Scoresby Scamper 2007 results

We ran the Scoresby Scamper yesterday, about noon. I took 32 minutes. The official times were (roughly) as follows:

1. Preston, 23:10
2. Emily, 27 minutes
3. Janet, 28:02
   
4. Dad, 28:20
5. Sarah, 30 minutes
   
6. Ben, 31:30
7. Joe, 32:20

I didn't do too good. I was both out of shape and my normal running pace is too slow to compete with Preston and Emily.

A thought:

All men dream: but not equally.

Those who dream by night in the dusty

recesses of their minds wake in the day

to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers

of the day are dangerous men, for they may

act their dreams with open eyes, to make it

possible.

From T.E Lawrence, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

This was the opening quote from the book Touching the Void, the most spectacular survival story I've ever heard. I'll leave the details out, besides the fact that any criticism regarding Simon's choices regarding the two are made irrelevant by two facts: Only Joe and Simon were on Siula Grande, and Joe agreed with Simon's choice. The fact that he would do things differently now doesn't mean that what they did before was wrong. Now, he has more experience, more practice, more knowledge. Then, he didn't. Neither did Simon.


Still enjoying Christmas in Wisconsin.

Numbers of the Day

First off, welcome from Kronenwetter, Wisconsin. We flew to Milwaukee with nothing of note happening, and the drive north was uneventful. Preston, Emily, and Sarah, however, were greatly delayed by poor weather. They can explain at their leisure.

Now for the numbers:

• 8. That's as in degrees Fahrenheit, the low temperature this morning. Brrr.
• 10. That's in inches of snow that fell today. Traffic was treacherous enough that attendance at church as exceedingly sparse and everything after Sacrament meeting was cancelled.

Dad has a snowblower so we wouldn't have to shovel the entire driveway, but the belt that drives the auger decided it was time to give up the ghost and it disintegrated just after Preston and Emily arrived with Sarah in tow. leaving Dad, Preston and I to shovel the driveway by hand. Gah.

On the plus side, Mom and Dad have an excellent fireplace, and it's been going almost all day. They also have blowers to blow air past the sides of the fireplace and chimney to get extra heat from the fire.

I think a white Chistmas is guaranteed.

Pregnancy Hormones & Random Thoughts

Sorry its been so long since I've posted anything. Work's been crazy and I haven't much time to check the blogs. We are still trying to get internet service with Verizon. Apparently, Verizon keeps loosing our internet service order. So everything is going well here. Baby is good, at least I think she is. She's moving around alot more now, which is always a good sign. When I was in the hospital, she definitely gave me a scare, but everything seems to be ok and back to normal! Yay!!

So before the hospital, I had my doctor's appointment, which was very depressing. Blame it on the hormones or stress or whatever (turning 30) , but when your doctor tells you you need to start watching what you eat and not to gain so much weight, you just feel like a fat cow. I gained 8 lbs. in a month (which by the way has doubled what I gained the whole pregnancy) so I know she just doesn't want me gaining that much in a month, but what can you do. So I left that dr. appointment crying, thinking, my doctor thinks I'm a fat cow! Pretty pathetic, huh? Don't worry, I'm pretty much over it. Right now, I'm enjoying my cowness. :)

Overall, 30 isn't so bad; it just feels weird and adultish. I'm sure I'll get used to it! On the bright side, maybe 40 will be weirder. :0)

P.S. Sorry Shannon, we didn't put up a tree this year since we were going out of town! But we did put out our other Chirstmas decorations in our defense! :)

Stir-Crazy!

I'm starting to get a bit antsy because I haven't been out hiking in a while; so I thought I'd list the hikes I've done through the years. A lot of these were while I was a student at BYU, but some have been before and since.

• The teensy slot "canyon' at Pioneer Park in St. George, UT. It's really just a narrow crack in the rock somewhere between 1/2 and 1 mile long. At points it's so narrow you have to turn sideways to get through. Not for claustrophobes.

• Zion National Park: Scout Lookout. Actually an attempt at Angel's Landing, we would have made it if a blizzard hadn't hit while we were going up Walter's Wiggles. By the time we reached the chains, snow was sticking to the slickrock, and the better part of sanity told us not to go. Not for acrophobes.
  
  
• Mount Timpanogos summit, from the Timpooneke trailhead. Both times, this was done as a night hike, with summiting to coincide with the sunrise. The first time, I hyperventilated just a touch as I crossed over the saddle at 11,000 feet, probably because I was jogging. (No surprise, huh?) The second time I was in better shape, surprisingly, and had no problems. In fact, my group fell asleep in the basin just below emerald lake on the way down. When we woke up, we thought we had lost a half-hour and everyone was ahead of us, so we jogged down the rest of the mountain, beating the rest of our party by at least an hour, possibly two.

• Loafer Mountain/Santaquin Peak: Tracy and I hiked this July 4th, 2003. We really enjoyed the hike, except it was blisteringly hot, even for Utah, and at the summit, there were bugs all over the place. I'm not sure we ever truly got to the Santaquin peak summit, but I know we hit the Loafer Mountain summit, which is taller, but has a poorer view. We had a great view of the valley from the south end to contrast with the view from Timp

• Squaw Peak: I did the "real" hike for this, starting out in Rock Canyon Park and going up, not the wimpy "hey, let's just drive almost to the top and then hike up!" variant.

