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Friday — Diamond Peak

By bkdunn | 15 March 2013 - 545 | Skiing

I wrote all these up on the plane ride home. FYI.

Paid: $49 (Reno Sports Authority)

Quality of Random Lift Strangers: 9/10

Weather: Overcast with some eventual light snowfall.

Would Return?: Definitely

I’m probably just a sucker for ski resorts with lake views, but I loved Diamond Peak, despite its shortcomings and quirks. I liked the laid-back vibe. The unpretentiousness caught me off guard (I figured Incline Village’s hill would be more uppity), parking was easy, and the random lift strangers were friendly and engaging. The skiing was also pretty good. Spent most of the day on Crystal Express sampling the diamonds with occasional forays on Lakeview. Snow was chopped powder most places, with some fun in-tree, un-tracked around Eagle Bowl and a few other gladey places elsewhere on the mountain

A little fog at the top of the express lift.

Looking up-run (this was “Lightning”, I think).

View from the ridge.

View from the sort-of untracked.

I took these using my goofy video cam:

Diamond Peak’s biggest shortcoming was pretty obvious: south-facing and with a lower elevation than some of its competitors, there were a lot of bare spots and some closed runs.
The views of the lake were fantastic; the lake is more than occasional scenery here, it’s a constant companion.
Visibility was tough up on the ridge before about noon, but got better during the day. Everything coming down off the ridge offered good visibility (even at the top).
I bought a sandwich at Wal-Mart in Reno on my way up so I have no idea how the Diamond Peak food is. However, I now know that the sandwiches at the Reno Wal-Mart are bland.
Crystal Express doesn’t ski as weird as it looked like it would from the map.
I liked that there was always something easy to bail out onto and something harder to bail back into on just about every run and gladed middle-ground.
The conveyor belt on-loading on Lakeview (and Lodgepole) was a new experience for me.

The place would probably start feeling small after a couple visits in a season, but I liked Diamond a lot.

Wrap-Up (for the Whole Trip I Guess)

The trip turned out to be phenomenal. I like spring skiing days and I liked getting to experience powder conditions that I haven’t seen since I decided to start skiing again last season. At the risk of igniting an east coast-west coast debate, by Monday afternoon I’d decided my next year’s ski trip destination wouldn’t be Vermont again after all. Even if Squaw wasn’t as transcendent as hoped, the trip overall was generally very nearly euphoric. I was mad when the lifts closed down every day and when I skied my last off Diamond on Friday, it felt like I was, I dunno, being sent back into some sort of dungeon or something.

Chained,

bkd

Thursday — Squaw Valley

By bkdunn | 14 March 2013 - 710 | Other

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Paid: $60 (bought someone’s voucher off Craig’s List a month in advance)

Quality of Random Lift Strangers: 6/10

Weather: OVERCAST with light snowfall throughout.

Would Return?: Maybe

This was the big powder day of the week with it having snowed all day Wednesday. I heard from one random lift stranger that she’d had an even better time of it on Wednesday, in spite of the high winds and closure of the upper mountain, since there was plenty of untracked available and not many hardy souls there with whom to share it. On Thursday: plenty of souls. Traffic was bumper-to-bumper from I-80 to the parking lot. The gondola line (funitel line, whatever) was long in the morning and Shirley Lake and Granite Chief queues were no-doubt aggravating to the non-single. Visibility was very difficult and I ended up spending a lot of time on Shirley Lake where at least I could see while trying to figure out how to ski powder (only partially successful in both endeavors).

Top of the Siberia Express lift looking (I imagine) not entirely unlike Siberia.

I like that the ski patrol is going after the guy before he’s even fallen (or started downhill or gotten to the top).

Rocks, trees.

Siberia Express had no line. Also no visibility on the top section. It’s worse than it looks here:
The shear number of chairlifts at this place is incredible. They seemed to start and end everywhere; around every corner was another chairlift (or two). For instance there are five lifts in the photo below (can you find them all??):
The rock outcroppings were cool. With those and the relative absence of trees on the upper mountain, I figured this must be what skiing in Europe is like.
Had lunch at Fireside Pizza down in the village on the hunch that ski resort food follows the same pricing principles as does dining at Disneyland. At least in this case it did – paid $18 (incl. tip) for a very good pizza and 32-oz. (!) soda in a glass (!!) rather than spending $15 for faster, price gougey-er, and inferior cafeteria-style fare. Would recommend. (Next time you’re at Disneyland, try the same strategy – you’ll see.)
As a service to fellow acrophobes, I’ll note that the Red Dog lift is the most fear-inducing lift I’ve ever ridden. There are a couple of long, *very high* gaps on that one and the relatively slow speed of the lift means that the shear terror wasn’t just fleeting.
Had been worried about needing chains for the drive up. Didn’t need them, despite Nevada DOT’s website stating that there was a chain check station on the 80 east of Truckee (the agriculture inspection station apparently had confused them).

