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
Here's a few photos to make up for my alarming lack of posts recently. It must be the holiday season... so busy... new snow... seasonal affective disorder... yeah, that's the ticket. From my Colorado trip in 2007.
Here's a video of last month's trip up the Barr Trail on the east side of Pikes Peak.
When I signed the register at the top of Quandary Peak, I noticed a Latin phrase printed on the sheet - along with Colorado Mountain Club and the names and comments of innumerable people. It stuck out because of the anachronism: the words Gloria In Excelsis Deo, also known as the "Greater Doxology". Now mind you, I'm the type of person who prefers the In Excelsis part, or perhaps a "Gloria In Excelsis Naturae". Nevertheless, the Gloria and other such nonsense has had some use in inspiring beautiful music throughout the ages - and this is an effect I'm not willing to gainsay.
The following "Gloria" was composed by Antonio Vivaldi and performed by the King's College Choir (audio extraction from Youtube posts by margotlorena.)
Last week when I was in Colorado with Roger, Jane, Ian and Lori, I thought I'd try to show everyone back at home what climbing a mountain is like. And relatively speaking, Quandary Peak in September is pretty simple, requiring nothing technical. It's only a 3.75 mile, 3300 foot climb to the summit. And then you go back down the same way.
So here's a video!
I took this with my Canon camcorder, but I'm going to look into some other, more robust options for outdoor activity, maybe some combination of GoPro for ruggedness and mounting, and Flip for resolution?
Success! Ian and I summitted Pikes Peak around 1:15 PM on Thursday afternoon. From Barr Camp onwards, we split up and went ahead of Roger and Jane. They arrived around 2 PM. We all rested at the summit house for a couple hours, and then took the cog railway down. I don't have any photos since I took video instead, and I'll have to wait until I get home to edit it down. As a replacement, here's the 14ers.com route map. We took the route from the east coming out of Manitou Springs, and the map only shows the last half.
It was very busy at the trailhead because the USAF Academy was doing a morning workout at the trail. I had to park way down in town and walk up to the trailhead. There's a lot of cool things along the trail, including the Incline Railway. Wait till you see the video of the cadets climbing up that!
After a couple of days just hanging around town, Annie and I got up early today and drove out to Wallace Falls State Park, near Gold Bar in the North Cascades. This is a centerpiece of the park; Middle Wallace Falls. Notice the dusting of snow on the trees at the top of the picture.
Middle Wallace Falls.
Yours truly on a most awesome ridgeline - just south of Sacagawea Summit in the Bridger Range northeast of Bozeman, Montana.
It easy to see in the photos the unique nature of the central Montana mountains. Each range is fairly isolated and distinctively sticks up out of the lower valleys, so, from the top of any one range you can look out and see the others appearing as islands in an ocean of blue-green. From atop the Bridger Range we could look out to the east and see the Crazy Mountains; to the southeast, the Absaroka Range; to the south; the Gallatin and Madison ranges; and to the west, the Tobacco Root mountains.
More photos below the fold.
When you think of Wyoming, I'd bet one the the first things that comes to mind are the vast western plains, filled with vast herds of cattle. Or maybe, the attendant old-style cowboys spending all day in the saddle with nothing but a chaw of tobacco, a flask of spirits, and a pound of hardtack. Or maybe a lonely field of oil rigs surrounded by sagebrush to the horizon. Of course, there's always Yellowstone, and the Tetons too... but back in 2007, I found that Wyoming has a lot of lesser-known scenic areas. One in particular is the Snowy Range, a small, steep range about 30 miles west of Laramie in the southeastern corner of the state.
Here's a few photos from the top of the range, between 10,000 and 12,000 feet in altitude. I shot them with a old pocket digital camera, and only did some touchup work on one of them - but it doesn't matter much, since the scenery is so photogenic! Click through to see them all.
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