Skiing on snow, not ice?!

I headed up north to go skiing with my dad at powder mountain and snowbasin. Snowbasin is where the 2002 Salt Lake Olympic courses were. By riding a small tram and listening to a "you might die skiing here" spiel from the lift operator, you can get up to the ridge at the very top where the downhill start huts are. Below the starts was a snowfield that was amazingly fun to ski down, but only while making lots of turns. I can't quite imagine going straight down it at 80 mph like downhillers do.


Earlier in the day, the mountain was entirely shrouded in dense fog. I couldn't see more than a dozen yards. One side of the mountain had almost no trees, and there would be sections where nothing was visible but white. No trees, no skiiers, no signs. I couldn't tell the ground from the air. Gravity was the only sense I had left, the only thing to do was go down (and hope a sketchy cliff didn't materialize out of the fog. Later in the day, the sun finally appeared.


The other mountain, powder mountain, lived up to its name, and I got to ski real, western powder for the first time in my life. It really was floaty and lovely. But bizarre to ski in - you have to lean back (which goes against everything I have ever learned about skiing on ice back east).


We weren't allowed to burn real wood in our fireplace, so we got a firelog that spewed green flames. Kind of wierd, but kind of fun too.

Winter in New Hampshire

Christmas cookies! Mom was getting exasperated and Karen and me for making dinosaurs and such and not Christmas-y shaped ones.

New Years Day - sledding down the Pack Monadnock Auto Road. Ben, Kaija, and Andy taking shelter from the vicious winds in the summit lean-to.

Michelle and Andy riding back from the mountain in Ben's truck, after much careening off trail, nearly hitting dogs, snowmobiles, and/or eachother's sleds.

Icefishing with my family. Here, Dad sets a tip-up in a hole we drilled (with a hand auger too, thank you, we don't have a motorized one)

Fish! All of us with the first yellow perch of the day.

And, before leaving New Hampshire, we did a winter hike up Mt. Washington. Andy hikes along the Lions Head ridge in 30-40 mph winds (windy most places, quite balmy for Washington).


Me and Matt at the summit. It took us a while to find the actual summit once we reached to top, as it was so foggy we could barely see cairn to cairn.

Prophesy Wall

We drove north of town to the Prophesy Wall, a 200 foot sandstone cliff, to break in my new climbing rope - hooray!

Sandstone is so soft it can be scary to climb on - flakes you use as handholds feel like they could be pulled right off the rock. Because of the height of the wall, most of the climbs are done in two or three pitches, stopping at ledges partway up to belay your partner. (I'm only about three feet off the ground in this picture, we couldn't get any pictures while actually climbing the wall, as belaying is somewhat more important than picture taking).


At the end of the climb, on top of the wall, we can look out and see the basalt cones of extinct volcanoes dotting the valley. And also the setting sun, so it's time to get down before dark...


Matt rappelling off the second belay ledge on the way down. Rappelling is very fun, as you are just hanging on the rope and controlling your descent by braking the rope with a belay device on your harness. Except that out here, there invariably seems to be a holly tree with spiky leaves at the bottom of most crags, and its hard to avoid them.

We really need to time our climbing excursions better, this is the second time we've walked out from this climb in the dark. But the late hour does make for lovely sunsets.

flaming tumbleweeds

Sometimes the river is very cold, lately around 5 degrees celsius. On these days lighting a lunch fire is a fabulous thing. It can be hard to find good firewood by the fiver, so the other day we just lit tumbleweeds on fire and they produced four foot tall columns of flame. Awesome.

Sometimes there are big muddy holes along the river. Sometimes we fall in them.

Yum, fresh bass. We have to remove non-native fish we find, and what better way than to eat them whole?

Fish get into places you'd never imagine. So to sample, we have to crawl down storm drains, through irrigation ditches, and so on.

During breeding season, the speckled dace gets bright red lipstick markings... the male speckled dace that is.

This bullfrog was found dead in the river. He was snuck into a backpack as a joke and carried several miles down the river, carried in the bed of our truck over 20 miles of dirt roads back to the office, thrown on the windshield of one of our cars...