Especially in the morning, the whole place had a sort of hyper-focused, manic air to it. I’m assuming it was all the expert-skiing locals who were super-determined to find the remaining stashes. No one was rude or anything, just – it wasn’t much of a kick back-and-enjoy vibe going on.

I talked to a lot of more-experienced skiers the following day at Diamond Peak and had a couple of them offer up criticisms of Squaw based on weather issues and lay-out. I can see why expert skiers would love the place, especially on a powder day, but I sympathized with the criticisms. For me, I wanted there to be more trees to ski around and to help with visibility. I also wanted there to be something groomed somewhere so I could take a few relaxed runs once I got tired of feeling like half an idiot on the by-midday chopped-up powder on the blue squares. It’s not like I didn’t have fun – I had a great time at Squaw. I think I just expected it to be some sort of transcendent mega-experience and instead it felt somewhat compromised. Maybe I did it wrong. Maybe it was the cloud-induced seasonal affective.

Here’s another photo:

The way back home.

bkd

Wednesday — Stormy, with a Chance of National Automobile Museum

By bkdunn | 13 March 2013 - 729 | Museums

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The National Weather Service described the winds at and around the Tahoe-area ski resorts on Wednesday as “destructive” and chains were required on every road between Reno and the chairlifts. So, after dropping Argosinu (née Telkontar) off at the airport, going back to the room to sleep another couple hours, showering, packing, finding and using a laundromat, and getting a by-then late lunch at Carl’s Jr., I headed over to the National Automobile Museum in downtown Reno.

I didn’t take a picture of the outside. Also, I’ve gone from having never been to a car museum to having gone to two in two months.

Right, so I didn’t know what to take pictures of inside either. I sort of tried to take “artistic” photos. The lighting was tough, a lot of glare. They had a lot of cars, but almost nothing after 1950. A lot of really old cars. The Ferarri was run during the 1952 through 1955 F1 (or whatever it was called then) seasons. It came in second in the 1955 Argentine Grand Prix. Here are photos of old cars:

Here’s the Ferrari. I think the art shot almost works for it.

Also third in the 1955 Buenos Aires Grand Prix.

So that’s pretty much the museum. They tell some good stories, every car has a detailed description plate on it, there’s some significant automotive history described there. Probably worth going, depending. Took me 2.5 hours. Cheap metered parking is right outside the front door.

Mit herzlichem Glückwunsch,

bkd

Tuesday – Mt. Rose

By bkdunn | 12 March 2013 - 931 | Skiing

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Paid: $49 (weekday full-time student price at window)

Quality of Random Lift Strangers: N/A

Weather: Sunny with high winds at the top.

Would Return?: Probably

Mt. Rose was exactly as advertised: unpretentious, locals-centric, solid vertical and elevation, and windy (although I think everywhere was probably windy that day). In terms of attitude and vibe, Mt. Rose was night-and-day compared to Heavenly (and Squaw) and, ceteris paribus, I preferred Rose’s relative easy-goingness – not that ceteris ever *is* paribus. Conditions were pretty firm (not icy) on-trail and off-trail was cruddy (this included the tree areas unfortunately). Mogul runs were carved deep with pretty inconsistent snow (thanks to the warm weather, lack of recent significant snowfall, and wind I’m sure). Spent all day on Northwest Magnum 6 (heckuva lift name) after hearing that the east-side runs were more scraped.

It was exciting to be able to see our hotel from the top.

Also:

Wish they’d had some better snow, obviously. The chutes looked like they’d be fun, but we saw (from a distance) one person who ventured in there all day and, based on his form, he didn’t look too happy.
Was also sad that the trees down the lift-line weren’t more skiable (I tried twice).
Didn’t understand why they wouldn’t run the little triple chair off to the right of us. There’s not a ton of skiing at the very top and the triple looked like it would at least be out of the wind. (I’ve been told by a local, however, that it’s not actually any less windy on the triple, just a lot slower.)
Not very crowded – we didn’t share a lift ride all day.
I liked that the ticket booth woman barely even blinked when I requested the student rate (I’m 41; yes, I’m a full-time student with the ID to verify it).
It’s cool that there’s one resort around Tahoe that offers such intense discounts.

