Yesterday the Mets beat the cardinals (something that should have happened about 5 months ago) to open the baseball season. Today the rest of the league begins games. The day has finally arrived! GO RED SOX!

I have been busy lately and not very inspired which is why I haven’t written much. Here are a few things:

• At the Raleigh REI garage sale I got a hammock with a mosquitoe net that packs up super small and will be really nice in the summer for backpacking on sunny weekends since I’ll be able to leave my tent and sleeping pad and still wont have to worry about bugs. I also got Ian a LED head lamp (absolute backpacking necessity) and got dad a new backpack. All great deals.
• The fantasy draft for my fantasy baseball league is tonight and I am too excited. Its the first year of a three year keeper league so that adds a new element, and things should be really interesting. I hate the pressure of not knowing what kind of team you are going to end up with but I love the excitement of the draft. Once its over then it’ll be a relief to at least know who I have to work with this year.
• We are planning a backpacking trip for next weekend that should be a lot of fun. James Ian and I are going with mom out to shining rock. We are all geared up and ready to go and just need some nice weather. Shining rock is so beautiful year round and should be even more so in the spring.
• I am very excited for baseball season to start next week. The Red Sox are looking good, with their one major question mark answered, moving Papelbon into bullpen as the closer. The rest of the guys in the pen should be great, and Taverez should be ok holding down the fifth spot in the rotation until Lester is ready to start. One guy that has been great this spring is Devern Hansack. Some are saying he could take over the role of closer by the end of the season and allow papelbon to move back into the rotation. Lester could then fill in for any injuries to starters down the road. You can never have too much pitching.
• NC State baseball is doing well this year too. They have won their last two ACC series, both two games to one, over VT and WF, after losing their opening ACC series one games to two. I would like it better if they were sweeping series, but the ACC is very good and winning series is doing very well. The greatest thing about the win over WF is the emergence of Jimmy Gillheeney as a dominant starter. He is only a freshman, but against Wake forest he pitched 5 and 2/3 three hit innings with nine Ks. Pretty awesome, and its nice to know he’ll be sticking around for the next two years. NC States series this weekend is at Boston College.

Here is an awesome blog about the launch of a rocket from California, to 200 miles above the earth, by a private corporation called spaceX. Its pretty awesome and I see it as the future of space exploration. So far most of space exploration has been done by governments, and governments aren’t known for being the most efficient and cost effective about projects like this and aren’t known for being great at driving down costs. However competing businesses will make space exploration more and more attainable and less and less expensive.

On the video in the article you can see live footage of the entire launch and footage from a cameras on the rocket looking back down towards earth. Its absolutely amazing to watch it get 200 miles into space in just over 5 minutes and see the curve of the earth come into view in the upper left hand corner of the camera. The video ends when they lost contact with it and they believe that the second stage malfunctioned and the rocket lost its stability. However it is considered a great success because its first stage separated successfully, which is what most people were worried would fail. There is a second video on the blog from their first attempt, when the rocket flew for a few seconds and then crashed into the ocean.

Yeah I know its been a while since I have written anything here, but things have been busy and I haven’t been so inspired. I was also gone backpacking for a long weekend, and you can see the pics from that here. Kevin and I planned to hike Blackstock Knob out by Mount Mitchell, but we learned a few lessons and ended up doing Linville instead.

The first lesson was always call ahead, even if you dont need a permit or anything. We got to the Mitchell area and everything was closed due to fire danger (high wind and dry weather.) Our second lesson was to be flexible. After scratching our heads for a few minutes we decided to go to Linville Gorge, which is only 30 minutes from Mitchell. Part of the second lesson was bring all your maps just in case. We didn’t have a map for Linville, and that limited what we could do there. However the layout of the park is pretty simple, with the LG trail running the length of the river and all of the other trails dropping down into the gorge to the LG trail.

