Back to a little bit of trad blogging. Links and comments from the greater web.
Experiments in carbon airbag cylinder shipping, continuation. This attempt at simply mailing from Austria was a fail. One wonders if a more ‘informal’ postal system (Italy?) would be a better bet.
Near Wildsnow home base, Aspen is hosting the alpine ski racing Worldcup finals. That’s the last races of the season, where they award the overall titles and some of the closer rivalries are decided. Racers such as Marcel Hirscher and Mikaela Shiffrin have it pretty much sewed up, but others will be battling.
Shiffrin is always worth watching. Her amazing ability to win slalom races by full seconds is astounding in these days of split second contests. I’d imagine she probably drives other racers (and coaches) crazy when they try and figure out how she does it. Denver post online is cluttered and difficult to read, but let all their junk load and this article is informative. Clearly, the coolest thing about Aspen’s races is you can spectate a major part of World Cup in a much smaller crowd than the riotous mobs of Europe.
Ever travel coast-to-coast and get your sleep schedule a bit messed up? Or fly across the globe and truly suffer from jetlag? In my case, I do fine going from Colorado to European Union. On the other hand, I have a lot of trouble adjusting when I return, flying east to west. I’ve never been entirely sure why that is, latest theory is I don’t have a 9-2-5 job that forces me back into a normal sleep pattern.
While the west to east trips enable “fooling” my internal clock by napping on the jet for eight hours or so, with eye covers, then having a coffee during the traditional “shutters up, let there be LIGHT” routine before landing, and deplaning to morning in Munich. My mystification about jetlag is resolved, or at least I hope so. This article in the NYT did the trick.
Um, Vogue magazine finally found a hut in the United States that up to their standards. The author worries she might have been converted into a “hut snob.” She got published in Vogue. I guess she put two and two together. More here.
At the moment, I’m sitting in Santa Barbara, California, enjoying warm seaside weather and lush greenery from recent rains (family visit). The breaking of California’s desperate drought got me thinking about global warming and the future of our mountain snowpack. As per my usual, upon surveying the amount of money and talk devoted to GW I’m not impressed by how far the needle has moved, if at all.
In GW news: EPA budget cuts. Interestingly, in this article it’s explained how a significant amount of EPA work involves _adapting_ to climate change consequences. Likewise, EPA’s own website specifically addresses adaptation. Funding higher elevation skiing is not mentioned.
Continuing my thoughts on GW, I found it interesting that the common journalistic narrative in articles such as this seems to assume EPA is somehow doing huge work in global warming reversal. Get that? Adaptation vs human engineered climate change reversal. We clearly need both, but in what balance? I’m seeing intellectual stirrings alluding to the fact it might be immoral to spend excessive money on inconsequential attempts to change the climate (look ma, see my solar panels?), while we could devote greater parts (or even all) of that to helping people who will be horribly affected by little events such as the ocean rising two meters — or the snow line rising thousands of meters. Look ma, see my high elevation ski lift?
WildSnow.com publisher emeritus and founder Lou (Louis Dawson) has a 50+ years career in climbing, backcountry skiing and ski mountaineering. He was the first person in history to ski down all 54 Colorado 14,000-foot peaks, has authored numerous books about about backcountry skiing, and has skied from the summit of Denali in Alaska, North America’s highest mountain.