Words, Music, & Outdoor Adventures

This weekend I went on a day hike into the southern part of Mount Zirkel Wilderness. 13 miles. Started on Elk Park road and finally make it to Elk Park; a beautiful open meadow filled with glacier lillies. Then up the trail to the wilderness boundary and had to stop at the South Fork of Mad Creek due to high water (see pictures in smugmug). It rained about half way back to the car.**

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The Album: When the Sun is the Moon- from an online review:

Will*”serve as a reminder of what earnest and thoughtfully constructed rock music can sound like and how music can be a refreshing shot of dusty, rollicking adrenal exuberance. The sound of Hudson Bell makes perfect sense as an amalgam of their geographical pedigreeothe same rootsy strains of the American South that inspired Neil Young grafted onto the lackadaisical, West Coast ambling of Stephen Malkmus. Though only seven tracks long, this album is packed with enough tightly wound melodies and joyously anthemic choruses to entertain and invigorate for some time.”

What we want
is never simple.
We move among the things
we thought we wanted:
a face, a room, an open book
and these things bear our nameso
now they want us.
But what we want appears
in dreams, wearing disguises.
We fall past,
holding out our arms
and in the morning
our arms ache.
We don’t remember the dream,
but the dream remembers us.
It is there all day
as an animal is there
under the table,
as the stars are there
even in full sun.

Cross training photo. Overnight backpacking trip out to Summit Park. The weather and the company were great.

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A silly picture of Abbey sleeping.

1. Remember that long, smooth strokes are most efficient.*
2. Front-quadrant swimming [with arms in more of a catch-up rhythm, out in front] helps raise hips in water and balance your body horizontally.*
3. Keep your head looking down and kick from the hips, not with the knees, and
   RELAX, RELAX, RELAX in the water!

Biked 73 miles this weekend: 30 on Saturday (River Rd) and 43 ond Sunday (Clark).

Total mileage on a road bike*year to date: 266*

Compared to last year year to date: 173

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Ran a 10K Saturday in 55 minutes which is a really good time for me and I felt good during the run. Now I have to decide if I want to do the 8.4 mile Cog Run. I’m not sure right now.

Today the sun was in and out: went on a 1 1/2 hour hike, swam, and biked. Picture from the hike:

From Writer’s Almanac - Mason grew up in rural Kentucky, the daughter of dairy farmers.*She wrote her dissertation about the novelist Vladimir Nabokov. By the time she was done, she said, “I was so sick of reading about the alienated hero of superior sensibility that I thought I would write about just the opposite.” She began to write short stories about people in her home state of Kentucky.Bobbie Ann Mason said, “I have always found it difficult to start [writing] with a definite idea about a character, or even a definite emotion. … But if I start with a pond that is being drained because of a diesel fuel leak, and a cow named Hortense, and some blackbirds flying over, and a woman in the distance waving, then I might get somewhere.”

Colorado River - State Bridge