Flotsam and Jetsam

This is the Spiral Jetty. It's a piece of landscape art that was constructed in 1970 (I believe....but I've been wrong before; nope, I'm right. CHECK IT.). It lives in the Great Salt Lake in the great state of Utah. The spiral itself is pretty great - though it serves no purpose, other than looking great. In high-water years, it is flooded out of sight by rising water and other times, when the water level of the lake is low enough, the rocks that comprise the Jetty are seen sitting plainly in the salty bed of the lake. It smells horrible out here, by the way.

For this picture, I was lucky enough to show up when the water was glassed-over and pooling within the entire spiral. Special, right? Appreciate it.

Legacy Bridge Wanderings

These photos were taken this past July up around the Legacy Bridge area of the Univeristy of Utah campus. The bridge was one of several structures built for the 2002 Winter Olympics on the U's campus. I blinked when Apollo Anton Ohno walked across this bridge and missed him entirely. He. So. Fast. Like this train....



This next photo is an HDR (high dynamic range) rendition of the bridge itself, looking west towards lower campus.



Incredible.

All things...

Just a tid bit from a photo-shooting spree I went on late last spring around Salt Lake. Unnh.

American Auto Industry Bail Out

The sad fact is it's not even a bail out. It's a bridge loan. Which is an even higher-risk loan, with a higher interest rate than typical money loans. And all this business about lobbyists, it's so true it's sad. I guess they're trying to save jobs, which is a good thing. And why should I be bothered by the fact that I'll lose value in the cost of my Subaru? I paid $800.00 for it - $600.00 of which was comprised of my economic stimulus check. So really, the car only cost me $200....

Advertising

I heard all it's about is arresting the human intelligence for a long enough time in order to get money from a person.

An Article from a Skiing Magazine

Grant lives at sea level. Grant drinks beer. Grant drinks so much beer that he has to brew it himself in order to remain financially solvent. Grant goes skiing in the Andes, however, and drinks nothing but water and Gatorade. And Grant’s friends begin calling him “Jennifer.” Cruel? Maybe. But is the mockery just? Does drinking at higher elevations really make a difference?

Turns out the I’m-from-New-Jersey-and-am-skiing-in-Utah excuse only pardons gaper powder skills. Most of the prevailing wisdom that altitude gets you wasted-er is founded on what Fox News calls “facts” and the rest of us call “utter bullshit.” Specifically, it’s based on a quasi-scientific study from the 1930s performed not by a doctor but by a psychologist.

According to a 1995 Austrian study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, boozing at 10,000 feet and at sea level produced identical levels of wanting to go to Denny’s and yell, “Spring Break ’08, bitches!” And a University of Texas article cited “no credible research evidence [that] alcohol makes you more intoxicated at high altitudes compared to sea level.”

Dr. Peter Hackett of the Institute for Altitude Medicine in Telluride concurs. “I recommend people not drink alcohol for the first couple of days at altitude. It depresses the breathing and could cause mountain sickness. And mountain sickness feels exactly like a hangover. It can be hard to tell the difference between the two. That’s the first 24 hours. After that, the body acclimatizes quickly. By the third day, you can drink as much as you like.”

******************************************************************************************************
My thoughts:
Touché.

I Beg To Differ...

.......NOT.

Fun Size

So I have beef with candy-bar makers and their ineptitude to correctly market certain products. Most notably, 'fun size' candy bars. See image below:


For the sake of all things unconveyable, let's just say the image of the 'fun size' snickers, above, is "actual size." Now, my beef; this isn't 'fun size' - this is a TEASER.

Da Bird

So, remember that little blurb I wrote about my love affair with Brighton a few posts down? Well, I kinda feel like I'm cheating on her this season. Yeah, I got a Snowbird pass this year. F me, right? Snowbird has a tunnel. I won't use it. But, I did get a deal on my pass (one reason for switching mountains this year). Hopefully it snows a lot and don't miss my alma mater too much. I know, this is ridiculous, but still....

