Inventing Your World

Invent your world. Surround yourself with people, color, sounds, and work that nourish you. Sark

Sun, Wind, Rain, and Ice (Hail/sleet)

Friday night was the BHFTF Welcome Social. Saw some of the folks from last year. Sat wth the guys from MSP. Lots of SWAG given out. Pretty good social. I was tired, left once the raffle was over.
Yesterday was the second day on the Mickelson Trail Ride. The guys from MSP (most of our ride group) wanted to delay the start, so it was almost 11 by the time we got to Hill City and the bikes off-loaded. I stayed with the vans over the first section.
At The Mountain Trailhead (near Crazy Horse) I joined the ride, the goal to ride to Pringle (17+ mile). Most of that section is downhill. We stopped in Custer for lunch.
For some reason, my bike computer changed from MPH to KPH. Called Zach from our lunch, got most of it changed. At least it was reading at MPH. The prolem that my odometer was way off. Last night, using my log, I got the bike miles reset. (Have 184 miles on it so far)
Back to the ride --- The hill and wind out of Custer amost did me in. For basically the first 3 miles I was at max heart rate. Stopped once at a driverway to bring the heart rate down. Once the trail was downhill again, I was good to go. The wind was still rough at times. It would cause my speed to drop from about 15mph to 7mph, and everything between.
After a brief stop at the White Elephant Trailhead, it was on to Pringle. Just out of the traihead it started raining. that wasn't too bad. But then some kind of ICE came out of the sky. With the wind, rain, and ice, it was not pleasant. The support vans stopped along the road as the storm passed. Asking if I wanted off the trail, I said - I'm heading to Pringle". Only 2 miles to my goal for the day -- I made it.
I and several others called it quits at Pringle. Four kept on. A very strong squal came through. We picked up 3 riders off the trail. the last one made it to the Minnekahata trailhead (as he saw us leaving to pick up the other riders. Everyone made it back safe.
Last night was the viewing of "Seasons", the new film by The Collective". Lots of fast riding, jumps, awesome riding, and crashes. Over the the Firehouse for a beer and needed purchases for the Beer-Muda Triangle.
A great and tiring day. I felt good about making it through some of the worst weather I have ridden in.

Verbena Bonariensis

My blooming Verbena bonariensis.

Thai Dragons

'Thai Hot Dragon' chile peppers on my single plant. This plant has grown fast and produced many peppers.
There was a bit of a mystery concerning this plant: some of the peppers had absolutely no heat at all (they're supposed to be 8 times hotter than a Jalapeño). I discovered it was because those peppers were drying on the plant and not ripening.
The other day, I tried a plump, juicy red pepper. After chewing for a few seconds, I was running back into the house hollering.
The heat lasted about 1 hour.

Stairway to heaven

Saturday was an extremely memorable day, the kind of thing that I'll likely still remember when I'm 83 years old sitting in a retirement home somewhere. As usual, I was a little later getting started on the ride to O'Reilly's than I'd planned, but the 15 minutes was fairly easy to make up, most of it was gone by the time I reached Canungra (after riding through the beautiful gorge) and started the 900-metre climb. The views up here are great, but what I really came for was the walk to Stairway Falls with the Gold Coast Hiking group that I discovered on the Internet a couple of weeks ago.


They turned out to be a great group. Friendly, adventurous and supportive. The walk itself involved a descent into a valley to the Blue Pool, before a trek along the rushing Canungra Creek to the falls and back, and a total of 12 unbridged creek crossings. There were, of course, the obligatory leech attacks (which caused some rather interesting reactions from Louise, our "fearless" leader), and a few obligatory falls in the creek (one of which cost me a pair of sunglasses), but it was worth it in the end.


On the ride home I was left to reflect on the day, and realised just what this experience meant. I don't know if any of us would have been able to follow the "track" and make it to the falls individually, but collectively it could be done. Sometimes it's also nice to find people with whom these experiences can be shared, and this day really had everything. I plan to make this the first outing of many with this group. There's talk of a climb of Mt Cougal next month -- all I can say is "bring it on".

Fountain Foolery after the Fun Match

You can biggify Hank's picture - he's really very cool about being in the pool!
I had to do obedience performances last Sunday in Hayward. I'm not wild about these things, but this Fun Match was held in a pretty area of the college campus there. When most of the classes were over, a few of us doggies ambled around searching for some fun and look what we found! A cooling-off place with sprinklers! Wish I'd had my kong, but it was Hank, the bulldog, who showed me this place - a few other pups came and joined us, but we didn't get their pictures. Hank is very advanced - in obedience that is. His mom, Jean Marie, is very cool.See ya 'round!

Frostflowers

White crownbeard - Verbesina virginica
Before I knew the real name of these plants I called them Ice Plants. I'm a flower nut but mostly a springtime flower nut, so I haven't studied fall flowers very much.
They have small, somewhat coarse white flowers. There's a lot more leaf than flower to them, so sometimes they suffer from the "it's just a weed" syndrome.
It seems like half the time I ask wildflower experts the name of something, it turns out to be beneath their notice, and they'll say "I don't know, it's just a weed!"
Anyway, this plant is called White Crownbeard, frostflower, or frostweed. Here's a site that shows them in bloom.
The most interesting thing about these plants to me is what happens after the flowers are gone. The first time I saw it, I wondered if loose cotton had somehow blown into the edges of the yard.

It only happens after a really hard freeze. Although the plant remnants look like dry sticks by the time it freezes, they somehow produce all this ice. One website I visited said that they are drawing the water from the ground.
The first time it happens is the most dramatic, and forms the most ice, but it'll happen again several more times when we go through cycles of warming up and then freezing again.
So what makes it happen with this plant, but not with others? I have no idea.
After I wrote the above, I searched a little more on Google and found this page that explains more about the phenomenon. (And has lots better pictures than mine!) The frost from plants he found was very thin. On the plants here it varies, but is usually thicker.

Bicycle Trails Calendar

I have published my first calendar. The calendar features photos I have taken while riding my bicycles around the country. Contact me if you are interested in ordering one.