Outdoor Travel Geek

  • mini triple crowns

    This weekend I went for what I guess was the first real training ride of the year. The weather was perfect for riding. The sun was out, but it was not hot. There was a bit of wind, but not too much, in fact it seemed like just enough to make the ride a bit…

  • feather falls backpacking

    According to some people, Feather Falls is the sixth highest waterfall in the United States. According to Wikipedia, those people are wrong, and Feather Falls doesn’t even crack the top ten. Regardless of who is right, Feather Falls is a pretty amazing waterfall. It’s incredibly tall. To get a sense of the size of the…

  • donner dining & dozing

    The Donner pass area is named after the infamous Donner party, a group of explorers who set out to California to strike it rich. They spent a disastrous winter in the mountains near Tahoe, with almost half of the group dying of starvation. The group is infamous in that the survivors had to resort to cannibalism to…

  • twelve pounds

    My work has a holiday tradition called the twelve pounds of Christmas. For twelve days there’s a potluck every work day leading up to Christmas, except for one day off for the annual holiday party (which is a buffet.) My work is organized into different bureaus, and each day a bureau brings in food for…

  • lazy days

    It is cold. The trees are barren. Winter is here. It was especially apparent when I went biking on Saturday morning. What’s amazing is just three weeks ago I went biking on this same stretch of road with Jiro and one of his lab mates, back then the trees were still covered with autumn leaves.…

  • the confluence

    They say that absence makes the heart grow fonder. I guess that’s true for places as well as for people. It’s been a little over a year since I’ve last been mountain biking at the Auburn Confluence, or Auburn Connie as I sometimes call it. I had forgotten how much I loved biking there. It’s…

  • pickle juice

    A couple of years back, when I first started to get into mountain biking, and before I really had any friends who mountain biked, I joined a group called Bayside Adventure Sports. Despite being the youngest person in the group by like a dozen years, I was the slowest person in the group. After a couple…

  • thanksgiving homecoming

    The month of November has always been a gluttonous month for me. First there’s the leftover Halloween candy to deal with. Then there’s the fact that my birthday and my brother’s birthday both are in November. And what is a birthday but an excuse to eat, drink and be merry multiple times? Then of course…

  • fountain of youth?

    Most people who read my crappy blog with any sort of regularity probably know that I’m not all that great at planning. Sometimes the lack of planning leads to some interesting stories. This weekend, for example, was pretty interesting. For a brief moment on Saturday I stood naked in the Ventana Wilderness, struggling to get…

  • the real season finale

    Originally I was going to title this post “season finale.” But when I typed the title into wordpress, it told me that I already had a post titled “season finale,” which I wrote almost exactly one year ago. So I changed the title of this post to “the real season finale.” Since I work a…

  • back to the bike

    It’s hard to believe I’ve gone an entire year without hopping on my mountain bike. I actually enjoy mountain biking a lot more than road biking, but I end up on the road bike a lot more, mostly because it’s more practical. I can just hop on the road bike and ride out to Winters…

  • the capital

    One of the great things about my job is that it’s relatively flexible. It’s because of this flexibility that I can take advantage of great deals on flights. Back in June Southwest had an amazing sale on airfares throughout the country, so I ended up booking a trip to Washington D.C. I actually visited DC…

  • first pho king five

    This weekend I ran my first 5k run. Well actually, I take that back. To say I ran the 5k would be too generous. I ended up only running a bit more than half of the route, and ended up walking the rest with a cramp in my shin. The sad thing is, I know…

  • a special place

    This weekend I went on what will probably be the last backpacking trip of 2011. It was to a place called the Trinity Alps Wilderness. After having been to Yosemite twice in the last month, I didn’t have overly high expectations of this place. This trip was with the usual backpacking crew that Dan organizes,…

  • weekend of fun

    Every once in a while I get an email from one of my friends with the subject “weekend of fun.” Weekend of fun is his little euphemism for house work day. He bought a house recently and is slowly remodeling it. So he sends out these weekend of fun emails asking for help. I’d totally…