Stimulus Check = Push-Button 4WD

Ok. It's official. I'm horrible at updating this blog. I love reading other people's blogs, yet loathe putting new material up on mine. It's not that my life is disinteresting, I just never feel like sitting down at a computer and typing about myself. I guess this is why I've never been able to keep a solid journal over the years, either.

Well, here it is. My 1992 Subaru Loyale, which has been affectionately deemed (through suggestion of a very good friend), The Lieutenant. It's got 124,000 miles and I paid less than $1000 for the guy.


Pretty sexy, right? The LT has a 5-speed manual transmission with a push-button 4WD on the stick shift. And look at that white paint....sooooo gooood! That's the LT.

ed - 11/19/08: Oh yeah, behold - the mighty push-button!!

Land-Locked Seagulls

From birth until the age of 11, I lived just outside of Denver, Colorado. Probably the single-most confusing thing about my childhood was the fact that there were seagulls in Colorado. I knew this to be strange due to my infrequent trips to the Jersey shore whilst back east visiting relatives - seagulls belonged at the beach, not at 5280 feet above sea level; no, that's just not right.

However, here I've been in Salt Lake City, Utah since I was 18 and these silly birds are here too. I don't get it. They're clearly not here for the skiing. Following are some botched attempts at capturing these displaced water-fowl:






*Ed. Note 5/6/08: Great - so Utah's state bird is the seagull. This just keeps getting better and better. Thanks for this tip goes to one of my faithful blog readers.

**Ed. Note 5/7/08: Again, this post has stirred up more than I could have really hoped for. Apparently these birds worked "miracles" back in the mid-1850s. Check out wikipedia's facts HERE.

Ah Ski Ski Ski

Here's a picture of me summing up the 2006-2007 ski season:
Photo: T. Felton
That's right. This season was all-things not great in terms of snow.

Now, here's a picture of me summing up the 2007-2008 ski season:
Photo: T. Stark.
Can you tell the difference? That's right. So, this winter's been good. And when I say, good, I mean it in the sense that I don't care if I'm using proper grammer or not (good vs. well...yeah, whatever). Just look at that picture - I'm so happy that I could be peeing my pants and you wouldn't even know it because it's literally been balls-deep all season long.

Maybe this year just seems so much better than last year because it hardly snowed at all last year. No. That's not it. It's the fact that nearly every Friday Ullr has turned on the storm spigot and lets the flakes fall all-weekend-long. This past weekend, especially...some of the dryest snow I've skied in my life. I'm going to shut up now.

The Love Affair

I first became acquainted with Brighton ski resort in 1992. Our family took a ski vacation out to Utah during spring break that year. Early one morning on our way to Big Cottonwood Canyon I saw a road sign for the University of Utah - I told my parents I was going to come to college out here. "Sure, Joe..." they said, I was 9 years old.

In 2001 I packed up and moved out to Utah for, ahem, college....and the skiing. Little did I know that I would reacquaint myself with Brighton that winter. Though not having not seen her for a little over 9 years, I wasn't surprised that we hit it off almost immediately. It felt great to be cradled by her back bowls, deep snow and laid-back crowd.

There's no way that back in 2001 I could have told anybody I would still be skiing at Brighton today; 7 years and nearly 550 ski days later, we still get along as well as the day we first met. Sometimes my affair with Brighton reminds me of Greg Noll, a big wave surfer featured in the movie Riding Giants, who moved to Hawaii after high school and fell in love with the huge waves crashing along the breaks at Waimea Bay. Sure, a bit of a stretch, water vs. snow, beaches vs. mountains, Hawaii vs. Utah, but whatever.

Brighton is good.

ph: Evan L.

