mountains - The Twilight Report

Pecos

(click to see in Google Earth)

First place I took my intrepid party to was Pecos. It isn’t really a full fledged hike, but a nice meander through the ruins. There is a lot of history wrapped up in the place and you get to see the early blending and confrontation of Spanish and native cultures. There are mountains around that always look to me as though they had a giant bear claw scratches in them. It was here that the party noticed that there are a lot of juniper trees in New Mexico, and I learned the Russian word for that tree.

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P.S. I am back in Australia now.

This is where I am going in August

I went today.

Don flew in this weekend and on Monday we went to Snowbasin. I only went skiing once last year, and my technique has degraded as a result, but I'm starting to get my second wind. The mountain was mostly blue and black. With the exception of two gondolas and a high speed quad, the lifts are old school triples which zoom around and catch you at breakneck speed -- it reminded me a bit of Pajrito. Snowbasin opened in 1939, and is apparently one of the oldest ski resorts in the United States.

The first time we went up in the gondola there were two young girls (omg) discussing wedding rings and weddings (and nothing but). The second gondola was with three young military men discussing where they had served (all locations were stateside as far as I could tell) and how they had spent their 60 days of leave after they had finished at "the academy." I found the contrast between these two rides both refreshing as well as being disturbingly narrow. I imagined riding up in a gondola with a bunch of IBMers/ex-IBMers and one or two non-IBMers. Actually, minus the gondola, that pretty much describes every party that I attended during my years at New York.

There is a Australian "joke" which goes like this:

Q: What's the difference between a buffalo and a bison?
A: Can't wash your hands in a buffalo.

The "humor" is derived from the fact that the way that Australian's pronounce the word basin can be indistinguishable from the word bison to non-Australians.

We went to Antelope Island last weekend which surprisingly does not have any antelope, but does have a large number of bison. Don (my step father), who likes to repeat silly jokes, has been using every opportunity to tell this "joke" ever since.

Therefore: from now on I am going to refer to Snowbasin as Snowbuffalo.