Create Something Today

"The gift turned inward, unable to be given, becomes a heavy burden, even sometimes a kind of poison. It is as though the flow of life were backed up." May Sarton

Climbing Program Manager

I'm pleased to announce that Stefan Lofgren has officially been selected for the permanent position as Climbing Program Manager. Of course, he's been serving in this role in an acting capacity for over a year now, but his skills, drive, and vision for the program have proven him to be the best person to further the professionalization of the Mount Rainier Climbing program. Stefan has worked for over 20 years in the parks in the Pacific Northwest-most have been here at Mount Rainier, but he has also worked at Olympic. He knows the mountain, the weather, the people, and the environment. While serving in the acting Program Mgr. role, Stefan has guided a major transformation toward professionalizing the overall operation, establishing increased permanent supervisory oversight for staff, provided his staff with increased training opportunities and additional time to prepare for the season, created clear guidelines and SOPs which have helped reduce risk for his employees, spearheaded the first major climbing permit fee increase in over 10 years, and has set a vision for the program which will provide for an even more effective operation that works safely and efficiently doing the amazing things that the climbing rangers do. In addition, he worked with park staff to envision and implement a webcam for Camp Muir and established network connectivity for the Camp. These items will increase the safety for visitors going up to Camp Muir, and enables supervisory staff to spend more time on the mountain than at their computers in Longmire. Congratulations, Stefan! - Chuck Young, Chief Ranger, Mount Rainier National Park

Meeting with IMBA

MONDAY, NOV. 9
6PM
OLD CHICAGO, 78TH & CASS
Ryan Schutz (IMBA's Regional Director) will be visiting on November 9 & 10 to do a "Scoping Visit". He'll be here to get a lay of the land, and facilitate us through the process of creating what we hope will be a master plan of our green space/trail system. With your help, we... can identify our existing green spaces, parks, greenways, preserves, etc, and also identify the gaps and potential connectors.
On Nov. 9th, he would like to meet with the THOR advisory board members and those interested in playing a role in learning more about organizational building.

The Badlands

I have been to the Badlands in South Dakota a few times now, and with each visit I enjoy the area even more. My previous trips were just quick "through-visits" on my way home from other travels out west. This time, however, I was able to spend almost two full days in the area. I arrived in Badlands National Park after spending the day traveling through the Pine Ridge Reservation and visiting Wounded Knee. The whole area is beautiful and I can only imagine what it must look like in the summer, when things are a little 'greener'. The grasses everywhere were still quite brown, nothing had really greened up yet.

As I arrived in the Badlands I started noticing a lot of standing water in the low-lying areas along the side of the road, and some patches of snow here and there. When I got to the park's visitor center the staff informed me that they had quite a bit of moisture in the past couple of weeks, in the form of both rain and snow. Consequently, there were lots of puddles and in some places larger pools of water. In the larger pools, choruses of frogs were croaking and singing to their heart's content. These pockets of water really made the visit interesting for photographs, as I was able to make several exposures of the hills of the badlands reflected in these pools of water.

While making the image above, about half an hour after sunset, a car pulled up alongside mine on the side of the road. A voice came from the window... "Great spot, huh?" I turned and voiced my agreement, then got up (I had been sitting on the ground with my tripod set low to get the above shot) and walked over to the car to chat some more. The friendly voice in the car belonged to Carl Johnson, who is currently the artist-in-residence at Badlands National Park. As it turned out, he's a photographer, too. He lives in Anchorage, Alaska but explained that he was a guide for a while in the Boundary Waters, up the Gunflint Trail. I said "No kidding... I'm from Grand Portage." To which he responded "I used to work as a security guard in the Grand Portage Casino during the winter, in between my summer guiding job." What a small world! It turns out he worked at the casino back when I was managing the marina in Grand Portage. At any rate, we had a nice visit and we swapped website information. If you'd like to visit Carl's site, go to http://www.carljohnsonphoto.com/ and if you'd like to see his work from the Badlands, click on the "Blog" link at the top of his main website page. He has some nice work, and its worth a bit of your time to visit his site.

(Above: My car's shadow on the painted hills of the Badlands....)
Tomorrow, I head for home. The Badlands marks the last of my "tourist" stops for this trip. I am staying in Duluth tomorrow night, and tuesday night I am scheduled to give a slide show and a talk about my trip and my photography in general to the Duluth-Superior Camera Club. Hopefully they will like what I have to share!

