Tuesday, May 17, 2005

Sailing on the Bay

While Goeric and myself were playing in the snow, Maureen was living the good life, sailing on the San Francisco Bay. Pictures of this trip can be found here.

Sunday, May 15, 2005

Mount Shasta Skiing



Goeric and I decided to do some serious backcountry skiing this weekend. We headed out to the beautiful town of Mount Shasta on Thursday evening, and spent the night at the very authentic Mountain Air Lodge.
After talking to the local Ranger Bobs in the Morning, we drove to the "trailhead" (actually, the road was cut off by excess snow, and we had to hike 2.5 extra miles to get to the official start of the trail). We were the only ones leaving that day, as the weather was somewhat unstable, and avalanche danger was considerable. The climb on Friday was uneventful. We skinned a gentle slope all the way up to base camp and pitched our tent on a small plateau at 8,300ft. I was feeling rather miserable with a light case of altitude sickness kicking in, so I rested in the tent while Goeric went on to conquer a slope next to our camp. The next morning, we left for the summit at sunrise. We were making good progress on hard snow, keeping a reasonable pace of 1,200ft/hr. At 11,000ft the snow became very unpredictable, varying from too icy for the skins to grip, to too soft for crampons. I switched back and forth quite a bit, and I really got to love the fast adjustment of the Black Diamond sabretooth crampons that I had borrowed from Roetter Outdoors Works, Inc. Everything was going smooth, the mountain was beautiful and the cloud ceiling well below us offered amazing views. Then (at around 12,000ft) I suddenly started choking and our climbing speed dramatically decreased. At this point, I had to face the fact that I would not make it to the summit safely, so I decided to dig myself in at the top of the most skiable terrain, at 12,600 ft. Goeric went somewhat further (we were on a rocky ridge at that point, so there was no avalanche danger). For the full story on this beautiful trip, Goeric put together a movie available here. You can also find pix here.
The mountain humbled us this time but as true as our Governor is a 6-time Mr. Olympia: we'll be back!

Sunday, May 08, 2005

Tahoe - The Last Stand

This was another Tahoe weekend. On Saturday morning, we met up with our very own localite Mr. Sidney, and headed for the sunny slopes of Squaw Valley. May skiing in California is a interesting experience. The snow was surprisingly good in the morning and some of us applied what they learned in flight school (FlyingRoetter), others just chilled in the gigantic base camp hot tub after a good day of skiing: pix here . The day ended with a nice BBQ on the deck, and we headed back on Sunday for the bay area.

Sunday, May 01, 2005

Hawaii - The Big Island



We spend the last week in Hawaii with our mum's. Travelling with your mother in law, you'd say? Well, we have great mum's and besides the trip was meant as a way to thank them for all the work they did to organize our Belgian wedding. Among the highlights of the trip were:
- swimming with sea turtles, pygmea dolphins, and other colorful critters
- poking flowing lava with a stick
- surfing the killer waves of Kona (or at least their little sisters)
- drinking pina colada out of a coconut

If a picture is worth a thousand words, here are
149,000 words worth of blog, as well as a couple movies.