It's incredible how entertaining a dead bullfrog can be when you're freezing cold from being in the river.

Three happy fish techs and one happy chub.

Save the Woundfin! Kill the Red Shiner!

So finally, here are some pictures of what I actually do for work. We have two endangered species in the Virgin River, the woundfin, and the Virgin River chub. These woundfin have little neon green tags in them so we know when and where we stocked them if we catch them during monitoring.


The Virgin River chub is one of the bigger fish in the river, and feeds on the smaller minnows. Both of these fish are found nowhere but the Virgin River, and the woundfin is confined to only 16 miles of river, making it one of the rarest fish in the world.


These fish are in trouble because of human water consumption and because of this fish here, the red shiner (we sometimes call them red devils). Introduced from the Mississippi into Lake Mead as a bait fish, the shiner has moved up the Virgin River, breeding 12 times a year, eating native fish eggs, and outcompeting natives for resources.

To get rid of red shiner, we treat the river with rotenone, a poison which kills fish by damaging their gills (so people, birds, cats, etc. are safe as we have no gills). Before treating, we salvage what native fish we can and move them upstream. Then, we work crazy long days to make sure we treat every backwater, puddle, and ditch along them river so there are no refuges for red shiner. Fish can survive in places you'd never imagine, like inside this rock wall that I am spraying with rotenone treated water.


We also stock hatchery bred native fish to boost population numbers. Here Laura is checking the temperature on a cooler full of woundfin being acclimated to river temperature.


Go out into the world, little woundfin! And make lots of woundfin babies!

Zion Narrows

As the upper part of the Virgin River (the one I work with fish on!) has flowed through Zion National Park, it has cut an amazingly deep, narrow canyon that is one of the parks quite famous hikes. There's no trail, you just start walking up the river where the road ends. In the river specifically, as the canyon is too narrow to have riverbanks.


The forecast said the water temperature was about 51 degrees fahrenheit. I attempted to figure out what this was in Celsius...as I have a science job all our work thermometers, and hence my reference points for how cold is too cold, are in Celsius.

Ah well. I headed up the river wearing my shorts and sandals. As I walked by other hikers, I noticed that all of them were wearing drysuit pants and canyoneering shoes that they had rented. Many of them looked at me askance and asked me whether I was freezing. It was a quite cold, I definitely could not feel my feet so well by the end of the day.


As I hiked further up, the canyon got narrower and twistier, with walls rising a thousand feet above and crazy shapes carved by the river. The water was perfectly clear, much different than the muddy lower Virgin River where we work. It was quite nice being able to see the rocks so I didn't destroy my shins on them as I normally do. It was also neat seeing the river I work on upstream, in an area that isn't full of invasive fish, crowded by tamarisk trees, and diverted for irrigation.


I ran into an amateur photographer who wanted a subject for his pictures - his are the two lovely pictures with the really nice light from long exposure times and tripods, they are quite nicer than the dark, somewhat washed out pictures from my little camera.

Moab!

from a guidebook "Mesa Arch would be excellent to walk over if it weren't for the thousand foot drop off one side."

Oops. Good thing Laura and I didn't fall a thousand feet into a canyon.

The first day we hiked in canyonlands, a national park hard enough to get to that it is gloriously empty of people. Our trail led us through this breach, where our voices echoed off the rock.

Quite often, I felt like I was inside the set of an old cowboy movie.

"When I got into town here, no one could understand what I was saying, and I couldn't understand what they were saying either. So I walked down the canyon, and sat by the river, and walked back out again, and I realized that no one has to say anything here." Peter Rowan

We went into town for the Moab Folk Festival and saw an awesome concert with Peter Rowan and Ramblin' Jack Eliot (above) and others.

We camped right by the Colorado River. Neil and Eric decided to take advantage of this and jump in the freezing cold river.

The next day we headed to Arches National Park.

Delicate Arch. This arch shows up in so many photos that I know this one doesn't really show how neat it was to be there. Even though its one of the most popular spots in the park and was swarming with people it was still amazing.

Dry ramen noodles are delicious for hiking!