. Needless to say, though excited, I am anticipating tackling the mountainside this time with considerably more…reserved…enthusiasm. At least I can count on the twinges in my ribs to remind me to curb my desire to push so hard.

Still, it is terribly exciting to be going out one final time this season. Tomorrow is the last day until next Winter for most the ski resorts around here, and it’ll be nice to get all my new gear out for one last hurrah. See you on the slopes.

 

 

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Hoh Redux

12 Apr, 2006
Posted at 22.37 PDT

My friend Wesa has posted a bunch of pics over on her blog of the recent trip to the Hoh rain forest my group of friends and I took, and I mentioned in an earlier post. She’s got a much better eye (and camera) for pics than I do.

That’s me holding up the tree.

 

 

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Olympic Peninsula

03 Apr, 2006
Posted at 23.55 PDT

This past weekend I visited Washington’s Olympic Peninsula with six other friends, and had a great time. If you ever have the chance to see it, grab it. The peninsula is kinda like natural wonders all over the country in that it always seems the natives never consider going to see it, and miss out on the most amazing things.

Geographically, the Olympic peninsula has always seemed strange to me. It’s not a peninsula like Florida, or Baja California—relatively long and skinny, but instead is rather wide, and covered in mountains. And the mountains themselves, though not particularly tall, are pretty cool in that they don’t form a chain, but cover most the peninsula, making it look nothing so much like a giant rumpled blanket. They’ve always fascinated me, in large part because the majority of the land they cover is more or less inaccessible. No roads go through the interior, they all skirt the coast barring a few that snake inland a little ways to provide access to places like the Hoh rain forest. It makes the interior of the peninsula seem mysterious and distant, one of those semi-magic places that are somewhat removed from the real world. I can only imagine the sense of isolation you must get if you do take one of the trails inland.

Like most of Western Washington, the peninsula is wet, wet, wet. The Olympics and the Cascade Mountains provide a rather effective barrier to the wet westerly winds coming in off the Pacific, and lots of rain gets dumped there. (But Seattle actually sees less annually than back home in Central Florida. Here though it drizzles—incessantly during the winter which I can attest can be most dispiriting your first winter or three. Eventually you either get used to it or kill yourself, which I suppose accounts for the astoundingly mellow nature of those who’ve lived here a while).

Saturday morning early we headed out in two cars, going South to Tacoma to get across Puget Sound, then North up the peninsula, around its top and back down the coast a bit. Along the way we passed Crescent Lake, ten miles long, a mile wide, and 660 feet deep—a hundred feet lower than sea level. It’s cold, clear, and if you catch it in sunshine, a beautiful deep blue. Sitka spruce, Douglas firs, and other “cathedral trees” line the nearly the whole route, and blanket almost the entire peninsula. This place is a tree-hugger’s dreamland.

I was in heaven.

It’s hard to express how I feel about the trees out here without sounding like some half-loony mystic new age freak. They are a large part of the reason I moved out here, honestly. Oh, it wasn’t because I felt some goofy spiritual connection or anything like that, but rather their sheer beauty, though I guess a profound appreciation of that beauty could be considered spiritual in a way. My first visits to the Pacific Northwest happened back in ‘89 and ‘90, and I spent that time hiking the trails along a stretch of the North Oregon coast, near a tiny, tiny, town called Wheeler. My memories of those hikes through the forests there strongly colored my interests when the chance came to move to Seattle. I haven’t regretted it the least. There’s a reason these woods get called “cathedral forests,” and you don’t have to have a particularly active imagination to figure it out. They’re usually quiet, the trees reach up to three hundred feet (thirty stories, people. Tall), and the undergrowth is generally limited by the shade to lush ferns. Moss is everywhere, and in the wetter areas, covers every surface of trees, hanging from limbs in sheets of green. The woods feel old. And old they are. Coastal rain forests have existed for at least 2 million years. Just about nowhere else on the planet can you find that sort of ecological stability.

Older feeling still was the Hoh rain forest, which we stopped by on Sunday. It’s an area in the Olympic National Forest that has some unique features. The Hoh valley is relatively long and glacier-carved from previous ice ages, u-shaped from the grinding ice that ran through it, and faces almost due West. The Olympic mountains surrounding it trap the westerlies that blow in off the Pacific, forcing them to dump 12-14 feet of rain every year on average. It sounds like a lot, and it is. That’s ten times the amount Seattle gets in a year, a city with a deserved reputation for wetness. The upshot of all this rain is that the peninsula is home to one of the very few temperate rain forests on the planet, and one of the oldest and most diverse biological ecosystems in existence. Some of the species in the rain forests go back 70 million years. In other words, some of the critters around here knew dinosaurs. Or to put it another way, have been around 14 times longer than human beings. You feel the age of this place in your bones.

It’s hard to imagine what global warming will do to rainforests of the Pacific Northwest, but I can’t expect it’ll be good. All the evidence points to us being on the cusp of some truly nasty and major environmental changes over coming decades, evidence that continues mounting despite our country’s current administration’s efforts to silence the voices of their own scientists on the subject. I can only hope that through some miracle of luck these ancient forests manage to survive.

