2006 March

I nearly missed this concert due to my upcoming trip to Orlando, but we were able to change our tickets from Saturday night to Friday. It meant I showed up to the concert a little tired after a week of work and travel preparation, but I’m glad I didn’t miss this evening of Italy-inspired music.

Verdi: Overture to I vespri siciliani This is a piece that jumps almost startlingly from one mood to another. Somehow the composer keeps the unity of the piece as it transitions from vigorous to languid and back again, and even in my tired state it captured my attention and interest.

Respighi: Trittico Botticelliano Three movements, each inspired by a Botticelli painting. I couldn’t help drifting into a half dream state, but the music seemed to carry me there and stay with me, sweeping me along. My memory isn’t clear, except that it was intensely pleasant.

Tchaikovsky: Variations on a Rococo Theme The title worried me. I’m not usually very inspired by Rococo anything. I should have more faith in Tchaikovsky. This is a brilliant piece that featured cellist Wendy Warner. I soon remembered how much I love the rich tones of the cello. Warner played masterfully, agressive at times, sonorous at others. The piece seems very demanding, racing up to harmonics so high her finger sat inches past the fingerboard, almost to the bridge. At other times she appeared to play all four strings at once. Wonderful.

Mendelssohn: Symphony No. 4, “Italianâ€? As so often happens, I’d absorbed my fill by this point. This piece seemed to lack emotional dynamics, or maybe I lacked the emotional reserves to receive it. Maybe another time.

Ann’s father kindly sent me an article from the Aviation Medical Bulletin that presented some fatality risks from the National Safety Council to support the argument that risk shouldn’t stop us from enjoying our favorite activities so long as we take reasonable precautions. I agree, but there is a big problem lurking in the denominator of many of these statistics:

Put aside the fact that these don’t quite match the current NSC stats. Is the world really this safe? In most cases, I would say no. The problem is that these are odds for the entire US population. For activities that nearly everyone participates in, like riding in a car or eating, the numbers are good. But not everybody flies in airplanes, rides bicycles, climbs high passes, lives on a fault line, etc. When I tried to find the risk of bicycling, I at least made an attempt to estimate how many cyclists there are in the US. I used this, a smaller number than the whole US population, in the denominator, which gave me a higher risk estimate, 1 in 131,000. That’s three times riskier than presented above.

So am I nitpicking at the same time I admit that my own numbers are gross estimates? Maybe a little. But I think if I can get a better estimate, I should. And for activities that only claim a small fraction of the population as participants, getting a reasonable number for the denominator may be very difficult, but absolutely necessary. Using the entire population would give a meaningless result.

This is a minor bugfix release. See the download page for more on the plugin. Changes in this release:

• Fixed a bug that limited the map to 10 markers in some installations
• Updated links to use the blog URL rather than the installation where appropriate

I noticed these two having a snack on the Cache La Poudre River on my way home. I didn’t have my camera ready, and getting this shot was a pure point & shoot luck. I can’t seem to find these birds in my usual field guides, and I’m not even sure if they’re grebes, or maybe loons? A Horned Grebe was the closest I found. Anyone else know? If you need a bigger view, click the picture to get to Flickr, and click “All Sizes” there.

A failed satire is always sad. At least I hope for this movie’s sake that it was trying to be a satire. The humor peeks through here and there, but it’s not worth sitting through yet another story of some guys who steal some money, get chased down, betray each other, blah blah blah.

Near Estes Park, CO

Excited to venture into Rocky Mountain National Park for the first time on snowshoes, we try not to let the weather forecast for cold, snow, and wind get us down. The low avalanche danger is reason enough for optimism. Ann and I meet Sean, cousin Doug, and his friend Bill on a blustery morning for our excursion.

Sure enough, Bear Lake trailhead is getting some heavy snow. It doesn’t feel too cold, though, and we set out in good spirits. Trails are not really marked, so we follow one of a few meandering snowshoe tracks to Nymph Lake, then up to Dream Lake. We get our first real taste of a ripping wind there, and those who have them dig out the goggles and neck gaiters. The trees are far more hospitable, but the wind buffets Emerald Lake as well. Doug, Sean, and I run (or something like it – snowshoes give one a clown- or flipper-like gait) on to the lake anyway, while Ann catches a chill while trying to find a sheltered spot to put on more warm gear. It’s not long before we all retreat back into the trees for lunch.

There’s a debate about whether to try a loop back to the trailhead or not. Ann is concerned that one of her hands is too chilled, but after borrowing some heavier gloves from me agrees to give the extension to Lake Haiyaha a try. From Dream Lake we climb a steep ridge. Not far beyond it we encounter an avalanche safety class digging a snow pit. They made the track we followed, and it ends there. After a bit of futile searching for any sign of Haiyaha, we turn back, thanking the class for their trailbreaking.

