Recently in The Outdoors Category
I'm ringing in 2011 with a new urge to blog, so here I am. Not much news for today, but I wanted to get on the board for Jan.1.
We celebrated Christmas in Utah this year. I had to come back early for work, but Brooklynne and the kids will be back Wednesday, so I'm kicking it alone for the next couple of nights.
The Wasatch Front got 18 inches of snow on Thursday, so we took HJ skiing for the first time. She did pretty well. She could manuver and keep her balance, but had trouble stopping. I asked her what was her favorite part of the day and she told me "riding the magic carpet." The simple pleasures....
I'm currently working on a history project that has led me to an interesting mystery in Durham lore: what ever happened to the Patterson Mill?
Historic maps, like the one here, show the mill near where Old Chapel Hill Road crosses New Hope Creek (near the current site of Githens Middle School), but according to the folks at the Patterson Country Store, there have been efforts to locate the ruins/wheel, which have all been unsuccessful.
Here's where the Inidana Jones in me comes out.... I think I'm going to take an expedition through the woods along the creek between Old Chapel Hill Road and 15-501. But I need some partners in the venture. Any volunteers to be the Starbuck to my Ahab?
For the last post of 2009, I'll leave you with pictures of our three kids, which we took today as we finished up a round of disc golf at the park. Congrats again to all the 31-Day Challenge winners. Remember to email me your snailmail addresses.
A color-inverted image of our sun.
Over the past week, Brooklynne and I have noticed a hawk prowling around the tree tops of the neighborhood. Also, we've noticed a slight dropoff in squirl activity around the house, but we didn't make too much of it... until we were playing outside with Halleigh and noticed something strange on her swingset.
We looked around a little more and found this on the very top beam:
The Montana grizzly bear population is on the rise. When we lived in Montana, about once every couple of months, you would hear about some rancher who was bent out of shape because a grizzly or a wolf had killed a goat or cow. While they probably hate the predator population growing, I'm sure they wouldn't mind going out and blasting a wayward bear if they got the chance. I hope this does not lead to lifting protections. As much as I try to stick up for Palin, I'm a little scared of her wildlife management positions.
This weekend, the whole Travis clan is going camping at the mountain land. The task for the trip will be to finish clearing all the trees and brush from inside the footprint of the cabin-to-be. However, we plan to divide the trip into one work day and one play day. So Saturday, we're planning another hike somewhere in the Mt. Rogers-to-Sparta regional area. Even though our camera is broken (again), we will try to get some pictures to post. I may even try out a moblog hack so I can post from my cell phone over the weekend. We'll see....
In honor of the weekend camping trip, here is a video from deep in the Travis family archives. It is a couple short clips from the first camping trip Brooklynne and I took together at Hylite Canyon, which is 30 minutes south of Bozeman. I think this was September 2001?
Last night we got crazy amounts of rain in Durham. Here's the streamflow data I saved from last night for the Eno River, where Brooklynne and I like to hike, fish, and swim. It looks like our max flow of 4,100 cubic feet per second shattered the previous record for this date (228cfs). The parcipitation meter for this location measured 7.5 inches of rain last night! Brad can correct me, but that seems extraordinary for a glancing hit from a dying hurricane.
As some of you know, I have gotten into geocaching a little, and I have been scoping out some local caches that look particularly fun or challenging. I'm not so much of a fan of the drive-right-up-and-park-at-the-cache variety, so you can imagine that I was excited to find a cache last week that is only accessible by river. Unfortunately, Evan took his canoe to the mountains and left it there, so now I don't have a boat and I've been hunting around for a place I might be able to rent or borrow one. That lead me to this graphic from a stream flow gauge on the Eno. Have you ever wondered why every year there seems to be some paddler stuck in a tree while the water floods around him/her? This may explain it.
