Monthly Archives: December 2012

2012 Reading List

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At the beginning of the year I set myself the goal of reading 36 books. Not much of a goal, really, as that’s the number of books I’ve read on average since I started keeping a list in 2008. So in effect my goal was to read an average number of books. I hit the goal back on the 21st. I started reading The Coldest Winter, not expecting to finish it until well into next month. But then Genae brought a brand new book home from the library for me, with a seven day limit on it, so I managed to sneak another one in to exceed the goal by one.

I’ve been thinking that my goal for 2013 should be 32 because I have several very long books coming to the top of the “to-read” list. The third Game of Thrones book weighs in at nearly a thousand pages, Massey’s Peter the Great is something like seven hundred, and Manchester’s MacArthur bio is on the order of eight. Each of those should count for two! But I’ll keep it at 36 and aim high.

Here’s the 2012 list.

Date Title Author Pages Subject
01/09/12 The Assault on Reason Gore, Al 308 Politics
01/22/12 A Clash of Kings Martin, George R. R. 760 Fantasy
02/08/12 Millard Fillmore Rayback, Robert J. 470 Bio – Pres.
02/12/12 Red Orchestra Nelson, Anne 388 WW II
03/04/12 Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy Volkogonov, Dmitri 642 Biography
03/06/12 The Fear Index Harris, Robert 286 Fiction
03/18/12 War in the Sun Hodson, James 449 WW II
03/27/12 Hitler’s Peace Kerr, Philip 448 Fiction
04/21/12 Franklin Pierce Nichols, Roy Franklin 625 Bio – Pres.
04/25/12 Counterfeiter Nachtstern, Moritz 288 Holocaust
05/11/12 Europe and the French Imperium Bruun, Geoffrey 280 History
05/21/12 Fatal Crossroads Parker, Danny S. 390 WW II
05/23/12 The Sharp End Ellis, John 372 WW II
06/05/12 Catherine the Great Massie, Robert K. 625 Biography
06/20/12 1943: The Victory that Never Was Grigg, John 248 WW II
07/17/12 Caesar’s Women McCullough, Colleen 696 Fiction
07/22/12 American Miracle Sill, Van Rensselaer 301 WW II
08/14/12 President James Buchanan Klein, Philip Shriver 506 Bio – Pres.
09/01/12 Existence Brin, David 556 Sci Fi
09/10/12 Penalty Strike Pyl’Cyn, Alexander 204 WW II
09/16/12 The Great Gates Sprague, Marshall 468 History
09/20/12 Fate of Worlds Niven, Larry; Lerner, Edward M. 317 Sci Fi
09/27/12 From Nazi Sources Sternberg, Fritz 208 WW II
10/16/12 The Transparent Society Brin, David 384 Politics
10/18/12 Escape from the Deep Kershaw, Alex 270 WW II
11/02/12 With Malice Toward None: The Life of Abraham Lincoln Oates, Stephen 492 Bio – Pres.
11/05/12 Lionel Asbo: State of England Amis, Martin 255 Fiction
11/08/12 The Flame Keepers Handy, Ned 325 WW II
11/10/12 Team Lotus: My View from the Pit Wall Warr, Peter 240 Motor Sports
11/16/12 A Dead Hand Theroux, Paul 279 Fiction
11/25/12 The American Axis Wallace, Max 465 History
12/06/12 Caesar McCullough, Colleen 664 Fiction
12/08/12 Rome Was My Beat Packard, Reynolds 338 Memoir
12/11/12 Stormtrooper on the Eastern Front Blosfelds, Mintauts 207 WW II
12/15/12 Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million Amis, Martin 320 History
12/21/12 The Battle of Midway Symonds, Craig L. 452 WW II
12/30/12 Hell in the Pacific McEnery, Jim 305 WW II

LoCo Christmas Party

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Lotus Colorado held their 2012 Christmas party Saturday night at Club Auto. It was a pot luck, lots of good food, lots of good conversation, not much more to add about that.

Club Auto bills itself as the premier collector car storage and clubhouse facility in the Denver metro area. They have what I’d have to call a showroom area and a warehouse area. Also in the facility is a high-end car detailing business and perhaps an exotic car rental business.