Once again we pass people in jeans and no snowshoes on the way back, but this time they are within a quarter mile of the trailhead, so we let them be. It’s probably unavoidable in a national park.

We all finish the outing with smiles, cute enough to make Doug gag when Ann and I make him take our picture.

More Photos

This area has been frozen solid since I first photographed it in November. Now it’s like the ice is clinging to the trees for dear life.

We knew that RV life would be difficult for Jezze, and that we might have to give her up if we were forced to move. That nearly happened this month, and we were relieved when my dad and Sarah were eager to adopt Jezebel. They live in higher, cooler Indian Hills, where Jezze revels in the chasing of deer and investigating of other neighborhood dogs. When it turned out we won’t have to move immediately, but probably will at some point, we decided to let Jezze go as planned to get aquainted with her new residence. We’ll miss her dearly, but hopefully take some comfort in knowing that my dad can offer her a better life than we can. And she’s still in the Kuhn family, and should continue to make her popular appearances in outing photos.

Mozart isn’t my favorite composer, and I wasn’t expecting an especially big turnout to see the Colorado Symphony Orchestra play three of his concertos in a row. Absolutely wrong. It seems that Mozart is still the big celebrity of classical music, and Boettcher Concert Hall was as full as I’ve ever seen it.

Piano Concerto No. 17, K. 453 This was great fun. The piece seemed to perfectly express the joyfulness of our day tromping around in the snowy mountains. Beforehand we wondered why there was no cover on the piano. It became clear when the conductor, Jeffrey Kahane, took the stage and sat down at it. He would be playing and conducting simultaneously, and had to be able to see the whole orchestra. We love Jeffrey Kahane, and it was a joy to watch him consummately perform and conduct the piece, doing each with one hand at times. He appears to do this with ease, as if the music lives in his limbs and only needs to be let out.

Clarinet Concerto, K. 622 This piece, performed by Bil Jackson, was a special treat for Ann, who has an old clarinet stowed away. The piece is written for Basset Clarinet, an instrument with a surprising extension to the lower register. Jackson received a round of applause just for demonstrating this with a short scale. He turned out an athletic performance, as if it were impossible to play the flurries of notes that jump and swoop without some corresponding physical expression. I noticed that when I began to tire of the many trilling cadences, as I tend to do with Mozart, Ann remained enrapt.

Piano Concerto No. 20, K. 466 After the intermission Jeffrey Kahane sat down at the piano again to play Mozart’s first concerto in a minor key (D minor). This came as a relief to me, and I greatly enjoyed the darker, rhythmic contortions of this piece that later inspired Beethoven, according to the program. Again, Kahane’s performance was facinating to watch. Ann remarked that his style is soft, not in volume, but in the way his hands appear to float surely over the keys.

Near Idaho Springs, CO

Ann, my dad, Jezze, and I head up to Echo Lake under bluebird skies for a ski and snowshoe outing. We’re in a good mood, optimistic about the day. Ours is only second car in the Echo Lake Lodge parking area, and we soon have the Chicago Lakes trail to ourselves. The trail, after skirting Echo Lake, descends several hundred feet into the Chicago Valley on a slightly rocky trail on a steep hillside. It’s a great snowshoe trail, slightly less ideal for touring skis, but still fun. Once in the valley we climb along a forest road to the Idaho Springs Reservoir, where we stop for lunch. The sky is now starting to cloud over, but it’s still calm and pleasant out.

Ann elects to get a head start down the hill with Jezze while Dad and I explore a bit further up the trail. The snowshoe tracks we’ve been following ended by the reservoir, so we have to break trail from here. The trailhead is clearly marked, but I haven’t gone far before we’re clearly off the trail. A gentle but steady snowfall now surrounds us. We explore down to the creek, and struggle up it a ways in wet, unstable snow. We soon give up on this and plow a wide loop back to the trailhead with no sign of trail. The puzzle seems solved when Dad finds a sign up the hill a ways, and we start again. Things look good for a while, but we end up in the thickets once more. This time we give up and remove our skins for the run back down. On the way we see a switchback we might have missed – it seems the key to this trail is to stay high.

We fly back down the road, then labor back up to Echo Lake where Ann is waiting. We’re all pleasantly tired and happy to head back to Dad’s for a short nap.

Side notes:

1. We passed the recently opened Echo Mountain Park – a 100% terrain park ski area. It didn’t appear busy, but hard to tell from the road. From the NPR story I heard it sounds like it will be the site of lots of kids getting big air…
2. On the climb back up to Echo Lake we passed a couple in jeans hiking the trail without snowshoes. Later I thought I should have given them a little reality check. Not only is it bad etiquette to hike without snowshoes on a nicely packed snow trail, but if the snowfall increased much it could easily cover the trail before you could get back to the trailhead, and losing the trail clad in cotton could get very bad. I hate lecturing people, but I think I should have told them my opinion just so they would know the risk they were taking.