Conditions were definitely a little firm that day. That said, it was hilarious listening to locals complain about how terrible the “ice” was. At Blue Knob that’s called straight-up powder.

bkd

Monday – Heavenly

By bkdunn | 11 March 2013 - 1749 | Skiing

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Paid: $93 (bought at Sports Authority in Reno the night before)

Quality of Random Lift Strangers: 5/10

Weather: Absolute Bluebird (my bro’s thermometer read 42 degrees on our way up Sky Express the one time)

Would Return?: Definitely

Given the advice I’d read on EpicSki, we chose a side and ended up spending almost the entire day skiing Dipper Express (we took a couple of runs on the California side since it seemed obligatory). No complaints about traverses. I think they’d had some snow the day before, so things weren’t too scraped and, in the trees at least, conditions could be described as soft. Our favorite run was in the trees alongside Big Dipper and Meteor – left us with a long, blue run-out, but I like hard-packed bombing runs, so all was good by me.

View of the lake from the California side.

This is what the snow looked like in the trees (on the Nevada side).

Other observations:

The pulled pork sandwich at East Peak Lodge was huge, but otherwise merely okay. Barbecue baked beans were generous, but I would have preferred a sweeter sauce with a little more vinegar and somewhat less chili powder. #yelp
To me, the oddest thing about the layout was that we were kind of “trapped” on the upper mountain. If any of us had left anything down at the car (we parked at Stagecoach), it would have been a blue square-and-slush hassle trying to retrieve it.
Stopped at the Red Hut (Kingsbury Grade) on the way up the hill. The bacon there is something to write home about.
Plenty of people there, but the Nevada side was pretty roomy and lift lines were close to non-existent (things were decidedly more crowded California-side).
People here had a somewhat disturbing penchant for making high-speed, lane-shifting entries into the lift lines. I imagine they learned that on the 880 somewhere around Hayward.
The ski patrol dude who rode up the lift with us should probably be friendlier toward people who paid $93 just to be there for the day.

In the net, I loved Heavenly. The price is silly, but the views were awesome, the tree-skiing was fun, and there were plenty of places to roam even without entering California. Just for the price, I can’t imagine going there more than once a year, but next time I’m in Tahoe to ski, it will be on the itinerary.

Crystal Mountain Resort (Report from Yesterday)

By bkdunn | 17 January 2013 - 1904 | Skiing

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Headed up skiing to Crystal Mountain with my dad yesterday. I’m guessing I hadn’t been there since some time before 2000 (the year). Um.

Here are some facts so that I can list here in order to break up the photos:

It was a beautiful, sunny day.
Got up to maybe the mid-30′s, warm enough to soften the snow, cold enough that it never turned to slush.
Even though it hasn’t snowed up there in a week or whatever.
It was really clear, no clouds in any direction. You could see Adams, St. Helens, the Olympics, and even Rainier.

It feels like the top of the world up there. It’s also a little windy.

So then I spent most of the day skiing Green Valley. There weren’t crowds anywhere on the mountain, but there were especially no crowds in Green Valley. They have an express lift there now. I don’t know how long it’s been there. I could probably find out on the Internet.

Presumably the caution was due to the presence of snow, a slope, and good visibility.

It’s sort of funny what constitutes an Intermediate run here vs. Pennsylvania. A lot of Crystal’s blues are steep enough to be double-black at Seven Springs (probably just black at Blue Knob).
And I sort of forgot how steep Crystal was just in general. Eastern skiing has already Stockholm Syndromed me I guess.

There’s also a gondola there now. It starts at the bottom (by the ticket booths, kind of below the lodge) and ends essentially next to the old #2 (Rainier Express to those living in the now). Here are three photos that include the gondola:

I’ve always been fond of those photos that make the gondola look like it’s flying at 30,000 feet.

The view looking up Middle Ferks.

The gondola seems kind of under-utilized from a skiing perspective. It makes for a very long run, though, going top-to-bottom. Plus it costs an extra $8 on the lift ticket. I dunno. Neither Stowe nor Whiteface charged extra for their gondola. It doesn’t seem like the resorts’ cost-benefit analyses should actually be different.

