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Shelf Road – Cactus Cliff & Gem Wall
Today there are some high clouds, so we optimistically head to the sunny Cactus Cliff area. Lisa & Dave go with some of their friends to the tougher Gem Wall, and we head for Cactus to see what we can hit before it gets too hot. Crynoid Corner, 5.7. Ann leads this again, and I…
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Shelf Road – The Gallery
After a pleasant night in our tent at the Cheese Head Ranch, a spread north of Canyon City owned by a climber from Wisconsin who hosts an annual Memorial day climber gathering, we set out with our friends Lisa, Dave, and Dyson (now a year and half old!) for the Menses Prow area, hoping for…
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Exhibit: Body Worlds 2
I all but forget I have a body sometimes, and even though I inhabit it 24/7, it’s mostly a mystery to me. I know some crude anatomy, but mostly it comprises a vague model of “stuff that’s in there.” My grandfather, a plastic surgeon, used to dazzle me as a child with the long, strange…
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Movie: The Weather Man (2005)
The Weather Man is the embodiment of the worst kind of small talk, the completely insincere patter of denial in which we coax each other into avoiding any real, meaningful interaction. Basically we see what happens when the Weather Man accepts being small, and thus his small talk becomes sincere. For such a short story…
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Meadow
My first attempt at high dynamic range, or combining several exposures into one, just to see if I could employ the technique using the GIMP. Not hard at all – the only trick was lining up the different frames, which weren’t exactly the same because I used a micro tripod strapped to my bike handlebars.
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Movie: Andy Goldsworthy / Rivers and Tides (2001)
Some of Andy Goldsworthy’s art requires a film to appreciate, and this does the job exquisitely. I haven’t come across any other artwork that evokes a sense of time, place, and the rhythms of nature like this does. Some of the interviews seem unnecessary to me – I’m always sympathetic to artists who have difficulty…
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Live Music: CSO plays the Lord of the Rings Symphony
I think we all – me, my dad, Ann, and Sarah – wondered in our own way how well a Symphony derived from a soundtrack would succeed. After some digestion, I’ve concluded that it’s highly dependent on how you approach the listening. If you listen to it like a classical symphony it sounds, as Ann…
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Buffalo Creek – The Big Butt
Maybe the climbers who named these rocks hoped to keep the yuppies away by giving them impolite names or, more likely, got into a competition that included putting up the hardest climbs with the foulest names. The way I see it, the visions conjured up by the names here make the reality the most pleasant…
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Poem from the Trail
I can resonate with this little ditty from Sidewinder: one lone hiker here I be all by myself on the CDT my friends are all ahead by a half day I must getting closer or so other people say dreamt the past 2 nights of playing in the water think I’d go crazy if it…
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Movie: Heaven (2002)
This must be what happens when you take an absurd Hollywood-style plot and play it down through the entire movie until the end, which you play up artistically. I liked the approach, which forced the focus onto the characters. With the extra breathing room often found in European movies, the tension comes from spaces that…