We decided to hike down into the northern part of the gorge and then hike along the river till we were beneath table rock, about in the middle of the gorge. I have hiked from the middle south, but never in the northern part, and there were a lot of really neat spots. One was a place where the river does an S all the way back on itself and drops several hundred feet rather abruptly. Another is the Babel Tower area where I am really looking forward to bringing a group to camp sometime this summer.

So we slept by the cars Thursday night. Friday morning we hiked down to the bridge at the spence ridge trail, and we spent the afternoon lazing by the river, sleeping, setting up camp, doing lunch and dinner, smoking our pipes, etc. It was very relaxing and totally enjoyable. Saturday morning we took the Conley Cove trail up to the road and hiked the road back to the cars. We were on our way home by noon Saturday.

So a couple other things that we learned. The saw that I brought was extremely useful for cutting brush into firewood, which enables us to keep warm when the temperatures got down to the 30s. Also we decided to make sure we have marshmallows next time and double check which end of the can Kevin tries to open with his pocketknife.

Also don’t count on being able to cover that much trail at Linville Gorge, because the going, even along the LG trail, is very slow. We also have decided that of the Cabin Trail, Pinch In trail, and Conley Cove trail, the Conley Cove trail is by far the easiest way out on the west side of the gorge.

Overall the trip was a great success given all the adapting that needed to happen and a great first experience with backpacking in early March. Looking forward to more trips like it this summer.

Jillian and I have been married for almost two years now, and we have had lots of adventures over the past two years, and from almost all of those adventures we have lots of pictures. The other day we sat down at the computer and looked through all the pictures from the past two years and picked out 13 really good ones from all of the various adventures, and we are having them printed for us to put on our walls. I was surprised at what a good price you can order prints for. We uploaded our pictures to Walmart.com and ordered ten 5×7s and three 8×10s for around $12 total. We are buying frames and we plan to have a wall containing all of our adventure pictures. I’ll post the ones that we chose on the blog here this evening or sometime.

I have always thought that the downside of digital photos is that its a little bit of a hassle to get hard copies of the pictures. However I am now convinced that digital is all good. If all of our pictures had been taken on old style cameras then we would have spent hundreds of dollars by now having the film developed, and we would have had to pay at least as much to have them blown up to 5×7s and 8×10s. Blow ups of digital pictures come out better because the resolution is so high when the picture is taken, and you don’t have to worry about the picture being damaged.

My dream is that down the road we have hundreds of pictures on the walls of our house from all over the world. Every picture can be a reminder of a trip or experience that we had, and can tell a story. We have been so blessed to have so many such experiences in the two short years that we have been married, and we hope for many more like them.

On the side, we have at least four panoramic photos that we would like developed. I have been told that pixeloutpost is the only way to go to print pans, but it is still pretty expensive there. If anyone has any advice for printing panoramic photos it would be greatly appreciated.

I put together the video I took of Brad at Snowshoe Monday.  If you enjoy things like awful wipe-outs then you will like this video.  Brad performs one of the most beautiful landings off of a snowboard jump that I have ever witnessed.  Check it out here on Google.

Brad, Mr Pete and I drove out to Snowshoe on Sunday night, and had an incredible day snowboarding on Monday. I think when we went to Beech Mountain a couple weeks ago i said that was the best conditions I had been in. That was far superseded by Monday. It snowed for a week and a half leading up to Monday, and there was over a foot of natural snow covering the county, and over three feet on the slopes. I have never been on powder before, but Monday we had an abundance. Down the center of the trails the snow was hard packed, but along the sides you would sink into the powder so it came almost to your knees. There were trails in the woods that you could skate through, and tons of neat features along the slopes. not only that but the place was empty, so at some lifts there were no lines at all, and on others the lines were less then 10 minutes.

This was the countryside on the way out there.