The more notable cars are in the showroom area. On one end are the older cars – mid-20’s Buicks and Rolls Royces. At the other end are a few Indy cars. In between is a variety of cars – Lotuses, Porsches, a Lamborghini, and so on. The most notable here is a Porsche Spyder 550 I’m told has a serial number only one off from James Dean’s car. Moving from the showroom to the warehouse you find a couple Ferraris and some classic Fiats and Fords and a gull-wing Mercedes.

Guests to the party who chose to drive their Lotuses were invited to park in the warehouse. There were only two of us brave enough to do so. The weather forecast was for snow. None had fallen yet, and the weather guy I watched said none was likely to fall before the wee hours of the morning. He was wrong – I drove the Elise home in the snow. It wasn’t cold enough yet to stack up on the streets, though, so it wasn’t a problem.

The warehouse was full of an odd assortment of vehicles. There was a nice early 70’s Lincoln Continental with a panorama roof, a couple of older Porsche 911’s, a Mazda RX-7 with very wide fenders and a huge wing on the back. There were also a surprisingly large number of trucks – Ford F-350’s and such. Not what I think of when I think “collector car storage”.

Sorry for the crappy photos, these were taken with the cell phone.

Ouzel Lake

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Mike and I talked about hiking to Pipit Lake. It hadn’t really occurred to me to hike there in winter; I guess I’m still stuck in the “hiking is for summer” mindset. But after trading a few emails on Tuesday, we decided to go the next day. It would be the best weather for at least the next week.

I picked Mike up at the park and ride and we headed to the park. His bus was a few minutes late, and we were in the teeth of rush hour traffic into Boulder so we didn’t exactly get an early start. The Wild Basin entrance station is closed for winter – that is, there is no ranger there. That’s pretty much standard year around, if you arrive early enough. Up the road we go, only to find the gate closed before the road crosses the river. This was new to me. I really had no idea when that gate was ever closed. I thought perhaps it got closed when snow piled up on the road.

We geared up and started up the road. The thermometer read 44 degrees when we left the car at 9:00. On the drive up, the sky was mostly cloudy, with some rather ominous looking dark clouds to the west. At the trailhead, though, it was clear blue skies above us and to the west, with fairly strong winds. It took us twenty minutes to reach the trailhead; we figured we’d hiked a mile already.

We made good time on the first part of the trail to the campsite shortcut. We’d passed a few trees that had fallen across the trail, something I’d not seen here before. Approaching Calypso Cascades, there was a spot where water flows over the trail. There are several logs serving as steps; water had filled the spaces between the logs and frozen making terraces of ice – miniature skating rinks.

From Calypso Cascades to a bit past Ouzel Falls the trail is on a north facing slope and is now covered with ice or packed snow. There’s not much snow on the ground, just on the trail. I don’t know how this season compares to normal, I suspect it might be drier than usual, but it’s still early.

We took a short break at Ouzel Falls. A great mass of ice has built up at the base and it looks like the ice at the left side forms each night and melts during the day. A large chunk fell off while we were sitting there.

Continuing, we paused for a minute or two at the next trail junction, where the Thunder Lake trail goes right and Ouzel/Bluebird goes left. We would soon be atop the ridge which had burned back in 1978 and I anticipated it would be quite windy. Time to put on a hat to keep the ears warm. Gaining the top of the ridge, the wind was breathtaking at times. The occasional gust stopped me in my tracks. There is no shelter on this section of trail, which is not so good when it’s windy or in the summer sun. But it’s always good for the open views of the surrounding mountains.

At the lake I set up the GoPro for a time lapse. I didn’t bother with the SLR as there were very few clouds, just a few small ones above the nearby peaks that dissipated before they moved too far. Also, I found that the original battery for the SLR had died after taking only a handful of shots during the hike to the lake.

We looked for a place out of the wind to have our picnic lunches and ended up at the campsite. No view, but mostly out of the wind. After a short while, I went back to the shore of the lake and retrieved the camera. I had placed it on a rock only an inch or so above the ice. It was the best I could do, but not good enough. The wind had blown it over. I managed to salvage the footage. I didn’t do any fancy cropping to simulate pans or zooms; all the camera motion is caused by the wind. The first segment is at half normal speed (two seconds per minute) while the second segment is normal (one second per minute).

