Taughannock Falls is one of those local places that is amazing and many people aren’t even aware of. Rachel wasn’t until I took her for the first time years ago but now it’s one of our favorite spots. That’s why we spent the day there by ourselves for our 2nd anniversary.
Our yard seems to be a breeding ground this spring. We’ve had everything from baby robins to baby rabbits. The baby robins showed up last weekend (completely expected, their nest has been in our garage for a few weeks/months now). Had I noticed the nest getting built It wouldn’t have lasted long (birds cause a mess) but I didn’t so we were graced with the presence of at least 2 baby robins. Rachel and I saw them both make it out and into the wild. Our garage is now safe from the birds, thank god!
Thursday while trimming the grass around the various bushes Rachel found a nest of rabbits. They were all huddled in a hole in the grass around a young lilac bush she planted last year. All of the rabbits hopped away and hid under the bushes next to the house.
When I got home that night Rachel wanted to show me, so we went outside and found Felix. Rachel has a tendency to name random animals we see, like charlie the squirrel in the Grand Canyon and now Felix the baby rabbit. There have been countless others, but their names escape me.
All the rabbits were gone (read: hiding) except for Felix. In fact, he seemed quite friendly, and even allowed us to pick him up and hold him for a bit. I’ve had pet rabbits before and usually they fall into one of two categories:
At first Felix seemed to fit into the second category. However; the longer we held him he seemed to become comfortable and even curious, sniffing and moving around a bit.
While it was fun to play with him a bit, we thought it best to get him back to his mother, so we put him under the bush next to the house (where we knew the rest of them including the mother had gone) and he hopped inside and disappeared.
We’ve seen baby rabbits every day since then, but we don’t think we’ve seen Felix again yet, all the markings have been different and the ones we’ve seen have run away as fast as you can see them.
Normally I wouldn’t like rabbits, but we only have a small flower garden to worry about so it’ll be fine. Also the bush that they’re calling home for now is scheduled for removal very shortly. I assume once it’s gone they’ll vacate the premises. Until then we’re happy to share our home with Felix the rabbit.
We found a new method of keeping the dogs worn out. I’d been eying our bikes for a while but the proposition was a bit scary. For whatever reason, I got it into my head to give it a go today and I’m glad we did. What fun! The dogs love it ALMOST as much as we do.
They got into it so much, they started pulling to make us go faster. The only tricky parts are turning, but they’re picking up on ‘right’ and ‘left’ commands pretty quickly.
This method seems to be far more effective at wearing them out than anything we’ve done until this point. A 15min bike ride has had them sleeping for 4 hours now. Not bad!
We’re on a roll. With the long weekend last week we headed up to camp and hit another of the 46 High Peaks. This time around our goal was Algonquin Peak, but like many of the High Peaks, hiking Algonquin gets you close to several others. We made our attempt at those as well.
Starting out up Algonquin we were once again in the rain, but we knew it was going to break before noon and that we’d have great weather at the summit(s) and after. Sure enough about halfway up the weather turned and we got our first glimpse of blue sky. Unfortunately this was just before we made it into the clouds. That’s right, we were above the cloud cover. Although the hike was exhilarating and we experienced some fine views on the way up, we ate lunch at the top in the clouds and without a view.
After a short stay on the top we started our descent so we could begin our climb up Wright Peak. About halfway down to the Y in the trail the cloud coverage broke and the sky opened up. It was beautiful. One of the best views from any mountain we’ve climbed. Since we didn’t know how long the view would last, we just sat and enjoyed it for a while. Then as it seemed like it would last we continued the hike.
After summiting Wright Peak, the view and the weather only got better. We had 360 degree beautiful clear sky the rest of the day. Wright peak is a hard rock summit with views in all directions. You can see many of the other 46 from the top and we were able to pick out our next goal, Mount Colden.
We did miss Iriquois Peak, a 3rd peak just a short hike (through a valley) past Algonquin, but we were already tired and concerned we might not be able to complete Wright so we left it off this time around.
The hike down was equally pleasant. What an amazing day/hike!
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Rachel and I ran our first race today. We participated in the JP Morgan Chase Corporate Challenge, a 3.5 mile corporate team race around the RIT campus.
I’ve been to the Corporate Challenge but this is the first time I’ve participated. Last year I was just a cook/photographer.
This year Rachel and I decided to run and so we’ve been “training” for the past month or so.
We completed the race, running the entire distance and we both posted times under 40 minutes (Randy – 39:42 & Rachel – 39:52). Pretty darn good for our first time!
From what I heard there were almost 3k less participants this year but there was still almost 10,000 runners! That’s a lot of feet… To give you an idea, check out the video from the starting line last year:
Next year’s goal? 30 minutes, 9 minute miles. Wish us luck!
There’s 2 more people on the Trek to becoming 46ers. We’ve only just begun but we’re in it for the long haul.
We were spending the weekend in Lake Placid due to a great deal on the High Peaks Resort. We booked the trip a few weeks ago and while the weather was great Friday and Sunday, rain was expected for Saturday afternoon. Despite that we decided to hike up some of the 46 High Peaks anyway. After all, we were staying at the High Peaks resort.
To start our journey on the 46er goal we climbed two peaks. We’ve climbed mountains before, Hunter mountain was the highest so far with an elevation of 4,040ft and that was last summer. We’ve now successfully summited 2 of the Adirondack High Peaks, increasing our highest mountain’s elevation to 4,098ft.
We took the Cascade/Porter mountain trail up from route 73 just east of the mt van hoevenburg recreation area and just west of the Cascade lakes (in case you’re trying to find it).
