Aircraft Update

A quick checkup on the Sportsman build.

Over the summer the Flying Fish & Friends loaded the plane onto a flatbed and moved it from Arlington Airport to it's new home and an aircraft construction shop was constructed around it. I went to check in on it last weekend. In order to get to the aircraft construction shop, one must first traverse a kite construction shop...


Kites all around in various states of development and all the way in the back a little door in a steel wall...






"Whatcha doin today luv?"
"Oh, you know, building an airplane."

Homework update

This remodelling thing is a total pain in the neck. I do construction for a living and I swear, remodels are the worst. Give me factory, or a warehouse any day - don't care as long as the job starts with a bulldozer, a trackhoe and a hole in the ground. Add a little concrete and I'm a happy girl.

But no, we're living in a remodel. ugh.
I've been chipping away at the project and it's finally starting to feel like it might actually be getting done. Got the wood floor installed...



and I installed the cabinets and moved the plumbing over so the sink's in the right spot...





Also got the wiring re-done and new lights installed. It's nice having some lights and being able to see at night. And dimmers... I have a new appreciation for the magic of dimmers. Oh, and the venting's finally done so we have HEAT again - Finally!!! we can turn on the fireplace and get a little heat going in here. The roof's patched and now we're sheetrocking... amazing how a ceiling helps keep the heat in.




The last hurdle to jump is taking out the windows in the back wall and installing a picture window and a door to the deck we'll someday put out there.

You know, writing it all down in one place it actually does start to look like we're getting somewhere on this thing. Feels kinda good.

Road trip part 9 - ancient bristlecone pines

Our last stop on the road trip was up high in the Nevada range where the bristlecone pines live. It's up around 9,000 feet, and the land is inhospitable. There isn't really any soil there, just rock. And gravel. And given the elevation, there's not much air there either. Think Mordor...



There are a bunch of equally craggy trees. Some of them have given up the ghost...



But some of them are still hanging on. This one is over 3,000 years old...





I could only imagine that these trees have a completely different concept of time than anything else on earth. They don't grow very fast. They accumulate the thinnest of layers every year and they are tough as the stone around them. When they die, they don't rot. They Erode.



This beauty has been growing for over 2,500 years...

This is, at long last, the final post in the road trip series.
Hope you enjoyed the ride!

Road trip part 8 - Nevada's great basin

We left Utah and headed back to Boise via 2-lane roads in Nevada. Whenever possible I like to drive along the two-lane roads in the west. Sure, they're not as glamorous as the interstates but they're often just as fast with a lot less traffic and plenty more to see. --c'mon, when was the last time you stopped for gas on the interstate and got a soda from a fountain beneath a several stuffed elk heads and a mountain lion? --

So we headed north through basin & range country and took in the sights and smells that John McPhee describes so well. It was a weathery day - cumulonimbus blew up and exploded all around us all afternoon...


Amazing mumatus formations...







Lightning strikes had the local VFD's out and about in their off-road trucks just in case. Because sometimes the rain doesn't even make it to the ground...



As usual, the storms tapered off towards the end of the day, the sun came out below the clouds and painted Nevada in silver and gold...

this is the seventh post in a series on the canyon country road trip
click the title of this post for a link to more road trip photos

Road trip part 7 - Zion mon

Headed west from the Escalante and spent the night in Coral Dunes before heading to Zion for a couple days. We went in through the east entrance past some incredible slickrock formations. They made me wish I'd brought my gear. It was all I could do to keep from scrambling up, and up, and up...




But if I had, I'd have missed the greatest climbing draw of Zion canyon - the BIG walls...



Unbelievably sheer cliffs, towering hundreds of feet straight up. Wall Street's got nothing on Zion...


In keeping with the general theme of the trip, we headed first for the narrows...



After about a mile upstream, it got pretty narrow. That's me back in there...





We stopped to explore a side canyon...

And the weather started to turn on us so we headed back out.

The next day we decided to take a walk up to the rim and check out the view. We passed a small slot canyon on the way - Echo Canyon - and I may add photos from there to this post another day (or you can click the title of this post for a link to more photos). The hike took us up a thousand feet or so, and that necessitated a rest on the way...


And a lunch break at the top...


It was an awfully nice view...
The river winds through the middle of the canyon and the main park road runs alongside it. The best part about the view from up here was realizing that there were no cars on the road, no car noise, and no car exhaust. The park has restricted all vehicle access from the park for most of the year. All visitors have to take a shuttle bus. I'll be honest - I was a little dubious at first, but it didn't take long for me to be convinced that it was a great way to go. Places like this should have as few cars as possible. Well, really, they should have as few people as possible. But it's a national park so people are going to be drawn in to see what it's all about. The least we can do is leave our cars at the gate.

this is the seventh post in a series on the canyon country road trip
click the title of this post for a link to more road trip photos including Coral Dunes and Echo Canyon

Road trip part 6 - phipps arch

On our last day in the Escalante, we headed up a side canyon to find phipps arch. The route took us into a box canyon and then up a series of slickrock bulges to an arch tucked into the rim of the canyon...








The nice thing about slickrock is that it's really pretty sticky...



The skinny white speck above the bush is PHred...



And this is the view from where he's standing...



That little black speck under the arch, right on the horizon? Yep, that's PHred again...


Late afternoon cumulous started to let loose (as usual) so we decided to get off the rock and head west...



A view down the drainage we descended...


That's me...

this is the sixth post in a series on the canyon country road trip.
Up next - Zion, Nevada basin & Range country, and ancient bristlecone pines.

Road trip part 5 - hoodoos

Stopped at Devil's Garden for a bit of dinner at the end of the day and spent a little time among the hoodoos as the sun set and the light turned magical...



Storm cells petered out at the end of the day and we found a nice spot on the canyon rim to sleep under the stars.

this is the fifth post in a series on the canyon country road trip

Road trip part 4 - spooky gulch

After clambering out of peekaboo gulch we headed across the rim to this drainage which leads to spooky gulch. And now a word about flash floods and slot canyons. See this drainage...




It drains to here. So, say that little storm cell was breaking over this part of the canyon. All the rain hitting the slick rock would roll on down to the drainage and funnel into here...

and then it gets squeezed into here...



...and then into here. An inch of water a hundred feet wide forced into a slot that's 2 feet wide gets pretty deep and pretty fast in a big hurry. It carries a lot of force. Which is why it's a really good idea to keep an eye on the weather when hiking canyon country.

So, mom, forget you saw that picture of the storm cell in the last post.


After this point it becomes very narrow - a tight squeeze really - and since the slot is about three times as deep as peek-a-boo it gets dark too. You'll have to take my word for it so here's the scoop on Spooky gulch: gets so narrow you have to take off your pack, goes up and down around boulder and logjams from flash floods - one of which contained a small rattler (yikes). At one point it got downright obnoxious (and this is the only climb I've ever done to merit such a tag) had to take off my day pack, wriggle it around a bend and drop it 6 feet to the floor before then having to do the same myself. It finally widened out again towards the end and spilled into the same drainage a few hundred feet downstream from where we'd clambered up into peekaboo.


What you can't see in this photo is the scrape on PHred's adam's apple which he got slithering through one of the narrowest spots in the gulch. Crazy!

this is the fourth post in a series on the canyon country road trip