Somusing

Today the Teton High School cross country team hiked about 5 miles from the Teton Canyon Alaska Basin trailhead on the Roaring Fork trail (to the south of Table Mountain) up to Hurricane Pass, where we had a beautiful view of south fork of Cascade Canyon and the Tetons. From there we hiked about 12 miles down Cascade Canyon, northward along the west edge of Jenny Lake, and finished at String Lake where we took a quick dip before getting a ride back to Driggs, Idaho in a school bus. The total hike distance was about 17 miles, with 4060 feet of elevation gain along the way. Our lowest elevation was 6770 feet, and the highest was 10,330 feet. It took about 9.5 hours. We took some nice breaks to let people in the back catch up. About 45 student-athletes were there, split into 3 groups each starting a half-hour apart. (The wilderness area rules require groups of no more than 20 people each.) We were led by coach Neil Gleichman, with assistant coach Griffith, and several of us parents he...

Here are three great songs that all seem to have something to do with sickness. That's weird, right? "Cough Cough" by Everything Everything (which is "about having no money, and wanting more money, and wanting nothing to do with money at all," according to the lead singer, so maybe only metaphorically about sickness?) "Cough Coughing" by Menomena "Germs" by Yeasayer

I came across the term aqua regia while reading, and looked it up. Wikipedia says the term is from Latin for “royal water”, and is also known as aqua regis (Latin, “king’s water”). In modern chemistry it’s known as nitro-hydrochloric acid. It got its name “because it can dissolve the noble metals gold and platinum.” A great story is related there: When Germany invaded Denmark in World War II, Hungarian chemist George de Hevesy dissolved the gold Nobel Prizes of German physicists Max von Laue (1914) and James Franck (1925) in aqua regia to prevent the Nazis from confiscating them. The German government had prohibited Germans from accepting or keeping any Nobel Prize after jailed peace activist Carl von Ossietzky had received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1935. De Hevesy placed the resulting solution on a shelf in his laboratory at the Niels Bohr Institute. It was subsequently ignored by the Nazis who thought the jar—one of perhaps hundreds on the shelving—contained common chemicals. Af...

A few weeks ago we took a family vacation up to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. We drove through Missoula, Montana; Coeur d'Alene, Idaho; Spokane, Washington; and Seattle, Washington. It was a long drive, but beautiful, and we got to meet up with some people along the way. In Vancouver we stayed at the Sylvia Hotel , a hundred-year-old hotel right by the beach on English Bay. Here was one of the views from our room on the top (8th) floor: And here is the nearby beach we went back to many times: We were in Vancouver at this time primarily to meet Erin's brother Colter Jacobsen for his art show at The Apartment art gallery. See Colter above wearing their Grandpa's work shirt with his name Virg on it! Here are photos of some of the pieces from the art show: The area of town around the art gallery is where the heavy drug users congregate, and with the kids we saw junkies and near-zombies roaming in their altered states, along with the beautiful gardens and...

We missed out on the TV series Northern Exposure when it first aired, but Erin got into reruns of it in the late 1990s, and we’ve watched most of it on DVD since. Phin has lately started watching it from the beginning too, during his rare allotted blocks of TV time. During our recent drive up to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada , we took the opportunity to make a little side trip to Roslyn, Washington, which was the actual location of the fictional Cicely, Alaska portrayed in Northern Exposure. It’s a very small town, and we were there late enough in the day that most businesses were closed, but it was fun to see it in person at last.