Pete Curtis
A software architect, endurance athlete, and musician living in Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA.
This is my own humble place to share the things I enjoy.
contact (at) petestuff (dot) org
On Wednesday night, the sky above Moloka‘i cleared out, and I took some pictures from the lānai.
Sagittarius setting in the southwest, with the Great Star Cloud, the Lagoon Nebula (M8). Corona Australis is on the left.
On Wednesday we took a tour of the island by car, to get our bearings. We headed back through Kaunakakai town and then north to Pala‘au State Park for the Kalaupapa lookout and Phallic Rock. As we turned off the main road and started heading northeast through Kualapu‘u, the road started to steadily rise out of the dry lowlands into mid-altitude woodland, and finally into a higher-altitude ironwood forest a good 1500 feet above the ocean. The spine of the island is located well north of center, so that the south-facing slopes are relatively gentle scrubland. But the north-facing slopes are steep, forbidding, and completely lush from the ocean moisture driven in by the trade winds.
The road dead-ends at the state park - which isn't the kind we're used to in Minnesota. It's more of a wayside rest. We walked out a couple hundred meters to the Kalaupapa lookout for a gorgeous view of the eponymous peninsula.
Over the past few months, I've been reading up on a few of Algernon Blackwood's short stories, courtesy of Project Gutenberg. This one in particular struck me, so much that I decided to add some formatting and repost it. Only three people are introduced in the story, and either two or three primary characters, depending on your point of view (although I tend towards the former analysis, the author probably intended otherwise.) A few excerpts:
...He painted trees as by some special divining instinct of their essential qualities. He understood them. He knew why in an oak forest, for instance, each individual was utterly distinct from its fellows, and why no two beeches in the whole world were alike.
..."Pah! the vegetable kingdom, indeed!" She tossed her pretty old head. And into the words she put a degree of contempt that, could the vegetable kingdom have heard it, might have made it feel ashamed for covering a third of the world with its wonderful tangled network of roots and branches, delicate shaking leaves, and its millions of spires that caught the sun and wind and rain. Its very right to existence seemed in question.
...She saw him go away from her, go of his own accord and willingly beyond her; she saw the branches drop about his steps and hid him. His figure faded out among the speckled shade and sunlight. The trees covered him. The tide just took him, all unresisting and content to go.
...The tide was coming in, indeed, yet not for her.
It's a very quiet and primarily psychological story, almost boring until halfway through, but gains a tremendous amount of power towards the end.
Moloka‘i is one of the lesser known Hawaiian islands, almost due east of O‘ahu across a 26-mile wide channel. It's billed in all the travel literature as the "Friendly Isle", although I'm not convinced the residents would refer to themselves with such a marketing term! Tuesday before last, we took a vacation within-a-vacation by packing two backpacks and heading out to the airport to get on an interisland commuter flight.
Diamond Head, or Lē‘ahi, is one of the most well known natural features in Honolulu. It's the remains of an old cinder cone, with a central crater that's not obvious from the ground but shows up great from the air:
Most of the roads you see in the crater are not public - they're actually access roads for a military installation and an FAA installation, except for the bottom right one, which is the beginning of the hiking trail up to the high point visible on the right side. I took this trail the afternoon before we left for Moloka‘i. More photos below.
Mānoa Falls is a short skip and a hop from my temporary home, up at the end of one of many steep, lush valleys that rise to the north from Honolulu. At the end of the road there's a small parking lot, and then a rocky, wet, slippery trail up another mile or so, maybe less. This morning we biked up and took the hike. Here's a quick sample.
More photos below.
Some of the most beautiful woods you will ever see.
This Saturday Chris and Verónica were kind enough to set up a 3-4 hour AR practice event in Minnetonka. A big group of us headed out to Lone Lake Park for the 9 AM start. It was cold, windy, and raw out, but we warmed up quickly with a 300 meter run to the top of a hill to pick up our maps. Stephen Regenold and I ran solo, while everyone else teamed up in twos or threes. Midwest Mountaineering even showed up in their Halloween cowboy costumes!
Take a look at Attackpoint for a quick description of the course and links to gmap-pedometer. I had a pretty good run in just about 3 hours.
Except for the part where I skidded my bike out on wet leaves over asphalt, doing about 17 mph.
So today I'm really sore all along the left side of my body - a sore calf, a big bruise on my upper outer thigh, a sore shoulder, a scrape on my arm, and a sore right side of the neck from the whiplash where my head hit the ground (that's why you wear a HELMET, people!) and snapped my teeth together. I can't turn my head all the way to the right, and have given in and taken a couple doses of Vitamin I since then.
Outdoor athletes have a hard life sometimes. It reminds me of Stephen's story about going to get a physical a couple days after a particularly prickly orienteering event. The doctor took one look at the scratches on his face and arms and asked, "Do you feel safe at home?" The standard domestic abuse question. You can understand why the doctor was professionally obligated to ask it, but in the actual context, it was pretty amusing. And it made for plenty of merriment, off-color comments, and a fair amount of teasing when he later retold the story - especially with Kari there.
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