I remembered Crystal having a lot more signs telling you what run you were getting on. There aren’t very many of them, which is probably fine, just that there are a few places where a person might get himself in trouble through lack of knowledge.
It was fun re-visiting sites of childhood trauma (top of 2, middle of Deerfly).
The walk in from the parking lot is still punishing.
Not to say that Crystal is some sort of great vlue or anything, but it’s kind of surprising that this place costs so much less than Stowe ($74 w/ gondola vs. $92).
The pizza slice was pretty small for $4.50 and $6.50 for a cup of chili seemed exorbitant. The $3 fries were a relatively good value though.

That’s probably good enough.

bkd

Stuff Bing Thinks Chinese People Say

By bkdunn | 2 January 2013 - 612 | Other

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These are things that Facebook friends of mine wrote on Facebook, but in Chinese, after said things were ran through Bing’s Chinese-English translator.

A large Rose Tea less naughty horse eat hemp threatened to pad Pensol has big hands and all grabbed the hand of horses a little less chanting spanking ~~~ it ~~~ like nonsense? Master trick horse hemp be punished?

*Like* nonsense, but not actual nonsense.

Di lash flies flies, waiters in clap your hands ~~ di nice shout! (But the flies didn’t play good at all?)

To which someone else (on Facebook) responded (in Chinese, per Bing):

Did not hit where is the point? Take fly down enough to make him worship!

I pity the fly.

Successful recent special love, there are a lot of beep-business week and the dog!

An entire *week* of beep-business seems extravagant.

Aunt said, shaken for the success of the iron pestle may also wear embroidered needle.

Worn pointy side out I imagine.

Hopefully I didn’t over-promise on this.

bkd

BKDunn.com Stats for 2012

By bkdunn | 1 January 2013 - 637 | Self, Self Promotion

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I don’t get enough traffic to get very interesting metrics. Instead, I get these.

Most-Used Search Terms
These are the search terms that were most used to find my site (according to WordPress).

Rank	Term	Last	Note
1.	diy tv stand	1	Still a bad project.
2.	redwood tree	NR
3.	ford trimotor	3
3.	la jolla	NR
5.	trigger finger	5
6.	forbes field	2
7.	la jolla cove	NR
8.	cross country road trip	NR
9.	diy tv stand plans	8
10.	california redwood tree	NR
11.	diy kitchen table	4	Now holds up my compound miter saw.
12.	b52	14
13.	seven springs	NR	Overpriced, overcrowded. Assumed profitable.
14.	ford tri motor	15
15.	painted rooms	NR
16.	spruce goose	20
17.	trigger finger splint	NR
18.	marble canyon	NR
19.	spooky gulch	6
20.	pittsburgh international airport	NR

More turn-over than I would have guessed. I’m apparently big in La Jolla. And last year my posts about the giant sequoias were big, whereas this year things have tilted toward redwoods. It’s probably meaningful.

Here’s a list about pages viewed (don’t know how these worked out last year). I’m omitting the home page and pages that are virtual duplicates (e.g., the multiple pages about the DIY entertainment center that isn’t very good).

Rank	Term	Year	Note
1.	DIY TV Stand Project	2008	Other steps would have occupied spots 2, 3, & 7.
2.	US War Deaths per Day by Conflict (War, Battle) and How Iraq Compares	2008
3.	ford-trimotor-interior (photo)	2009
4.	Big Wave Day in La Jolla	2010
5.	More B-52 Photos, By Request (Plus a Couple Pics of AMARG)	2008
6.	slate-tile-floor-finished (Photo)	2010
7.	Cross-Country Road Trip v. 3.0: 48 States in 90 Days	2009	I miss the road trip.
8.	The Indistinct Redwood National Park and a Bunch of Indistinct State Parks	2009	I like the photos still.
9.	My First Red Egg and Ginger Party	2008	There has not yet been a second.
10.	Getting Closer: My Do-It-Yourself Kitchen Table Project So Far	2008
11.	Injury Update: Trigger Fingers	2010
12.	De-Stapling the Hardwoods	2010
13.	Gantt Chart for My Home Renovation Project in Pittsburgh	2010	Milestones were missed.
14.	Painting and Carpeting the Front Porch	2011
15.	Spooky Gulch, Peek-a-Boo Gulch, and Dry Fork Hike	2010
16.	How to Remove Shoe Moulding	2010
17.	Kitchen Floor: Slated	2010
18.	The Evergreen Air and Space Museum	2009
19.	forbes-field-outfield-wall (Photo)	2010
20.	Renting the Jeep Wrangler on Kauai	2007

So 2008 and 2010 were big years. Most popular posts written this year were about my fake plastic rocks and my Versa-lok retaining wall — they were tied for 66th. I didn’t post a lot this year.

bkd

Skiing White Pass

By bkdunn | 31 December 2012 - 1241 | Skiing

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Went to White Pass for the first time in my life on Thursday. Snow was PNW-great, visibility was interesting and variable, with a freezing fog making Couloir Basin kind of useless and about a 60-second sun break in the early afternoon. I didn’t take many photos, but among them were these…

Chair 4

Mach V to the right, Chair straight ahead.

