Until then, I’m having some fun and I’m posting it here rather than sending a mass email. Hopefully I don’t have a stalker.

June 14 Graduation. Family stuff
June 15 kicked out of Stanford housing, bumming around NorCal for the week (hike, climb, beach)
June 19-21ish climbing in the Sierras (Charlotte Dome?)
June 23ish visit LA
June 25ish visit Flagstaff, AZ and help out on my cousin’s ranch
Early July head up to Park City (stop in Moab! I know, it’ll be hot, but I love Moab), mountain bike
July 15-31 lead a 2-week backpacking trip with NOLS. It’s hard to convey how excited I am for this.
Aug 1-2 family time near Mt Hood.
Aug 3 hike Mt St Helens?
Aug 4ish-14ish kayak the San Juan Islands
Aug 16 – 31 drive to DC via Boulder, St. Louis, maybe Chicago, maybe NYC.
9/9/09 – work!

Let me know if you can join in!
“Those were the best days of my life…”

Ed Abbey may be spinning in his grave, but State Parks have always been the piece of our land management system that compromises for convenience and accessibility. In some ways they’re the gateway drug that helps urbanites understand land management and conservation. In some ways they’re the inverse-wilderness area that helps keep careless, inexperienced tourists away from the more fragile and less-watched wilderness further from highways — at the same time raising funds that partly go to protecting those places.

I think this is a good move, and I may even use the service some day.

Thanks to Steph for the link.

I don’t live in Park City anymore, but that doesn’t mean it’s not the best ski or mountain vacation in the world. When I moved there I was struck by the lack of a good local guide to nightlife and restaurants (sorry, Park Record/Flipside, you suck). I dabbled with making one but decided to spend my time at work instead.

Fortunately, my friend Casey Sowul has come to the rescue and put together a professional-quality guide to restaurants, bars, nightlife, and everything worth doing in your favorite mountain town in Utah (that’s Park City). All it needs is a few 5-star reviews of Bistro Bar and I’ll have nothing more to tell visitors.

Ski Town Restaurants – Park City restaurant dining guide. Reviews, photos, menus, coupons, specials, maps for the best restaurants in Park City

I made a connection that seemed profound as I was falling asleep last night and thinking about how fortunate I am.

Don’t stare at the rocks.

This was the first useful piece of advice I received when I was learning to mountain bike. It works like magic. If you see a rock in the trail ahead that strikes the fear of a crash into your heart, your instinctive reaction is to stare at it in horror. If you stare at the rock, your bike will run into it.

Every time.

If, instead, you ignore the rock and stare at the clear patch of earth you want your bike to pass over, your bike will go that way. Every time.

Through work I’ve run into a number of people who are in the self-help/motivational/coaching business. I instinctively dislike the rhetoric involved and the amount of money people make selling the same recycled advice over and over, but I agree that helping someone gain the confidence and motivation to work toward their goals is one of the greatest gifts you can give. So, if it works, great.

For me, the best advice has been from mountain biking:

Don’t stare at the rocks.

I don’t have time to write much cuz we’re headed to dinner and why would I spend time writing a blog when I could be wandering around getting lost in Venice? but I will find a way to spread the photo love when I get back. And some day I’ll find a way to work a month or two per year in Italy into my career.

Hope everyone else’s summer is starting out well. I miss everyone like crazy… trying to send you all postcards, but if I don’t have your address, then sorry. Hopefully I’ll see you this summer or in the fall.

Ciao bella!

I went on a camping trip and took lots of pictures, so I should post them. But I’m leaving early tomorrow morning for Kona, Hawaii, so they’ll have to wait until I get back.

I uploaded one picture just to make the post pretty. It’s me attempting to fly. I guess the F18 Hornet we saw flew further than I did. But I was higher than it! Death Valley is a low-fly zone for the China Lake Naval Base. Yeah, from an 850ft high pile of sand we looked down on a navy jet going 300mph. It was sweet.

So I still love Death Valley. And the bigass sand dunes which I hadn’t seen before were amazing.

This weekend was fun. On Saturday I got up at 6am to go to LA (conference at Occidental) and give a talk on the Electoral College (based on my thesis, yeah I give that talk a lot). It went well because I gave the exact same talk in my Math Forum class on Monday, and it’s like the 5th time I’ve presented that work. I’m actually better at talking than doing math.

But then I was tired and wanted to get to the mountains, so I left right after my talk and stopped by my aunt’s house in Pasadena to wish her a happy birthday and return my cousin’s camera which I accidentally stole after rock climbing.

Then I went to Halona, a lovely rustic cabin that Pomona owns in the mountain village of Idyllwild, for the semesterly math department retreat and it was hella fun. Just look at the pictures.

I had a spring break. It was cool. I caught up on all that stuff I’d meant to do last fall. Except my statistics course. Still working on that one.

I also snowboarded Mount Baldy and it was great. Accidentally when down a rocky cliffish thing but only my snowboard got hurt (poor boardy). Next time I’ll be less stupid. I was wearing my helmet, and it’s about the 5th time this year I’ve been glad I was =)

Thursday my cousin Tyler came out from Altadena and we headed to Vegas baby, Vegas! Except I don’t like the city. We turned off and hit up Red Rocks Canyon National Preservation Area or something like that, and lo and behold Garrett, my boy from Portland, was there rock climbing with two of his buddies. I realized I haven’t climbed a rock in five years, and I also re-realized that climbing rocks is awesome. It was way fun.

Unfortunately either both of my camera batteries died at the same time, or something’s wrong with my charger, or something’s wrong with my camera. So I have no pics. Hopefully Garrett took some and will pass them on. [Update: Tyler managed to get a couple pics from his dying camera, so I put one of them up.]

Last weekend I and one of the kids from the last June trip co-led another ski trip to June Mountain. It was even better than the last, and we stayed 2 days. Here’s some highlights:

• 7 kids in a “sleeps-four” cabin (of course)
• Only 1 girl on the trip (poor Meg!)
• Driving around Friday night failing to find hot springs and making Noah grumpy (poor Noah)
• Taking first-person boarding videos with my camera-in-waterproof-case. And crashing into a tree.
• Sunday night, finally finding the most kick-ass hot spring I’ve ever been to.
• Bathing-suited snow angels. Yeah they look the same as clothed snow angels, but it’s all about the process.
• Giving a ride to a couple whose car got stuck while they were searching for hot springs (paying back karma for the nice guy who winched my car out of the mud about 1/4 mile away from that spot two years ago).
• My first speeding ticket on Hwy 395 (but only 10 mph over!). I’ve still never gotten one while driving my car. My friend who drove my car went faster than me and didn’t get one. My car never gets tickets because no one can believe it’s capable of going faster than 75.
• Back home at 3am and sleeping very very soundly.

I have pictures to prove that all of that really happened. I’ll post’em when I get a chance.

I thought this page was a lot more exciting when there was a new set of cool camping pictures on it every week. Unfortunately I couldn’t keep that up, but I did just get some pictures from the Hearst Castle trip I did like three weeks ago. I think I took like one (bad) picture the whole weekend, but Reed Schuler did some kick-ass stuff with time exposures while we were on the beach. Check’em out.