 

 

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Snowboarding, or the New Religion

11 Feb, 2006
Posted at 22.08 PST

So I was recently conned into giving snowboarding a try. Snowboarding, for those who may have inhabited the dank bottomside of a rock the past ten years or so, is the so-called sport wherein one straps his or her feet to a plank of wood, and flings oneself down the side of a mountain. Reaching the bottom without planting your face in the snow, or getting eaten by a tree (more on this later), constitutes “fun.” But humans are weird that way. We also call plunging toward the Earth at terminal velocity with nothing but a big sheet tucked away in a backpack fun. And it’s claimed we’re masters of the Earth. Masters of a madhouse is more like it.

It sure looks fun, but I haven’t been on a skateboard in twenty years, and from the outside snowboarding looks an awful lot like skateboarding, only with trees and more gravity. And being 6’3”, I have a lot further to fall than most people. Physics is a bitch. Add in the fact I was contemplating embarking on a madly physical endeavor at the age of 36, and you can imagine the skepticism and trepidation with which I viewed the prospect. Crazy shit like this is for the young. Hell, a couple of hundred years ago I’d most likely be dead by this age, not trying out a new sport.

5.45 A.M. The word “ungodly” springs to mind. Fortunately, I’m not religious, so I hauled my ass out of bed anyway and a few hours later found myself at Crystal Mountain trying not to fall down yet again. Oh God please, not agai——Owwwwie! There’s a phrase snowboarders use to describe hitting the ground so hard that any bits and pieces on your body not strapped down go flying. It’s called a yard sale. I could have made a fortune. By the end of the day I was miserable. I can honestly say I have never in my life experienced such incredible pain. Oh, the time I hiked up Mt. Si at the beginning of the season and discovered (at the top, natch), I have a tendency to over-pronate my knees was worse in intensity, but it didn’t even come in a close second to the sheer volume of pain induced by learning how to fall off a snowboard. Ankles, knees, inner thighs, stomach, wrists, shoulders, neck…the list was dishearteningly endless.

And then there was The Humiliation of the Lifts. Using a ski lift, like the dentist, is one of those Things-You-Cannot-Avoid, as trudging up the mountain for an hour to spend ten minutes sliding down is just too depressing to contemplate. (You think life seems pointless now? Try–oh, never mind. The word you’re looking for is sisyphean). Getting on a lift is easy, even for a noob. It’s getting off the lift that proves to be somewhat…challenging…when one is new to the concept of snowboarding. Suffice to say that attempting an egress from the moving lift is yet one more way to get up close and personal with the concept of gravity as applied to moving objects, with the added excitement of hauling your ass out of the way of those behind you before they pile into said sorry ass. Isaac Newton, I hate you. That at no time did they have to stop the ski lift because of me I considered the greatest triumph of the day. I set small goals, what can I say?

I had a blast.

Or at least that’s what I kept telling myself as I spent the next week hobbling around half crippled. Regardless, a few weeks later I found myself out at Steven’s Pass. Now that I knew just how bad it could hurt, I really understood the meaning of the word trepidation. And the ski lifts I viewed with outright fear. Such a frame of mind is not exactly an auspicious beginning to one’s second attempt. Nevertheless, I let my friends convince me to brave the Humiliation of the Lifts™ a second time. And you know what? This time I really did have a blast. Strapping oneself to a plank of wood and flinging oneself down a mountainside is more fun than a sack of kittens. Still fell down most times exiting the lift, but hey, at least I managed it twice.

So here it is, two months later, and I apparently have a new religion as it were, spending mad amounts of money on gear. The tax return is already accounted for, and I find myself researching the relative merits of various boards, bindings, boots, and other sundry bits of ‘boarding gear. Boy is this sport expensive. Sigh. The amount of equipment required is mind-boggling, especially to a Southerner used to sports that require such things as: a swimsuit. But what are you gonna do when you have so much fun doing something that it invades your damn dreams? On multiple nights, no less.

And now, on to the man-eating trees, which is not a phrase I would ever have thought to find myself uttering. It seems that a very real danger to those out on the mountains is that of tree-wells, loose-packed snow which forms inside the protected area under a conifer’s branches. The danger lies in getting too close while flying down the mountain and plunging into these pits head first. Now I suppose every sport has its drawbacks, (sharks and surfing come to mind), but getting stuck head down in the snow and suffocating seems a particularly ignominious way for one to shuffle off this mortal coil. Eaten by a tree, as it were. At least sharks are an exciting way to go. Painful, to be sure, but you must get mad props in the afterlife for such a spectacular manner of death. Eaten by a tree? Not so exciting. It seems such a nebbish way to go.

On being informed of this gruesome risk (tree-wells, not sharks), to snowboarders by my friends, I of course promptly tagged such trees as carnivorous. Naturally, it didn’t take long for this to be shortened to coniforous. Once you add a overactive imagination to this juicy bit of knowledge, it rapidly becomes self-evident that this is–naturally–a particularly sneaky evolutionary adaptation by trees to insure themselves of a nice tasty snack of nitrogen and other fertilizing goodies come springtime. That other theory that the branches are wider at the bottom to get sunlight? Obviously a ploy to put us off the real reason. Build a tree-well, snatch yourself an unwary skier, and voila! Instant breakfast. Winter weather even conveniently preserves it for you until Spring thaw, right when you the hungry coniforous conifer begins sprouting new, suspiciously lush foliage. I bet you could spot the successful hunters by their rich leaves and unusual height compared to their less lucky siblings. Who knew trees could be so vicious? Winter Sports: Beware the Sarlacc Pits.

Just a thought. Enjoy the boarding.

 

 

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