Stories

  • Thanksgiving in Las Vegas, Part 1: The drive down

    One of my best friends from high school invited Erin and I down to Las Vegas for Thanksgiving. In fact, we were invited down last year, but we weren’t able to make it. Therefore, I decided that we’d make it work this year. Erin still wanted to host our annual Thanksgiving dinner at our house, so we had one on Saturday before everyone left for their break, and on Sunday, we packed up the car and headed south. This trip has a lot of firsts in it for me. It was my first time venturing south of McCall, my first…

  • Fall Foliage

    I’ve been spending a lot of time finishing up my dissertation proposal, which is due in a little over a week, and that has kept me from taking time to enjoy the outdoors. We got some considerable rain over the past weekend which lead to some dramatic skies and really clear views on Monday and Tuesday, but I just wasn’t able to take advantage of the nice conditions. I did get out for a little bit yesterday afternoon to check out the fall foliage in the arboretum on campus. In Idaho, we don’t see very much fall color. There are…

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    Aurora

      This story begins Friday night when I learned that a large coronal mass ejection (CME) sent a burst of solar radiation from the sun headed toward Earth. It was predicted to intercept our atmosphere on the evening of the 8th, producing auroral activity in the high latitudes. Given the size of this solar storm, as described by spaceweather.com, I was a bit suspicious that the auroras migh be big enough to see all the way down here in northern Idaho. So, I kept a watch looking for evidence of such activity. On the evening of the 8th, I checked…

  • Smoke in the Air

    Where have I been the last three weeks? To put it lightly, I have been choking on smoke. Since returning from the Seven Devils trip over Labor Day Weekend, the wildfires in the northwest, particularly in Idaho, have flared up. A fire south of the Devils appeared as well as a large fire just outside of Riggins. There have been some smaller fires near Grangeville and Lewiston to add to the mess. Winds from the south have blown all that smoke into the Lewiston-Clarkston valley and onto the Palouse where the smoke has been so thick at times, you could…

  • Huckleberries.

    I went up to Freezeout Saddle with some photo club people to pick huckleberries. As I expected, they were still ripe, and very plentiful. But the problem with huckleberries is that you can pick for an hour and still not get very much. I think I came home with maybe a pint of berries. I brought my camera up as well to get some photos of the area and of us picking only to find out that I left my card in the card reader and my extra card in the sack that I take backpacking. oops.

  • Labor Day Weekend: Backpacking the Seven Devils

    This is the story of how Dan Beck and I ended up spending much of our Labor Day weekend in the backcountry of one of Idaho’s most scenic and rugged mountain ranges, the Seven Devils. It begins over a week before when I sent out a message for a backpacking trip over Labor Day weekend. I suggested a 3-night trip into the Eagle Cap Wilderness with an emphasis on summiting peaks rather than counting long miles. I had some interest and was all set for our 3rd annual Wallowas weekend, when some of the members decided it would be a…

  • Fly Fishing on the St. Joe

    There’s nothing quite like the feeling of getting that perfect cast with your fly rod, landing the fly perfectly on the water exactly where you intended it to land, and having a fish jump for it seconds later. I was in that groove Sunday afternoon where the fish were chasing after my fly, but only one actually hooked. But the thrill of fly fishing isn’t so much the catch as it is the pursuit. There’s something theraputic about standing thigh deep in running water while throwing the line back and forth, even if nothing is biting. Then again, it’s just…

  • 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…

  • Fishing on the North Fork

    I went fishing along the North Fork of the Clearwater with Tyler and Dan, two graduate students in the department. Unfortunately, it was a short trip, leaving Thursday morning and returning late Friday afternoon, but that’s just how the timing worked, and it was a much needed getaway for all of us. We camped at Kelly Forks campground, luckily snagging a spot along the river. The campground is located at the confluence of Kelly Creek and the North Fork of the Clearwater which has some added benefits. Kelly Creek has an amazing fishery, but it is catch-an- release only. At…

  • 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…