Family reunion: Frogtrap II

What, still no Grand Canyon pictures?  Nope, you'll have to wait.  Here are some pictures from a family reunion we recently attended though.

"Frogtrap II", the reunion, was for Drew's side of the family. We came from as far away as Japan, Singapore, Montreal, and Oregon to gather at a summer resort in the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York to un-knot and retie family ties.  The last official family reunion that was not associated with a wedding, graduation, or funeral, was 30 years ago.  It was probably time to see how the family had grown and changed.

The place we stayed was called Timberlock, and I would highly recommend it to any family looking to have a great time at their reunion.  One of the great things about Timberlock was that each familial unit had their own cabin or, in Drew's and my case, a "tentlet".

 Our tentlet

The tentlet was just a mini cabin right on Indian Lake that included beds, a wash basin, and a little woodstove, but no bathroom.  Sharing the bathroom

The bathrooms

was not an issue because they were were clean and nice and there were only a few other people staying in tentlets.

The next greatest thing, which to tell you the truth I was initially concerned about, was the lack of electrical power or cell phone service.  Turns out I loved it.

The third greatest thing was the abundance of activities we could do, unscheduled, and just plain fun.

There was swimming in a fantastic lake equipped with a rope swing and water trampoline,

Water skiing and sailing (Drew and I didn't get a chance to sail, but others did)

Canoeing and kayaking

 Brothers - like old times

 

Heading for home

Paddleboarding

Hiking

The little sailboats on the lake were Dan & Kathy and Houston & Linda I think.

dry-land rope swinging

badminton, and archery.  Other activities that we didn't get a chance to do included horseback riding, tennis, ping pong, and sailing.


There was plenty to do, but we also had time to mingle and visit with relatives we have not seen for a long time.

 and meet two of the newest editions to the family:

1. Ivy

and 2. Fulton

 3 generations

 
With all that to do, there was still quiet time to read, nap, sit around, or do puzzles in the lodge.

 (get it, SIT around ;-))

And what family reunion would not be complete without custom t-shirts?  Thanks to Drew's Dad, sister-in-law, and niece, we each got to customize our own t-shirt.

Now that's a real family reunion!

Meals were fabulous and served family style on the dining porch.  The cook and all the staff were very attentive to our culinary needs.  You'd think with all that jumping on the trampoline I did, I wouldn't have gained any weight, but the still-warm chocolate brownies were too good to refuse.

On the first night, Aunt Linda treated us to special birthday cake and cupcake to celebrate what would have been Drew's grandfather's 100th year. We each had a cupcake that had our name and birthday on it. Plus, they were tasty!

In the evenings, we were treated to entertaining and sometimes poignant family home videos digitally remastered and set to entertaining and era-appropriate music by Drew's Unka G.  It was cool to see that much family history.

On another evening, there an entertaining magic show.

We stayed four days, but should have stayed a week because Timberlock was such a beautiful and relaxing venue at which to gather to reunite with Drew's family.  Even though I am raving about how great Timberlock was for Frogtrap II, the truly best thing about the long weekend was getting to spend time with Drew's family.  I got pretty lucky to marry into such a good group!  Thanks to Unka G for organizing us and entertaining us! 

 The 5 siblings.

So how do we pay back Unka G for all his hard work organizing the reunion and editing hours and hours of old video?  We drag him back across the country flying non-revenue on Southwest.  We made it as far west as Denver, but ended up stuck at the airport at 10 pm with no nearby hotel vacancies or cars to rent.  So we enjoyed a less than comfortable night in the airport.

At least we were rewarded with a fabulous sunrise the next morning before catching the flights back to SLC and PDX.

Great family! Great time!

*Thanks to Linda and Eliza for some of the photos in this post.

Birthweek

I know all my faithful readers are waiting with baited breath for posts about my life-changing river trip down the Grand Canyon in early June, but I'm still working on those posts.  For now, just wanted to get some pics up from birthweek.

Four days after I returned from the GC trip was my birthday.  I figured that there was no way anything could compare to the excitement and fun of the river trip, but, thanks to my awesome husband and sweet friends, I had a really great birthday.

On birthday eve, I went on a ladies' ride with the ROXX weekly rides.  What is better that riding with your homegirls?

Cake, that's what.  Drew planned, prepared for, and hosted a little get together at our house after the ride.  There was cake,

singing, and dancing (well, only by me while friends sang Happy Birthday to me).

It was a fun little party of bike friends to help me celebrate #42.

 On actual birthday, it was all about what I wanted to do, so we started the day by biking to Eggs in the City, one of our favorite breakfast places.

