Remy: Raise The Debt Ceiling Rap
Don’t forget this one too.
Archive for the ‘ Video ’ Category
Pummelvision – this is kind of cool.
You can make your own here.
The Fourth Annual Old Rag Adventure
Every year since 2007, we’ve done a weekend camping/hiking trip down to Old Rag in Shenandoah National Park. That makes this year the Fourth adventure, and for the first time we did it on Memorial Day Weekend.
Day One is camping. For the first Old Rag Adventure, we actually camped in the park itself, which turned out to be a bad idea. ”Quiet hours” are very strictly enforced at 11 pm. We stayed up until 11:30 and then called it a night. As we were settling into our tents to go to sleep, we were assailed by no fewer than four police cars and eight Front Royal Police Officers who had made the 45-minute one-way drive down to our campsite after the Park Ranger called them to complain about us at 11 pm sharp. It was a mess; they wanted desperately to cite us for something for the trouble of the drive, but we were above reproach.
Anyway, since then, we’ve camped in the horse fields of Graves Mountain Lodge in Syria, VA. It’s a great deal, and it’s free from both quiet hours and restriction on fires. For a minimal investment of cash and beer, it’s a great night. And we got a lot of firewood.
(Bierwagen had a stroke of genius at some point during the night. So far, we’ve always camped/drank first and then hiked the next day. The problem is, as we get older, we don’t recover from the drinking quite like we used to. So the new plan: hike on day one, camp that night. That lets us leave at a leisurely pace the next day.)
In previous years, we’ve had the camping fields all to ourselves, but this year it was full of horse trailers and upper class rednecks who were camping out for a week before the annual Blue Grass Festival (think a blue caller Woodstock). We actually met some of our neighbors, including a shirtless horse rider who told us about his plan to stay for two weeks and to be “lit up the whole tahm!”
There was Savannah Marie (not our sister) who was 10 years old, large and in charge. Imagine Rosanne at ten. Her dad was two sheets to the wind and friendly as hell. At around midnight, he rode his horse into the middle of our camp, proclaimed loudly that he was “The Great White Warrior” and then rode off drunkenly into the night (I think Bierwagen might have captured that on film; I missed it).
Day Two was the hike. We slept in as long as we could before our tents turned into saunas. While we waited for the hangover medicine to sink in, we broke camp and got ready for the 10-minute drive to the Old Rag trail head.
It was a very hot day – it would get up to 90, and sticky. It was also Sunday on Memorial Day weekend. I’d never seen the parking lot that crowded. It didn’t help that the famous upper lot has been closed… for good. They got a green light to build a larger lot, so I guess that’s progress.
We parked, paid (it was May 30, the second to last day on our Annual Pass) and off we went!
As we walked, I happened to look down a side-trail and saw a rather unique sight. A million butterflies just camped out there in the sun. Probably mating or something. Anyway, Tiffany has always dreamed of being swallowed in a cloud of butterflies; and this might actually be her chance. So we took a short detour:
Tiff and I have done Old Rag more times than I can remember. It’s a really, really fun hike. It starts with a challenging climb that eventually morphs into a series of rock scrambles. The scrambles can be tricky – especially if you’ve never done it before.
With the Memorial Day Weekend crowd, there were some traffic jams. Seriously, traffic jams on a mountain. There were also some very interesting characters including a guy climbing in flip-flops, an unwashed hippie with no underroos and a butt-crack on display for the whole world.
This year’s Old Rag adventure featured two Old Rag virgins: Matt Mauer and Jeff Marty made the summit for the first time!
Mother’s Day
Jed’s sister Ruth came to visit this weekend (Mother’s day weekend) and we went to Luray Caverns. It was spectacular. Every view was better than the one before, and with no natural openings, it was bug, bat, and rodent free. I’ll let Jed post the pictures, but my personal highlights were Dream lake, the big drapery, the bride and groom columns, and the stalagpipe organ, which played music by hooking the organ up to these pressure valve plungers which gently plucked various stalagtites to make the different pitches. Very very cool. All around a great day and since we couldn’t be with our mothers, we all made little videos for them in honor of the day. Here’s mine. Love you moooommmm!
Calypso!
On February 21st (the after we got back from Mexico), we went to Marnie’s house to pick up our new kitten. What you haven’t seen yet were the videos we made the day she came home. It’s pretty much just her being a kitten, but who doesn’t want to watch a video of a kitten playing?
Broken Chairlift @ Whitetail
If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if a ski lift broke down while you were on it, you’re about to find out.
