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[caption id="attachment_768" align="aligncenter" width="662"] Punchbowl Falls after the storm.[/caption] [caption id="attachment_765" align="aligncenter" width="610"] Eagle Creek[/caption] [caption id="attachment_766" align="aligncenter" width="610"] This little creek took out a footbridge days before.[/caption]

A couple weeks ago some friends and I planned a trip out to Smith Rock. My friend Jon wrote a detailed email outlining exactly what everyone needed to bring. Check and done. Things were still forgotten. I neglected to bring Stephanie one of my spare sleeping pads, Jon brought his tiny Snowpeak backpacking pot which made cooking dinner for five people suck. I almost through an extra pot in my bag, but decided not too at the last minute. We took these minor blunders in stride and had an awesome trip. The detailed planning reminded me of another trip I did a few years back with a bunch of my old high school crew. We were up late, heavily inebriated, and within a couple of minutes made the decision to go backpacking the next day in the mountains behind Santa Barbara. The seat-of-our-pants trip planning was awesome. In the morning as we shook off the hangover, Chris shouted: "What?! We're going backpacking!?" We scrambled and within the hour everyone was packed and we were on ...

  [caption id="attachment_741" align="aligncenter" width="380"] Clear skies over Skull Hollow.[/caption] This past week was a blast! I headed out from Portland to Smith Rock for the Craggin' Classic hosted by the American Alpine Club. Festivities started at the Redpoint Climbers Supply shop in Terrebonne where we picked up our steel pints, drank some pints, and watched an awesome slideshow by the legendary Alan Watts. We also heard from Meg Kahnle about her Live Your Dream grant to climb Monkey Face. Live Your Dream #1 from Meg Kahnle on Vimeo .   She's doing a collaborative art project about Smith Rocks. Tag your instagram shots of Smith with #ConnectWithSmithRock to submit your photos or head over to Connect With Meg . The next day we rolled into Smith Rocks from the Skull Hollow campground and met with our clinic leaders. I signed up for the Self Rescue clinic to brush up on some essential rope work skills. I didn't bring my camera with m...

Once one of my non-geologist friends uttered the words "trippy" while staring at a geologic map of North America that was up in the hallway. I agree. To the uninitiated a geologic map probably looks like a fairly random assortment of off-colors, blobs, blebs, sharp lines, and generally strange shapes. As geologists we are trained to take the seemingly random slapping together of colors and lines, and pull from it a history, a piece of the story of our planet. Some engineers at Google challenged a deep learning network with a series of images which produced some "trippy" results. Wouldn't it be fun to apply their code to some geologic maps? Basically the program takes an image and attempts to match a some known object (birds, dogs, etc.) in it. Do this for a few iterations and the object becomes more pronounced. For instance they fed it a picture of clouds: [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="1500"] Clouds or ... from Google...

I got our car stuck in the snow. My girlfriend, Jess, our Boston Terrier, Oliver, and I had just finished a short sunset hike through the snow in Colorado's Eldorado Canyon. It had been a fun stop on our winter road trip through the four corner states. Oliver didn't mind the snow too much, especially after he figured out that he could eat it. Infact, he ate so much snow that he threw up over and over on the hike. He wouldn't even break stride. We were pretty hungry and planned on stopping in Boulder for some dinner before crashing at our friend's house in Erie. Darkness fell as I drove my girlfriend's Subaru Forester out on the narrow road. Another car was driving up the road and without really thinking, I politely steered to give them more room. The snow masked a small drainage dish on the cliffside of the road and the Foreseter slid into it. Crap. I tried backing out, rolling forward and out, everytime we just slid back in. Stuck. I jumped out on my hands and knee...

I've always been fascinated by the night sky. I must have learned all the constellations as a kid. Now I can only remember a handful, but I do remember my first night in the High Sierras, looking at the clearest sky I've ever seen. It would be years later before I had my own camera that would be capable of capturing the light sent out from the stars, and then a few more years before I bought a tripod actually point my camera at the sky. Before Jess and I embarked on our Winter four corners road trip, I read up as much as I could on astrophotography camera settings. I was figuratively chomping at the bit to take star photos. Our first stop where I got to give it a try was City of Rocks State Park, NM. I spent hours after dark in the cold cold wind taking exposure after exposure, testing settings, hiking to different locations. Oliver, our boston terrier, wanted to be with me, but was not stoked on standing around in the cold, dark night. I brought him back to the tent and got an...