I had never been to snowshoe before, and I loved that place. We were on the slopes all day, never stopping to eat lunch or anything, and we didn’t even do half of the trails there. Everything we did do was a lot of fun, and the size and difficulty of every trail kept things interesting. I discovered that moguls are actually very enjoyable when they are not made up of mounds of ice that jolt you every time you hit them. All of their black diamonds had moguls and a lot of their intermediate slopes had moguls, and they were a lot of fun to tackle.

The powder is deep on and off the slopes

Another incredible thing about snowshoe was their terrain park. It was enormous, and each feature was enormous. I figured that I would give some of the things a shot, and tried some of them out, but most of the stuff there scared the crap out of me… which is good, because it gives me something really high to aim for. Maybe someday I’ll be hitting stuff like that. I did carve my first black diamond and built up the confidence to tackle any slope, so I should be able to keep up with any of my skier friends on future trips.

The potential energy depicted here is amazing. In another second both the snow butt boy and the camera man would be zooming down this slope almost to the lake far below.

The long and the short of it is that it was an incredible day snowboarding (as every day snowboarding this year has been incredible) and it was beyond incredible due to how incredibly incredible the conditions were. That was the long… the short is that it was incredible. The end.

Two things this weekend.  First of all it seems that things have come together for snowboarding on Monday.  We’re planning on going up to snowshoe, and i am really excited about that.  Of all the places in the southeast it is the biggest, with 57 trails.  It is very spread out so that none of the lifts should get too crowded, and it has been snowing all week and is supposed to snow all weekend, with Monday being sunny.  Looks to be some great snowboarding.

The other thing I am excited about is fantasy baseball.   With the season just around the corner I am full steam ahead studying for the draft.  Last night I did a mock draft that was helpful because it lets you get an idea for where people are being drafted.  I thought I did pretty well in the mock draft, and looking forward to the real thing.  There are so many great players that emerged last year, it will be very interesting to see how things play out.

I compiled all the video from Thursdays snowboarding trip, added a tune, and put it on Google video, where you can see it here. Enjoy!

So the first of the planned trips I mentioned was yesterday, and what a great trip it was. In all my east coast skiing/snowboarding, yesterday had the best conditions I have experienced so far. It snowed 3 or four days leading up to our trip, and they were making snow all week, so it was perfect on Thursday, and the day was cold all day so there was zero meltage. Although it was the coldest I have ever been on the slopes in, I was warm all day long thanks to being completely covered, including my face with a wool cover and goggles. All the trails at Beech were open and it was not too busy, so I dont think i ever stood in line for longer then ten minutes for a lift, and for most of the day I was on a slope that had no line at all.

Those who came out were Brad Kinnison and Mike, Duncan, and Jordon Clark and I. Brad wanted to learn how to snowboard so I showed him, and after four times down the beginner slope he was ready to take on the mountain. I taught him the same way I did Jillian, teaching him the toe side and heel side falling leaf, and J turns, and by the end of the day he was carving on the intermediate slopes. Mike, Duncan and Jordan were all skiing and pretty much tearing up the whole mountain, doing all the black diamonds and intermediate stuff.

Yesterday was the first day I felt totally confident snowboarding. My goal was to be able to get comfortable with the board flat, so I could set up for jumps and stuff. If you try to jump while you are on one of your edges then the board will go out from underneath you as soon as you leave the ground. So by the end of the day I was doing jumps, and even landing a few, and I tried doing their flat box, but only ever made it about halfway before sliding off one side. I am thinking of going out to Appalachian next time where they have two extensive terrain parks and I can get a handle on doing the boxes.

As usual I took lots of video of everyone and I’ll be putting them together into a movie like the one I made for Sugar in January, and when its done I’ll post the link here so you can check it out. Meanwhile enjoy the pics!

This is on the trip out to Beech, and you can see the mountains are snowcapped.

The beautiful conditions at Beech

BK heelside

Duncan

Jordan cruising along

Brad Kinnison again, switching from heelside to toeside

A couple of goofy looking guys