With sustenance, I was able to focus on opening all the nice presents sent and brought by my friends and family.

 Notice the dominance of a certain beverage?  You all know me so well!
I have to show a picture of the adorable mama pig and piglet that my mom sent me.

 Aw, ain't that cute.

Next on Lucy's day, I chose to focus on one last big remaining home addition project.  We still have one mantel and tile surround to build for the fireplace in our new family room/office.  Drew was a good sport while I tried to visualize size and shape for a mantel.

We went to a tile store and found tile we both liked, but when we got it home, the choice seemed wrong, so we are back to the drawing board.  At least we have a better idea of what we want now.

After tile time, we went hiking in the Wasatch Mountains up Mill B north fork trail.

Beautiful scenery and a nice change of exercise from our usual bike bike bike.  We didn't make the ridgeline though because hunger for pizza forced us to head for a newish restaurant we've been meaning to try: Boardwalk.

Pretty tasty pizza pie is a good way to end a fabulous birthday.

Solo celestial work retreat

You may have heard on the evening news that parts of the western US were scheduled to see a fairly rare annular solar eclipse last Sunday evening.  If you lived along the most central path of the total solar eclipse that occurred on February 26, 1979, but you attended a grade school that did not place any value on science education and therefore confined you and your classmates to the classroom to read a book while your fat teacher when outside to view the perfect total solar eclipse, you might take this passing celestial phenomenon more seriously.  I have wanted to see an eclipse since I was denied the opportunity in 5th grade, so when Watcher alerted me to the coming eclipse and gave me a pair of special eclipse viewing glasses,

I set about arranging my schedule to be in the path of annularity.   Salt Lake City would see only a partial eclipse, but my field area in Utah's West Dessert was in the path.  I needed to go fix some of the surface flow monitoring sites and weather conditions looked fine, so I checked out a vehicle, threw in my new 0-degree sleeping bag, packed some trail mix, and off I went to chase an eclipse.

I needed to go as far south in my field area as possible to see the annular eclipse, which worked out perfectly because the sites in that area were the ones I needed to visit twice during this trip.  I also had promised a colleague I would investigate a small but important water source in that area for him.

Sunday at 6:10 PM I arrived at my chosen camp site.  A small knoll in Hamlin Valley, with a backdrop of the Mountain Home Range and a great view of the western sky and the southern Snake Range. 

I set up my camp for the evening, which consisted of a cot, cooler, and camp chair,

Solo solar camp.

and settled in to view what the cloudless sky promised to be a perfect annular solar eclipse.

In an annular solar eclipse, like a total solar eclipse, the moon travels between the sun (big round white circle in the diagram below) and the Earth (below right), casting its shadow on Earth in a narrow path as the three bodies move through space.

But because the moon is farther from the Earth in an annular eclipse (C, above), entire disc of the sun is not obscured by the moon as viewed from Earth, so the observer sees a "ring of fire" around the round black moon.

At 6:21 PM I looked at the sun through my special glasses and thought I could ever so slightly see a tiny bit of flattening on the lower right side of the sun.  I looked again every 5 or 10 minutes and watched as more and more of the moon "bit into" the round sun like a Pac Man. I didn't have the special filter for my camera, so these pictures are not mine, but here is what I saw. The color is about right.

At one point I said out loud to the coyote that watched me drive in, "That is totally !#$@ing awesome! This is amazing."  Between glances, I looked around at the landscape, growing dimmer and dimmer.  The light was eerie because the shadows were sharp, but nothing was very well lit.  It was as if there was just less light, which is exactly what was happening.

I also had time to make a pinhole camera, which I had never done before.

Eclipse viewing platform. Pinhole camera (box) to the left of the chair.

I wanted to see the eclipse from every possible angle, and it worked.  Every 10 minutes or so I would look into my "camera" and see the round sun turning into more and more of a crescent.  

 Tiny projection of the sun inside my homemade pinhole camera.

Finally, at 7:30:29 PM the whole moon fit inside the sun and the ring was complete!!!!!

I felt a very happy bubble that had been building up since 5th grade burst in my head.  I am not kidding - relief and elation are not too strong of words.  To be there, alone in the wilderness realizing a lifelong dream was pretty damn cool.  How is that for a science geek?

So I sat there for 4 minutes and 9 seconds watching through my special glasses as the ring shifted slightly from one side of the sun to the other.  Awestruck.  And then the total part of the eclipse was over and the moon was moving out, creating a Pac Man facing the other direction.  I ate my salad for dinner between gazes at the sun and glances into the pinhole camera.  I tried to see the crescent shadows reported by others

but could not see any, probably because there was no dappled shade for miles around!  While I was hanging on to view the very last remnants of the eclipse, a cloud moved in front of the setting sun.  It was fascinating to watch how quickly the cloud moved across the sun compared to the moon.

