startups, technology and fishing

Video from 1 week ago with Joe H and Tom R skiing down Rainier from Camp Muir. Thanks Joe for putting all the clips together! We ran out of water about halfway down and the clip about the water bottle is me holding a squeeze bottle filled with snow that just refused to melt. We filled up further down from a glacial stream. The clip where Joe shouts at me “This way” is him saving my ass from skiing off a cliff.

Had an amazing weekend with friends Joe Heitzeberg and Tom Romary. We met on Saturday evening in Rainier park. The campsite at Cougar Rock was full so we drove a few hundred feet down the road, parked at a trailhead, hiked in a bit and slept under the stars. We got up to paradise at about 7am and started hiking up to Muir on skis with skins. We hiked from about 5,500 ft to over 10,000 ft, took a break and had lunch and then skied down on a route we made up as we went along. At one point we had skied into a valley and had to climb a snowbank to get back on the trail (the alternative was skiing down the Nisqually river valley on top of the river and possibly falling through, so we decided against that).  Joe has posted photos and video here.  (Page 2 has the videos) The videos are a little large to download, so as soon as they’re up on youtube I’ll embed a few here.

CRV and Bill Tai put together an awesome weekend in the mountains of Utah snowkiting. Thanks  Jeff Kafka and team for some awesome instruction. I think the most memorable moment was Chris Sacca getting up on stage at the local bar and singing Stairway to Heaven including the screamy bits at the end. Tell me someone got that on video!!

I didn’t have a camera but hopefully some photos will be on Flickr soon.

Saturday we snowkited and I had a few great runs although I got my ass seriously whipped by a 10 meter kite on top of the windy ridge until one of the guys on a snowmachine came and grabbed my kite for me.

Sunday the conditions were whiteout and it was snowing heavily so we hit Park City for the deepest powder I’ve ever seen. It was a warm clear beautiful day and I hung out with Sunil Paul and Sebastian Thrun and turns out Sebastian is a spectacular skier and he gave me some great pointers on how to ‘bounce like you’re on a trampoline’ in powder. We did a few really challenging (for me) runs through trees and it was awesome!!

Got this a few minutes ago from my Dad in South Africa:

One of the bloggers using FEEDJIT is The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

If you don’t know what it’s about, read this.

I just became a huge fan.

It took me about an hour to catch one of these. I shot this with probably the worst choice in camera. A Canon Powershot S50 which is awesome for everything but time lapse photography. It has a 15 second maximum exposure and you have to wait 15 seconds after each exposure while the camera processes. But after about an hour of trying I got one!

This was shot at about 2am on August 13 2007 in Elizabeth, Colorado - about 50 miles South of Denver at 6000ft altitude on a perfectly clear Colorado evening.

I just drove from Seattle to Denver where I’m spending a week. We took the northern route through Montana and I stopped and did a tiny bit of fishing in the Clarke Fork and Yellowstone rivers. I just caught one small rainbow on a dry fly in the clarke fork which wasn’t bad considering it was the middle of the day on both rivers and not far from the road.

We stopped in Bozeman for the night and I discovered an awesome fly fishing shop called the Bozeman Angler. There are some awesome restaurants on the same side of the street.

Next week I’m in BC for three days king salmon fishing. I can’t wait.