Hourglass, I think.

Mach V was probably my favorite run of the day.
Locals were very nice, lifties were politely ambivalent.
Arrived a little after 9 and the ticket line was a half-hour long.
The day lodge at the base was way too small, but their chili was excellent.
The best visibility was on the two middle lifts, which is probably not the optimal place for the best visibility.
Fresh snow available on or near every run until some time in the afternoon.
There are some HARDCORE 6-year-olds that ski this place. Absolutely fearless.
Impressed by how many people apparently own cabins in Packwood.

Really enjoyable day, though. I was envious of the folks from Yakima for whom this is a convenient drive (I’m staying at my parents’ house in NE Tacoma, from where it took 2:40 to get there). Would like to get back some time when conditions were better on Couloir, which looked like it had a lot of potential.

bkd

Concrete Block Retaining Wall; August Involved Sweating

By bkdunn | 5 October 2012 - 607 | Home Renovation

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It’s done enough.

At Move-In vs. Current:

So the cap blocks aren’t actually done yet. I just set them on top. They need cut so they don’t have those gaps on the face. We’ll see when it happens. And sorry the angle’s off. Never took a before-photo of that corner — probably because the telephone pole is in the way.

Okay so then here are a bunch of “during” photos.

Pre-groundbreaking (post-jungle):

Trench, dug (although once blocks started going down, a lot more digging commenced):

A literal ton of bricks (one of four):

The base course:

Second course, with some back-fill:

82 lbs. (the black plastic pins line the courses up at a 3/4-inch offset — they don’t really hold anything together):

Current view, other corner:

So there’s that.

Some notes I guess:

August was a humid month and warm.
Props out to Pratyush for helping me dig that one day.
I’ll put some sort of plants in that flat area behind the top of the wall. In the spring.
I underestimated how much backfill gravel I would need by about 75%. It’s not hard to acquire, but it’s also not all that easy to transport and then that one day when I asked the Home Depot cashier if she could get someone to help me haul 20 bags of it to my truck and load it and she called up some deaf senior citizen to do it and then I was like, trying to get him to stop, because, you know, wasn’t the strongest guy or the fastest moving and here, let me do that for you for me…
I guess I’ll put rocks between the wall and the street. Gravel, the sort of roundish kind.
The wall uses Versa-Lok blocks; the color/style/pattern is called “Saratoga”.
Trying to get the first course level was also the worst thing ever.
Once the first course is done, it goes relatively fast, except that I ended up having to do more digging and leveling to extend the wall at the ends, so, you know. After the base course, probably 3-4 hours a course after that.
Overall, the project was simple, just a lot of work. OTOH, I think I lost weight in August. I should market this as a P90x competitor. Should have taken before-after photos of myself…
Progress on the project was often slowed by an older person walking or driving by and wanting to talk for an hour about my wall, their walls, other people’s walls that may have existed, shovels, the weight of concrete, etc. The last 58 minutes of these conversations were generally pretty dull.
My neighbor across the street helpfully donated four buckets of concrete from a concrete tub he’d taken out of his basement. Apparently he thought it would be easier for me to spend an hour crushing concrete against, I don’t know what, my driveway? in order to use it as backfill than it would be for me to go to the Home Depot and buy another bag of drainage rock for $3.28. I need to always only ever tell people “no”.
My neighbor across the other street has asked twice now whether I’m going to run the wall up the remaining 40 feet of the side yard, because, you know, that would look good.
Older blue-collar white people are well-meaning, but that doesn’t always carry a lot of weight — you know, the road to hell and so forth.

In conclusion, the retaining wall represents another project at the house that’s 95% done, but not 100. I remain consistent.

bkd

bkdunn.com

Friday — Diamond Peak

Thursday — Squaw Valley

Wednesday — Stormy, with a Chance of National Automobile Museum

Tuesday – Mt. Rose

Monday – Heavenly

Crystal Mountain Resort (Report from Yesterday)

Stuff Bing Thinks Chinese People Say

BKDunn.com Stats for 2012

Skiing White Pass

Concrete Block Retaining Wall; August Involved Sweating

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