On the way out, we opted to continue a short way up the Thunder Lake trail to the upper junction of the campsite shortcut. It’s always nice to see a little different terrain. I think the shortcut saves six or seven tenths of a mile when hiking to Thunder Lake, but we had to go four tenths to get to it. So the hike out was a few tenths shorter than the hike in. We were also on the sunny side of the valley so we took another short break there.

By now I was figuring we were the only visitors to Wild Basin. I was surprised when we encountered three groups of hikers heading toward Calypso Cascades (two couples and a solo hiker). In retrospect, we probably would have met somebody at Ouzel Falls. We were the first ones to the end of the road in the morning, but when we returned to the car there were about a dozen other cars there. Not alone in Wild Basin, but only meeting five other people on that lower section of main trail is about as much solitude as can be expected.

Timetable

Car 09:00 AM
Trailhead 09:20 AM
Campsite shortcut (bottom) 09:50 AM
Calypso Cascades 10:00 AM
Ouzel Falls 10:30 AM
Thunder/Ouzel jct 10:50 AM
Ouzel/Bluebird jct 11:35 AM
Arrive Ouzel Lake 11:50 AM
Depart Ouzel Lake 12:35 PM
Ouzel/Bluebird jct 12:50 PM
Thunder/Ouzel jct 01:25 PM
Campsite shortcut (top) 01:35 PM
Campsite shortcut (bottom) 02:10 PM
Trailhead 02:40 PM
Car 03:00 PM

Button Rock Mtn

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Ed and I planned on hiking to one of the several glacial knobs in the vicinity of Mills Lake or The Loch. I was going to leave the house by 7:15 or so to meet him at his place. Unfortunately, the Fern Lake fire had been fanned during the night by winds gusting to 75 mph, causing the park to be closed. Highway 66 was closed and everybody west of Mary’s Lake road had been evacuated. The fire burned three miles to the east in a half hour during the early morning hours. The Fern Lake fire has now been burning nearly two months and has consumed over 3500 acres, including Moraine Park.

So Ed suggested a Plan B – we hike to the top of Button Rock Mountain. The trailhead is a short distance up the road to Big Elk Meadows, just past Pinewood Springs on US 36. The hike starts up a rough four-wheel-drive track before heading cross country on a trail Ed has been working on for a couple of decades.

In the lower elevations, forest service crews are clearing the dead trees. First they cut up the dead wood and stack it in cones, very similar to what the park service has done along the roads in RMNP. In the park they’ve been burning the cones when conditions are favorable. Here, though, they use a large chipper. We couldn’t see the chipper in action, as it was on the opposite slope of a ridge we hiked away from, but we heard it operating from the time we put boots on the trail until about lunch time. As we gained elevation we could see the extent of the area already cleared. This is a substantial amount of work.

I wonder how much of a difference it makes clearing the dead trees this way. The wood is still there, just in a different form – chips spread out over the forest floor instead of being in log form. Not as concentrated, closer to the ground, I guess it won’t burn as easily or as hotly.

I’d never have found Ed’s trail without his guidance. The lower part of his trail was covered by chips laid down in the last couple of weeks. Before long, we got to an indistinct trail. As we hiked, he pointed out rocks he’d moved, or trees he’d cut or rearranged. He doesn’t want the trail to be too obvious, but easy enough to follow once you’re on it. When we neared the summit, the trail again became to vague for me to follow without his help. Near the top was a picnic table made from dead trees – trunks sawn in half with a chainsaw.

The view from the top was quite nice – Longs Peak and Twin Sisters pretty much due west; the peaks of Wild Basin to their left, and the summits of the Mummy Range not totally obscured by intervening terrain. All the summits were snow capped and shrouded by clouds. Smoke from the Fern Lake fire was faint but visible, smearing the sky along the horizon.

The peaks to the west are too far away for any interesting time lapse footage from the GoPro. And I’m disappointed once again with battery performance from the SLR. I charged both batteries a couple of days ago. The Canon battery was pretty much dead from the start and the after market battery only lasted for 100 shots.

The hike was a nice change of pace, but all in all I prefer hiking in the park. As I said, we could hear the chipper running continuously for about three hours. Our hike was also punctuated by more or less constant gunfire. And along the four-wheel-drive road there was quite a bit of trash ranging from water bottles and broken plastic to spent shotgun shells and even discarded clothing.