After the show was over, I had a few minutes to hike around a bit before nightfall. The night was cold and clear and I was happy to have my Marmot Ouray sleeping bag to snuggle down into on my cot.

Now for the work part

So the trip was memorable mostly for the eclipse, but there were a number of other cool things too.

Wild Horses

Monday morning I went to investigate Gip Seep in the Mountain Home Range.  The BLM manages this seep as an important water source for wild horses.

Gip Seep

I have seen horses in this area before, but never this close!

I think there were two groups of them.  While I was measuring water quality and flow at the seep (2000 uS and less than 1/6 gallon per minute - not a big water source for a herd of horses and some elk) one group of horses came to drink.  The stallion was not happy that I was hanging around their water source, and pranced back and forth while his brood mares and colts hung back.  I pulled back under cover of the junipers, but they wanted nothing to do with that place while I was there.

 

Flow measuring

OK, so maybe this part is not as glamorous as solar eclipses or wild horses, but it is kind of a fun and important part of my work.  I measured stream flow in three ditches before the local ranchers rerouted water into a different irrigation ditch and then again after the reroute.  By doing this, I am checking to see if the permanent flumes we have installed to continuously measure the flow are reading accurately.  I have no action shots of this brave hydrogeologist, but here is one of the streams and the flume we have installed.

Next, I got to use some leaky hip waters to muck around in this spring pond

and dig out a bunch of branches recently deposited by Mount Wheeler Power Company into the pool.
I am always a little leery of what might be attached to the end of my hoe when I bring it out of this pond.

I also visited the other 6 monitoring sites for routine maintenance.  It makes for a lot of driving because the sites are so spread out and all the roads are gravel.

Camp 2

No celestial phenomenon occurred during my second night out, but the camp spot was just as remote and the wilderness just as blissfully lonely.

After a very long and dusty day in the field Tuesday I headed for home to see my sweet, sociable husband.  Celestial solo retreat complete.

Race report: 12 Hours of Mesa Verde v. 3. part II

Saturday was race day.  Drew and Jim got up crazy early (5 AM) to go to Denny's for breakfast, while Shelly, Leslie (who had crashed with us at the last minute) and I tried to get a few more winks of sleep.

We elected to have me do the LeMans start, since I had not done it before.  The likelihood of me having to do 4 laps as opposed to Drew's 3 would be higher if I started, which was OK because Drew raced for 8 hours the previous weekend.

I was ready to roll by 7 AM

and my bike was staged where I could find it.

We lined up and the start gun went off!

photo courtesy of Dusty P.

At the LeMans start, I felt like I was in a heard of stampeding bison.

After everyone got on their bikes, the furious pedaling began.  This created some dust.  I did not like this part, and fell pretty far to the back of the herd.

photo courtesy of Dusty P.

With several hundred racers all trying to race the same singletrack course, there were massive delays and long, long conga lines.  I got stuck in a couple of really bad ones, and was barely putting out any effort.  This cost us big time.  As I came into the start finish area,

 photo courtesy of Milissa M.

the clock ticked 1 hour 41 minutes, which put us in only 19th place out of 25 teams.  We figured that was because most co-ed duo teams opt to have the guy start because, in most teams, the guy is much faster than the girl.  But still, my poor competitiveness early on in lap 1 did not help.  We were expecting to move up throughout the day.

And we did.  Drew had a good first lap, then I went out on lap 2 and logged my fastest time yet in the three years I have raced MV (1:33:58).

Other Revolution team members were having some problems with crashes and mechanicals, but Cousin Milissa was riding well and looked awesome in her disco outfit coming out of the disco tunnel.

photo courtesy of Nancy W.

Lap 3 for me was uneventful but solid. Lap 3 for Drew was his best yet.  He finished lap 3 with 1 hour 25 minutes left on the clock, so I went out for our final lap.  By this point I think we were in 10th or 11th place.  

As I came across the finish line at 10 minutes after 6 PM,

we had, in true Jordan fashion, whittled down our competition to end up in 9th place.  Drew and I both felt very good about our endurance and lack of big crashes, so we celebrated at the free pasta feed and complimentary Colorado brews.  We hung out to see some of our teammates take high honors in the solo and duo categories, and then headed back to the rental house for a soak in the hot, hot tub and much needed bed rest.

The next day we packed it up and hightailed it back to SLC.  That was one fun race!