Saturday, February 27 was a busy day at Whitetail. We got there at around 8:30 am, and there was already a line to get into the parking lot. The only hope when there are that many people, is that all of the lifts keep working, and when it comes to moving people out of the lines and up the hill, the Whitetail Express is the linchpin. Unfortunately, this high-speed quad simultaneously threw two drive wheels in the upper motor. Apparently, this is an easy easily fix if you only lose one, but losing both requires you to disengage the entire motor. That means you can’t have the extra weight of passengers.
So you’ve got to unload them.
Flash back
When I was young (probably 7 or 8), and still learning to ski in Montana, I was once lowered from the Lavelle Creek Chair at Missoula’s Snowbowl. At the time we still lived in Stevensville, so most of my skiing was at Lost Trail on the Idaho border. This particular adventure was only my first or second time at Missoula’s Snowbowl.
It was almost closing time, and I was on the chair with my dad. It was the last run of the day on a very cold, very windy day. This was before night skiing, so that ski area closed because of failing light, and it was getting dark.
I remember the ski patrol hurling a rope over the cable, and telling us they were going to have to lower us down. Unlike how they did it in this video, at Snowbowl they hoisted a patrol man up to us. He then secured us in a harness and we were lowered down. A few chairs in front of us went first, so we got to see what it looked like.
I went first. The harness was tightened around my waist, and then I had to slide out of the seat. It was terrifying. Not only was the wind howling, but the surroundings became ghostly and dark. The slopes had long since been emptied of skiers, and it was isolated. The only sounds were the wind, whipping us around as we descended.
Once down, we skied to the top of the Grizzly Chair, which I was planning to ride down (getting town the second half of Snowbowl is challenging). That chair, however, had long since closed, so we had to ski down. Dad took me down Upper Spartan, and then, not knowing there was an easier green-circle way down called Second Thought, he took me down the Spartan Headwall. It was my first black diamond, although I wound up walking down it.
The sad consequences of this experience was that it scared me off Snowbowl. It was, I thought, was far too treacherous for safe skiing. Even after moving to Missoula, I refused to go. As much growth in skiing ability as I sacrificed at this formidable age, I also lost time on the slopes with family. Of course, I was too young to appreciate any of that yet.
Fast Foward
The fix for the Whitetail Express was easy, but it required the skiers to be offloaded. At several stations up the hill, a snowmobile deposited teams of ski patrol. With a rubber ball, they threw a thin thread over the cable. That thread was used to pull up a heavier climbing rope. That, in turn was attached to a harnessing system.
The upside down T-shaped harness was comprised of a wooden seat bar that had a metal bar rising out of the middle. The skier sat on the cross-bar with the tube coming up between their legs. At the top of the tube was a rope harness that they slid over their head and shoulders, and around their chest to hold them to the bar.
Then, they just slide off the chair and enjoy the ride down.
I was in line when the chair broke – probably about 3 minutes earlier and I would have been on the chair. I think I would have enjoyed it a lot more this time around. It’s like a free zip line!
Skiing Whitetail
Back on the second-to-last day of January, we hit the slopes at Whitetail with Ben Cox and some of the old kickball crew. It was a windy 17°F and it snowed the whole time. And it became clear that Whitetail is the class of the three hills that we have passes to.
First, for Tiffany, they have a wide range of green circles. And for me, there’s a high speed quad and blue squares that cover more vertical than any other hill round here. And they’re the legit blue squares too (they’d be black diamonds at Liberty, Wisp or Camelback)! The black diamonds still aren’t up to par with the Rockies (they’re basically narrow blue squares), but the high speed lift lets you do a circuit (up and down) in as little as 15 minutes.
So, on the second-to-last day of February, we met up again with Cox and some of the old kickball crew again to conquer the slopes once more, this time in warm 41°F weather with the sun out. The snow was very slushy and heavy. The slopes were packed with thousands of people.
At the beginning of the year, Tiffany acquiesced to a season pass at three local hills (Liberty, Roundtop & Whitetail) despite having skied only once and despite that one experience being less than ideal. She was decent with the “wedge” or “snowplow” turn, but a long way from good at it. She stuck pretty much exclusively on the bunny slope.
But she took a lesson her first time out this year, and slowly began to leave the wedge behind. She conquered the bunny slope that day, and moved on to a green circle at Liberty called Dipsy Doodle.
After a few more times out, she owned the Green Circle. She progressed to more challenging green circle terrain at Wisp, and really started to master the parallel turn. She’s well beyond the bunny slope, able to conquer any green circle in front of her.
And then, at Whitetail, she aced her first blue square run called “Stalker.” It was a big-time threshold.
It’s always fun to watch Tiffany ski. Inevitably, she’s surrounded by less experienced skiers going a lot faster than she is. And inevitably, those skiers wipe out all around her, leaving her as the last one standing.
Here are some pics.
There are some shots in there of people being lowered from the chairlifts with a harness-cable system. More on that soon.