• Calf Creek Falls, Escalante. We went to Escalante for Memorial Day and visited Amy, one of Tracy's friends while she was doing her archeological dig there. We hiked this, along with about 2000 other people that day. The weather was great. My advice: do this any weekend besides Memorial Day weekend. Also, don't drive from Provo to Escalante at night, because the road is freaky! You see a sign that says "No Shoulders", and all you see is the headlights on the road and the reflective strips on the edges and centerline. Seriously, nothing past it. The road curves, and you see nothing because there isn't anything but air! Freaky

• Solider Hollow, via snowshoe. Thanks to wearing snowshoes instead of skis, we were able to go places in Soldier Hollow that most visitors (read skiers) won't see. Our goal was the first real summit above the hollow. A mother moose deprived us of that particular treat, but we still had a spectacular experience.
  

• Stewart's Falls, aka Stewarts cascades. This one was odd because we had to park practically in Sundance. Not the ski area, the "artists' village." Really, the vacation spot. Anyway, we hiked up there and saw the falls, then hiked back. Fun trip.

• Manassas National Battlefield Park: The entire thing. I'm serious; I've hiked every trail in the park, and I believe I've hiked every portion of all of them, except one.
  

• Appalachian Trail. We've hiked a few of the Virginia sections of this trail. We started out 2006 with a New Year's Day hike near Bear's Den (a hiker hostel in NoVA). We hiked the part of the trail that goes through Sky Meadows State Park, and we've hiked it in Shenandoah National Park. More on those later. I would like to take a week and just hike the AT through Shenandoah sometime.
  

• Sky Meadows State Park: We hiked about 4 miles with the dog, om a Memorial Day. It was HOT, and the dog was panting like crazy. It had about 1000 of elevation gain in a little over a mile, which is unfortunately typical for trails here.
  

• Great Falls National Park: Trails follow the Potomac both through the placid waters upstream of the falls above the low-head dam into the nearby regional park and downstream to the observation points over the falls, following the river through Mather's Gorge, and down to Difficult Run's merger with the Potomac.

• Shenandoah National Park: I've hiked portions of the AT, the Elkwallow loop, the Hot-Short Mountain trail, the Nichols Hollow Trail, well, let's just say I've hiked a few trails. Oh yeah, we also hiked Old Rag Mountain. The great thing about Shenandoah is there's always more trails you haven't reached yet.

• The Tuscarora Trail. I've hiked about a third of the Tuscarora Trail, which stretches from Shenandoah, through West Virginia, up to the AT again, in Pennsylvania. It was originally designed as an alternate western route for the AT to take around the messy development known as Northern Virginia and Maryland.
  

I'm hoping this winter I'll able to do a a lot more hiking in Shenandoah. I like winter hiking. Although you have to be prepared for unexpected conditions, you get views from places you can never see from during the rest of the year because of the leaves. In Shenandoah, in particular, you can never be certain what the weather will be. Since it's two to four thousand feet higher than everything else, a rainstorm here can be ice or snow there.

Football madness

Okay, I can't help it. The So-called "Bowl Championship Series" has again failed to deliver on its promise of a definitive championship, and the game hasn't even been played yet.

This season has been a crazy mess, but still leaves one question, to my mind, unanswered. Why is the only undefeated team in the nation not playing in the "championship" game?
Yes,yes, I know the official answer. Due to Hawaii's a weak schedule and poor rankings in the polls, Hawaii is not number one or two in the nation.

How can a team's schedule be held as the definition of whether they're a good team or not? The majority of the schedule is guaranteed to be against conference teams. If the non-BCS conferences aren't considered major, your conference opponents don't matter. So, if you aren't in a BCS conference, you're schedule is guaranteed to be considered weaker it would if you were in one.
That leaves two, maybe three non-conference games.

In order to be taken seriously as a non-BCS conference school, you have to schedule against two teams that are considered "major" teams.

1. Choose opponents from BCS conferences.


2. Choose good (hopefully Top-Ten ranked) opponents from those conferences. A number 5 ranked Michigan from the Big 10 would be good. Oh, wait, they aren't even ranked now, at the end of the year. If you can't get them to agree to a game, how about number 14, UCLA. Oops again.

I believe the point has been illustrated, but to make it truly real, add this particular part of reality:

3. Take the previous two steps and expand them to the next 3 years.

If you can do that, you should apply for a job in the athletic department of a Division I-A school.

Hawaii played, and beat, two non-conference teams from Divison I-A teams, in the PAC-10 and MWC, and one Division I-AA team and was still only ranked #10.

Just for a final dose of the craziness, take a look at the Wikipedia entry for the BCS, here. Go ahead, I'll still be here when you're done.
Does it seem to you that the rules section is pretty long? You're right.
Does it seem like the 'controversies' section is as long as the rules section? You're right.
Does it seem like the formula changed every single season? You're right.

The best thing that could happen to college football would be for the NCAA to kill off the BCS. I'd love to see the game start with an official disclaimer from the NCAA stating that "this game is not an NCAA-sanctioned championship game". After all, they're the official organization of college sports, and they don't recognize any Divison I-A football champion. Unfortunately, the BCS will hang around as long as the conferences that run the BCS still get to make money from it for their cash-cow football programs.

They don't seem to care that the cash smells like crap.