Search Results

New York Long Path - slice off a section as long as you like. Some of the Long Path is unavoidably crappy - the south end is in suburbia and the north end is a work in progress. Still, I can personally vouch that Sections 17-25 are all awesome trail. That area is tough. Parts (17-19, 21, 24) are really tough, comparable to the northern Long Path, the Presidentials or the Adirondack Great Range. I won't name names, but I've warned a couple of the regulars here to reduce their mileage accordingly/…

Mary Ann's still bugging me for name and stats! Help me get her off my back, willya?

Quote from SarcasmTheElf: “Welp, it looks like it happened again ” Details!

Quote from LIhikers: “It should be as long as nothing crazy happens.Of course there was that cold, and snow we got caught in that August day that we were on Mt. Moosilauke. Bring a warm hat and gloves and you can always sleep in your rain gear if need be. ” Heh. Reminds me of the time that Moosilauke got 8-12 inches of unforecast snow. In June. While I was on it. Gotta love the Whites. I think I got better weather the time I did Moosilauke in January. I was able to go up the whole way on crampon…

Congratulations! Two Little Elves... I can see we're going to be suffering from cuteness overload around here! Friday Mountain will still be there when you're ready. I may try to bag it in the meantime, but I'm still slowly working back into things - three steps forward and two steps back, I'm afraid. I'm going to try to take Teacher and Gumball to Overlook Mountain and Echo Lake in another week, and see how the feet and knees treat me on that one.

2024 in the ADK's for me, if the dear Lord spares my health!

Quote from SarcasmTheElf: “ I think it's some sort of cosmic balance. I'm finally employed again, because of that the stars (figuratively speaking) decided to release others from the chains of wage work. ” Yay! Glad to hear it. I'd noticed that you'd been subdued of late, but in the last week or two sounded more like your usual self (atrocious puns and all). In fact, I'd been meaning to reach out and ask how you were doing. One of these months, we really ought to make another attempt at Friday M…

Where I work, the campus is on the rim of the Mohawk River gorge. There's a hill - maybe a quarter mile and a couple of hundred feet of elevation. My office is in a building on the hilltop. My lab is down on the river. Ordinarily, the walk up and down the hill doesn't bother me at all, but once in a while, I'm moving more stuff than I can comfortably carry, or my foot or knee is acting up. We have little electric golf carts around the place that employees can use (it's a big campus). More than o…

Quote from max.patch: “serious question here; why are E and W in the wrong place? ” Because you're looking at the sky "from underneath", as it were. Print out that chart, hold it over your head and orient it, you'll see the directions come out right.

Quote from Dan76: “Now is the time to stockpile eclipse glasses for the Texas to Maine 2024 event. ” Don't forget the 2019 transit of Mercury.

No totality Up North here, but being on site with a couple of thousand science geeks has its own advantages. The partial eclipse (shot by holding a piece of ND14 film over a phone cam) 36550565212_e94f927c2f.jpg Solar crescents seen in the leaf shadows 35910859183_0739fd06c7.jpg A colleague projects a solar image through a monocular. 36550615112_9123faef02.jpg Another colleague sets up a Dobsonian telescope for direct viewing. 36720260285_9437578152.jpg

Quote from Astro: “AK, thanks for helping make this world a better place. Investing in future generations is one of the greatest things we can do. ” Hey, I do it selfishly, it's fun. Since I don't have grandchildren, the neighbour kids are the next best thing. Besides, there's a pretty view from the top. 29172995140_966289dc26.jpg

Quote from Foresight: “ETA: We (surveyors) used to use sun shots on a regular basis as a means of getting true north and there was always the joke you used on new guys; How many sun shots can you take without using a sun filter? Two. ” I used to have a sign in my lab saying "DANGER: Do not stare into laser with remaining eyeball." EH&S made me take it down.

Yesterday, I went out and did a very short but strenuous walk in Middleburgh, New York. I went to a local spot that has the generic name, The Cliff ("The Cliff" is actually printed on the USGS maps!) with a neighbour lady and her two sons, and we all scrambled The Cliff. The kids hadn't tried rock scrambling before. The younger boy, when he saw the cliff face, said "I'm not prepared to do this!" (The older one was blunter: "I can't do this!") "Sure you can! You just have to know how. I'll coach …

Quote from Astro: “While I would have rather been hiking in NH and ME, I have made use of my time back home and studied for and yesterday passed my PMI-ACP (Project Management Institute Agile Certified Practitioner) exam. ” So now you teach project management snake oil? (You'll never convince management that project velocity isn't a performance metric. They'd rather have a stick to beat people with than actually get the job done. And Agile often gets sold as a more effective stick.)

Quote from Drybones: “Quote from chief: “I think it was in '69, but could have been '71, don't quite remember ” Many of us have a problem recalling those years.....and many others are trying to forget. ” If you remember those years ... you weren't there.

Quote from SarcasmTheElf: “Today I learned another one of those things they don't tell you about parenting... appalachiantrailcafe.net/index…579d5bbeb378c7fb480c743ca ” Takes me back to when I was 18 or so and home for a holiday. My great aunt was visiting and the same thing happened. My dad was away and it fell to me to deal with it. As I was taking up the toilet, my brother whispered, "if you find a yo-yo in there, it's mine."

Quote from JimBlue: “I've never heard of a .22 for anything other than paper targets or small animals. ” I've heard of handguns chambered .22LR. They were competitive, I think, with the .25ACP that my auntie used as a purse gun - except that she'd never have trusted a rimfire.

I could believe that there is an alternative explanation to people with guns being more often the victim of bear attacks - they get foolishly confident and molest the bears or otherwise take risks that the unarmed wouldn't. I'm not saying anyone here would do that, but it's hard to underestimate the stupidity of some people. That's the only explanation I can think of for the fact that the commonest location for snakebite is the hand. I don't hike in grizzly country, and the statistics show that …

Quote from Dan76: “There's an ongoing discussion in Texas regarding the proliferation of salt cedar. One side maintains the tree holds soil in place during drought and serves as shelter to wildlife. Others claim the tree is a prodigious user of underground water to the detriment of other plant life. Additionally cedar crowds out other trees and plants thereby reducing food sources for wildlife. ” Yeah. It's complicated. The stands of cedar in sheltered hollows belong there, particularly if they …