Merry Holidays!

ByMatt

I had a good Christmas this year. It began with a week of continuous snow fall. We’d have 3-6 inches here and there with warm days compacting the wet and heavy accumulation. But all of that still adds up so that by the time Christmas rolled around, the snow was over a foot deep in parts of our yard. Meanwhile the mountains have been getting hammered. Moscow Mountain has over 40 inches in the upper elevations, Brundage has over 90 inches at the summit, and I’m not sure of the current depths at Freezeout and Lolo Pass as the snotels have stopped reporting for the moment. As it stands, we’ve already had more snow on the ground than the entirety of last winter.

Yesterday, we went out for a snowshoe hike on Moscow Mountain. We only hiked a mile up Tamarack Road before Clara got cold, but the conditions were perfect for walking on the mountain. Lower temperatures meant a drier, fluffier snow pack and previous skiers had already packed a surface so that we weren’t breaking a new trail. I’m not sure how deep the snow was where we were, but it was at least 2 feet as my poles could sink that far into the powder. The surface was just a few inches below the gate.

Greta on the trail
Greta on the trail.
Clara enjoyed the hike from her backpack seat.
Clara enjoyed the hike from her backpack seat.

Christmas itself was quite enjoyable. Last year, Clara was too young to really appreciate presents. This year, she really enjoyed ripping off the wrapping and playing with her new toys. She got some crayons and markers, some books, a shopping cart, a baby doll (which she loves), a play kitchen, and a tea set. Here are some photos of Clara opening and enjoying her gifts.

Similar Posts

  • Flight Paths

    [map style=”width: auto; height:400px; margin:20px 0px 20px 0px; border: 1px solid black;” maptype=”ROADMAP” gpx=”http://www.mineral2.com/wp-content/uploads/Flights.GPX”] If you don’t already know me, I have a thing for maps and geography. It’s an absolute delight to see the landscape from the air. I’ve been bringing my GPS with me when I fly, mostly to keep track of flight progress and to identify what I’m seeing out the window. But it’s also interesting to see how the FAA routes flights. Spoiler Alert: it’s not a direct path between cities. The two tracks above show the flight path between Phoenix and Cancun in both directions….

  • Perseoids

    Every summer at early-mid August, we enter a portion of the solar system rife with meteors, and ever year around this time, many of those chunks of rock and debris hit our atmosphere and burn up, giving us the Perseoid meteor shower. This year, the shower did not occur during a full moon, and so the skies were dark and the stars were bright. Some of the photo club folks wanted to have a camping trip this weekend, and that devolved into a fire and star photography night at our place. The meteor shower was pretty good Saturday night. There…

  • |

    Aurora

    We got alerts that a solar flare could cause an aurora that would be visible into the middle states. So, last night, I checked the sky and luckily it was clear to the north. I saw a faint glow on the horizon and set up the camera. Sure enough, there was an aurora. The excitement didn’t last too long. I wanted to view this one from Steptoe Butte, one of the best places around for viewing auroral activity. So, we got in the car and started driving west. Unfortunately, the sky was overcast over much of the Palouse, and by…

  • Why you’re working from home, Part 2: A Shiny Model

    Immediately after I published my last post, I wasn’t content with the manner in which I conveyed the SIR model. Simply posting graphs from scenarios that I ran isn’t exciting. It’s passive, and it doesn’t actively demonstrate for the reader how social distancing does work to reduce infection rates. I wanted something interactive. Something that you, my readers, can play with. So I built the model in Shiny. Shiny is a tool for R that makes data visualization interactive. I had never used Shiny. But with a few hours of reading the introductory tutorial, I had my own custom application…

  • Hard drives and data storage

    I’ve come into a real conundrum lately. I’m running out of space on my hard drive. Earlier in the year when I thought my hard drive was dying, I bought an external drive which I use to move old files for storage and back up my current system. The problem is that using the external hard drive as a working drive is not an ideal solution when my primary (read: only) computer at the moment is a portable notebook. Thus, I don’t want to be using the external hard drive to store all of my music and photography, the two…

  • Another conference, how about that?

    Somehow, I managed to go to two conferences in one semester. Tomorrow, I’ll be heading to Port Townsend, WA along with several other members of the department for the bi-annual Evo-WIBO conference. This is a small, regional conference for evolutionary biologists in the Pacific Northwest. There are only going to be around 200 or so people attending (compared to the 2-3000 at SICB), and there is only one talk session at a time. So lucky me, I got chosen to give an oral presentation. Did I mention it’s a small conference? It begins Saturday morning and ends Sunday at noon….