Sun Beams over Isle Royale

This morning's sunrise was pretty sweet, although at first it didn't look too promising due to the cloud cover. As we drove to our planned location, however, things were looking better. The actual sunrise itself was okay, but once the sun got up into the clouds we were treated to an incredible display of sun beams protruding down through the clouds. The piece of land that you see in this photo is Isle Royale National Park, which is in Michigan but lies only 20 miles offshore from Minnesota, where this photo was taken from. If you look closely in the lower right corner of the photo you can see Rock of Ages Lighthouse, which lies just a few miles off the eastern tip of Isle Royale.

Visitation Totals for Mount Rainier Park

The last graph got me wondering, what was the general visitation totals for Mount Rainier during the same period, 1991 to 2005. As you can see, there has been a decline overall. I gathered these stats from here.

Summer Heat and Movie Reviews

Monday, in the heat of the day, laundry chores were completed. Spoiler alert re: The Bachelorette. At night, I watched The Bachelorette and was completely disgusted by the show. Normally I love watching, but Brooks, her runaway favorite, all of a sudden in Antigua decides he "doesn't know how" he feels about Desiree. Chris Harrison talks to Brooks about his feelings and draws out the maudlin conversation to ten or more minutes. Then Brooks has to tell Desiree that he's just not feeling right about their relationship. The show devolved into Desiree having a blubbering, sniffling pity party. Again, this part of the "drama" was stretched like Silly Putty to its breaking point. Talk about time fillers. The show could have been over in an hour instead of two. Sheesh.

Movie review: Tuesday I went to see The Wolverine in the middle of the afternoon. The reviews I read in Entertainment Weekly and The Oregonian were good. Even though I was skeptical about going, I went because of the reviews. I should say here that I totally enjoyed the X-men movies. However, I did not enjoy this movie. It had moments of exciting storyline and a couple of interesting characters, but overall, just another angst-ridden comic-book character. My favorite character was Yukio (Rila Fukushima) who brought an element of the unknown into the movie. I liked her verve and stick-to-it-iveness. Otherwise there was a lot of gratuitous violence and preposterousness (is that a word?).

In the parking lot at the movie theater, I saw the coolest car grille...looks Spiderman-ish.



Tuesday night, Bob and I went to see San Antonio Mission baseball against the Corpus Christi Hooks. It was a pleasant night at the ballpark...not too hot and a nice breeze blowing. The Missions won the game. Yay! Afterwards we went to Sonic for their half-price shakes. Bob had peanut butter fudge and I had strawberry cream pie. So delicious! It was a very nice date night.

Movie review: Wednesday, Paycheck, our Netflix selection, arrived. The movie stars Ben Affleck and Uma Thurman. I watched the movie in the afternoon and boy did I love this movie. How I missed it at the theaters is beyond me. The story is about a man who, in the not-too-distant future, works at reverse engineering high-tech products to make them better and cooler than the competitor's products. To do the work, he goes into seclusion at a company for four to eight weeks. At the end of that time, when the product is ready, his memory of the weeks he worked on the project is erased and he then collects his paycheck. Erasing his memory is done at great risk to his health. For his next assignment, he is asked to do a very top-secret project which will take three years. Impossible, he says, no one has ever done an assignment over eight weeks (and that was him). Eventually they talk him into it with the offer of stock options that are "guaranteed" to be six figures. He accepts the assignment. His memory is erased. When he goes to collect his paycheck, he is told he signed away his rights to the stock options. Then his belongings are given back to him (they were collected when he started his three-year assignment). Only thing is, the items aren't his. Or are they? From this point on, the movie really gets moving and becomes a thriller in which he has to figure out what the items are to be used for to save his life. Very exciting and a whopping good puzzle. I highly recommend this. The DVD also had "extras" which were very well done, including an alternate ending. I gave it five out of five stars.

When Bob got home Wednesday night, he watched Paycheck and enjoyed it too.

Today, I went back to work at the RV park office to start my two days for this week. August is our slowest month of the year. We had one check-in and four departures. We also made four future reservations.

That's all from here. Safe travels to you.

Travel Bug out.