Exit 4 on I-80 West

This past weekend was an interesting one. Instead of going skiing, a buddy and I decided to trek out to the Bonneville Salt Flats in Western Utah. There's a lot more to why we didn't go skiing, and I'm only going to get angry if I delve into that story; besides, it would at best be a tangent and we all know that staying on topic is much, much better.



Yeah, so, back on topic. The Salt Flats are, well, flat...and salty. After exiting the highway (exit 4, clever, I know...) you head north on some road following signs to the Bonneville Salt Flats. Ending up on a two-lane road that traverses across the Salt Flats, you think "my gosh, could this be it??" Then, it gets better, the road ends - in, literally, the middle of nowhere. Nothing is there to hold you back from doing whatever you please. In our case, we took the time to snap a few photos and then drove my buddy's car really, really fast on the flats.



After seeing all there was to see (read: not entirely too much), we packed back in the Subie and headed back home. Go check this place out sometime if you ever get the chance. In fact, give me a call, I'll ride shotgun.

Yeah, "I used to skate"

So many people make this claim if and when skateboarding is brought up in conversation. But how many people can truthfully say this and, at the same time, actually mean it?

This past weekend I found myself flipping through a skate mag while I was waiting for a window to be fixed on my car. It was probably one of the best things that I have done for myself in a long time (read the mag). Silly - you ask? Not so. I spent the better part of my adolesence with a skateboard under my feet. Outside of my playing lacrosse in high school, skating was what I did with all my friends at that time. We skated every day after school, all weekend long and even talked, somehow, our parents into shuttling us up to Philly, from Delaware, to skate the FDR skatepark under I-95 a handful of times each summer.

Back to the mag - I wish I knew then what I know now. It really hit me, reading the articles and appreciating the pictures, how anti-establishment skating really is. Between the ages of 13-17 I never really took in, evaluated or understood much of what skating meant as a whole. Rather, I knew what it meant to my friends and I and that's all there was to it.

We all grewup in middle-class families that lived in the suburbs. We didn't know squat about anti-establishment and didn't give a damn about anything outside of our own neighborhood. But now, looking back, after finishing college and being thrust out into the 'real world', I can only wonder how and who I would be now if I was truly anti-this and anti-that at a younger, more impressionable age.

This is my buddy, Matt, circa 2000.


Cheers to the youth. I know I'd give anything to be a kid again.

Alta

Ahhhhhh. Alta ski resort. What started out as a quaint mining town in the 1800s has now grown into a world-renowned ski resort; famous for harboring 500+ annual inches of Utah's 'greatest snow on earth'...yeah, blah blah blah....a couple things come to mind when I think of this place: Altaholics, Alta-Egos and the fact that my friends who ride shredsticks can't come here with me if I choose, wait, if I'm dragged into skiing here.

A few thoughts that come to mind within this triptych:

Altaholics: These are the out-of-state guys and gals from back east and out west that make yearly, often multiple time-a-season, pilgrimages to the glorious state of Utah with one purpose, ok, two purposes: To patronize what they see as one of the last 'pure' skiing establishments in the Nation and to complain about the estranged liquor laws of our fine state.

Alta-Egos: Usually found amongst skiers that have grown up in Utah, learned to ski at Alta and will continue to ski there until they die or it doesn't snow anymore - whichever happens first. Here's a typical conversation would go with someone who has an Alta-ego:

1. "So for this party tomorrow night, I need directions to your house."
2. "Sure, buddy. We're at 300 South and 800 East, right by the Sinclair."
1. "Where is that in relation to Alta??"

Sadly, the above is no joke.

Snowboarders aren't allowed: The majority of my friends ski. And many of my friends snowboard. Usually, we enjoy skiing and riding together. Yeah, well, that's why Brighton is better.

I will merit this skiing establishment in that it has some of the finest terrain in the Wasatch. The only downfall: After a big dump it gets skied out faster than you can wipe your own ass.

*Edit - Yes, I also have tons of friends that ski at Alta. Most of this post is meant to be taken as toungue-in-cheek. Thanks for reading.