Hiking in the Cold and Rain

Not the best conditions, but the hike was great! I ran right up on an 8 point buck. Fog is great for surprising animals, but not so fun for trying to see a slippery, leaf covered trail. The weather has been very uncooperative lately - rainy, cold (not the "Oh good, it's going to snow" kind of cold, just the barely above freezing, wet and slippery kind of cold), foggy, and sometimes very windy.

The Overall Run Falls were barely visible through the fog (hence, no pic), but I would love to come back when the weather clears up. The water had frozen into giant over-laying icicles that almost looked climbable with ice axes and crampons.

While hiking, I attempted to do a Ghost Hunters audition clip, since the setting seemed right.

Our Lucky Thanksgiving

We had much to be thankful for this last Thanksgiving. My older brother, "The Doctor(The Burbs reference)," was kind enough to drive nearly 6 hours from their current home in Connecticut to our place in little'ol Virginia. He brought his lovely family, including his wonderful wife, Lisa, and the two kids. They arrived safely Thursday evening just after I returned from cooking our turkey at our friends home. I know, your thinking, "why cook the bird at a friends place?" Well, the answer is simple. We were blessed with a total power outage when the turkey was about 30 minutes from being cooked. We called up our SUPER NICE friends, Jeff and Carrie, and asked if we could use their oven. They just happened to be frying their bird this year. Wow, we were saved. The power went on just as I was driving home from our friends.

The rest of the weekend was spent doing fun things with the kids and spending some quality time with my bro. The pics are here. We went downtown and visited the Museum of Natural History where we saw dinosaurs, the "Hope Diamond," and lots of sparkly rocks. We did not have enough time to see even half of the museum, so we agreed there will need to be another visit to D.C.

My hat goes off to my brother and sister-in-law for being such patient and truly loving parents. We hope to be able to visit them at their place in the near future.

Learning the Hard Way

ReBes was not feeling so hot on Veteran's Day, so I set out to do a 12 mile hike on my own. It was a great day and everything started off as it usually does; hurry to get all the stuff together, get out the door, race traffic, then finally figure out exactly where the trail head is located. This time I was going to see how fast I could do it. After all, it seemed like a fairly straight-forward and non-technical ascent to the top of the ridge, then back down again (foreshadowing intended). To shorten things up a bit, I missed my turn and ended up going the opposite direction of my intended route. After about 7 miles into it, I figured something was wrong, but I could not put my finger on it. Nearly 12 miles out, I knew I had no other choice than to turn around and backtrack to my last known point of origin on the map. I turned around, reluctantly, and retraced my steps back up to the top of the mountain where I was able to get cell reception and called ReBecca to let her know I would be home late. You can imagine the phone call - not only do I feel bad about not being with ReBes on my day off, but I wasn't even enjoying the time I was spending outdoors. Ranger Rick was in a pickle. I can say that I am super glad I "over pack" for most outdoor trips. This morning, when I had a chance to review the map, I realized that I should have turned on a barely visible (LOTS of leaves on the ground) section of the trail.

Lesson Learned: If ever a doubt, check it out.

Post River Trip Post

I did some serious chopping in Adobe Premiere Elements and ended up with the clip you see here of our September Gauley River rafting trip. It is a bit long at about 15 minutes or so. We had a blast and intend on returning next year for round 2. Luckily, we did not have one person go overboard from our boat. A big heart-felt "THANKS!" to our friends for having us along.

The Crazies Are Out!

Hey, just me again. By request, I am uploading a video of Rebes and Katherine doing a little jig about 10 minutes before Katherine had to leave to the airport to catch her plane back to Arizona. Enjoy.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Old Rag Hike with Katherine!

We had a visitor this weekend from Arizona. Katherine and I had a lot of fun hanging out and eating all the food Rebes cooked up. It was a VERY short visit (she flew in Friday afternoon and left Sunday afternoon). She was a good sport and awoke at 5:30 am EST (3:30 am Arizona time) Sunday morning to hike Old Rag mountain. It was very nice of Katherine to come out and visit us with the little time off she gets from work.

It was a beautiful day for being outside. Rebes is looking forward to her trip down to Texas and I will have to miss out, but look for pics upon her return.

Padre, Madre, y Hermanito en D.C.

Wow, what a week! My parents and little brother, Stephen, made their way to the East Coast and spent some time with us. It was interesting to see the people in church on Sunday do a double take when they saw me, then my Mom, and then my Dad. I could see the connection being made. We did not have much time and were not able to properly introduce them to many of our friends. However, we did manage to go out to dinner twice (Cheesecake Factory and Sweetwater Tavern), play the Wii twice (tennis, golf, bowling), see some sites in D.C. (Arlington Cemetery, U.S. Capitol, Botanical Garden, White House), visit the Udvar-Hazy Air and Space Museum, do a little walking at Great Falls National Park, watch a movie, and eat hotdogs from a famous (alright, not so famous) downtown hotdog vendor. Like I said, what a week. We snapped lots of pics and thought you might like some of them, so here they are. You might also enjoy watching me pretend to know the words to this song as I sing along with Stephen and Rebes in the car. Hope everyone is having a great day!

An AMAZING hike!

Hey everyone, I did it. I finally got over the fear of putting my face on the internets (the network of tubes that connects us). Here we are at the saddle of Mount Timpanogos. The conditions for this hike were perfect - except for the hurricane level wind gusts at the top. Despite feeling like a human kite, we made it to the top. I failed to get a pic at the summit. Our hands and faces were numb and we were very busy trying to scarf our trail-mix and tuna-in-a-pouch before we headed back down. The smell of the various trees and flowers was incredible while hiking through the valley up and down the mountain. From the top, we could almost see the bottom of Emerald Lake, the result of the melting glacier/permanent ice flow. We were joined by ReBecca's brother, Aaron, and sister-in-law, Jenny. It was great to have such nice (and funny) people to talk to the whole way. I felt like I accomplished something after we reached the car (thanks to Elyse for letting us borrow her stylish little Lancer), that is until we found out that ReBecca's Grandma Ricks has been to the top of Timp twelve times. Wow. We have committed to doing it again and if anyone reading this has the urge, please let us know and we can correlate.

Some details of the hike:

• 7.5 miles to the summit (one way on the Timpooneke trail)
• 11,749 foot summit
• link to map of hike here (thanks to www.climb-utah.com)
  

Our trip to Utah was very brief, but Kevin and Melissa's wedding was wonderful (our main reason for going). Good luck to them in their journeys. Anyway, we will hopefully be good bloggers and make many more interesting posts in the near future.


For those interested, you can see a few pics of the quick trip we made to Utah for Melissa and Kevin's wedding here.