The trail goes steadily up for about 1.8miles where it Y’s. From there it’s .3 miles to the summit of Cascade with an ascent of a 292ft and .7 miles to the summit of Porter with an ascent of 270ft. While the rest of the Cascade trail was relatively easy, only a few hundred feet to summit Porter is a bit missleading. First you descend several hundred feet through what can only be considered a mud slide, then you cross a valley and travel back up the hundreds of feet you descended plus the original 270ft.
The top of Cascade Mountain felt more like the top of Mount Washingtain than the top of one of the smaller Adirondack High Peaks. Winds were constant at easily over 60mph with gusts probably topping 80mph. The wind caused the slight rain coming down to feel like your skin was getting sand blasted. Porter Mountain wasn’t quite as bad since it wasn’t as open, but the wind was still incredibly strong.
This isn’t the first mountain we’ve climbed and it won’t be the last, but it is the first one we’ve hiked up and down in the rain. Having the right gear is vital for hiking and we made use of some new equipment, our new Eddie Bauer RipPac jackets, for the first time this trip and it made our experience enjoyable despite the bad weather. They will certainly remain a staple in our hiking packs.
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My Friend and Best man in our wedding Anthony graduated with his Masters Degree yesterday.
He’s been in school for a long time, and so upon successful graduation he planned a little shindig last night. Low key but a blast.
His brother Rocco has been traveling a lot, and was also recently quarantined for swine flu concerns so if I suddenly come down with something… Anyway, he came back from mexico a short time ago and brought some premium cigars with him.
They were very enjoyable.
Cheers to Anthony, you earned it man.
I’ve been meaning to climb some of the Adirondack High Peaks for a few years. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have any grand illusions of becoming a 46er (Although, as a side note, that would be awesome). I simply enjoy climbing the occasional mountain. Climbing some of the highest peaks in New York State seems like a good goal.
With my parents recent purchase of a camp in South Colton, NY I figured I’d use that as a base camp. I still probably will, although in a few weeks I’ll get to use the High Peaks Resort. A short time ago they started running the Elevate Your Rate promotion which is basically a deal for 75% (+) off. They’re featuring one of the High Peaks for 46 minutes for 46 days. During that time the promotional rate will be the same as the elevation of that featured peak. For example, our peak was Mount Emmons which has an elevation of 4,020′ which turned out to be a daily price of $40.20 which is pretty darn good.
My experience thus far has been via Twitter and I’m thoroughly Impressed. There has been a great amount of communication from them and I’ve felt they’re really going the extra mile. We didn’t get the dates we really wanted (due to availability) and I let them know. They promptly look into it and got back to me within an hour with an explanation why those dates were blocked out. They tried to see if there was any room available but unfortunately there was not. That’s OK, the dates we got work fine anyway, and now we get to go with my friend Anthony and his wife Meg! I really didn’t expect that kind of service at $40.20/night, and that’s just through twitter. I’m excited to see what kind of service they offer in person.
We’re definitely looking forward to the trip.
A few weeks ago while I was up at camp I saw some Otters. As far as I can remember I’ve only ever seen an Otter one other time in the wild. That time they were playing and sliding down the hill into Moldy Pond. This time, they were doing something a little more… special.
They were so twitterpated they didn’t even notice me chasing them down through the woods and then standing about 20 feet from them. They played and fished and ran and I’m fairly confident they were mating. It was nothing short of awesome. It all happened so fast I barely got any pictures fired off, but a few came out.
I don’t think I’ve seen anything quite like it before or since.
I made two discoveries today. Well really, my friend Mike made one discovery yesterday (which I realized today) and I made another one today. I’m going to use my discovery today to illustrate Mike’s from Yesterday. If you’re less inclined to a little geekery skip to the map below.
GPS Tracking isn’t all that new, there are many devices to do this, and every mobile GPS unit that I know has the ability. The iPhone doesn’t, or at least not natively. Mike and I were exploring an area of Rochester today which I’d never heard of or seen before today. Because of this I thought it would be neat to track where we were and how far we went etc. Also because I tend to take a lot of photos I figured I could use the GPS tracking information to geo-tag my pictures.
My criteria for GPS tracking was that it could use my iPhone, that it was free, and that it could track my coordinates over time. This isn’t a lot, I know, I was trying to be flexible. I did a little searching in the iTunes app store and came up with InstaMapper.
InstaMapper fit the bill perfectly. Not only is instamapper free, but it pushes the data direct to a website (which requiers an account that is also free) allowing you to export it in any format you wish. It also interfaces directly with Google Maps letting you see all your waypoint data on a very nice Google Maps interface.
Overall I’m impressed. My only complaint is that the the waypoint data is not cached locally to send later if you don’t have a connection. While this isn’t a problem around Rochester, this will be a problem if I were to try to use this application in a more rural area such as the Adirondacks. Of course, there is another downfall to the iPhone app version, and that is the app has to be running in the foreground for your waypoints to get tracked. This is a limitation of the iPhone however; and in my opinion can’t detract from the value of the application itself. The app is available for iPhone, Blackberry, Android & Motorola iDEN(whatever that is) at this point.
The following is the GPS waypoint map created and embedded using InstaMapper’s tools of our trek today.
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This is all in a park called Turning Point Park. It’s quite nice and apparently they’ve spent a large chunk of change in the past few years putting in the 4,000ft boardwalk. I’m awefully happy with whoever spent all the effort to push for the new boardwalk, it made the entire experience vary enjoyable and the park would be all but useless without it.
I will be visiting again.
Randy Aldrich 