Missoula Ultimate Halloween Hat Tournament
Pictures of a rad Saturday in Missoula playing with frisbees.
The the first picture links to a gallery. The last three are pictures that were too big to include.
Holland Lake
We spent last weekend at a forest service cabin near Holland Lake, about halfway between Missoula and Glacier National Park in the Swan Valley.
Saturday we did a 12 mile out and back hike to Upper Holland Lake. The hike had about 2000 feet of elevation gain, which ended up being the difference between fall and winter.
The Mount Vernon Dredge
The Mount Vernon Dredge is an old mining relic located in Nevada City at a history of mining museum. It is a massive structure, kind of reminds me of a brontosaurus when I think about it.
Blodgett Canyon Climbing: Drip Buttress
On Tuesday my friend Steve and I did a 5-pitch climb up the Original Route on the Drip Buttress in Blodgett Canyon. It is 3 pitches of 5.9 followed by two of 5.8. We had some awesome weather for October in Montana, sunny all day and the windiest part was at the base of the climb.
It was definitely a long day, taking us about 3 hours to walk off the route once we had finished climbing and get back to the car. I am really sore now but it was well worth it.
Biking to Stevensville
From Wikipedia
Stevensville is officially recognized as the first permanent settlement in the state of Montana. Forty-eight years before Montana became the nation’s 41st state, Stevensville was settled by Jesuit Missionaries at the request of the Bitter Root Salish Indians.
Tubing the Blackfoot River
Hilary’s brother Justin and his friend Charlie visited us from Atlanta over the weekend. On Friday we drove a little outside of town to go tubing on the Blackfoot. The weather was hot and the water was cold.
Blodgett Canyon Climbing
Over the weekend I was able to go climbing with Dylan and Jason, a couple of Missoulians. We went to Blodgett Canyon, a 40 mile drive south on Highway 93. The route we did was the South Face of Shoshone Spire, listed in the Falcon Rock Climbing Montana guidebook as a 7-pitch 5.8+, described as
Probably the first multi-pitch route climbed in the canyon and still a mandatory classic.
The climb is all traditional style, with no bolts anywhere. It was definitely the tallest climb I had ever done. A bit scary in places but still a lot of fun.
Eureka, Lake Koocanusa, and the Libby Dam
North of Glacier, 7 miles from the border of Canada, we encountered the town of Eureka, which was soon followed to the west by Lake Koocanusa (best pronounced “Koo-can-u-s-a”) and its creator the Libby Dam.
Eureka is a small town that is big on logging, like most towns in northwest Montana. It was easy to see why, biking around the supply of trees seemed about limitless. They had a nice exhibit with multiple historic building, pictures, and objects from the past 100 years or so. The whole exhibit was a rather grand effort to keep history alive for a town of 1000 people.
Lake Kookanusa itself was gigantic. We rode along it for 50 or 60 miles and only saw the southern half of the lake. The lake was created when the Libby dam stopped the flow of the Kootenai River, the third largest tributary of the Columbia River (according to Wikipedia), in the early 70’s. The older I get the more anti-dam I become. Let the river flow I say.
Montana and Idaho Bicycle Tour
Yesterday I finished a 13 day tour with Jeff and his dad, John. We biked almost 900 miles through northwest Montana and the Idaho panhandle. The beginning of the trip we followed the Adventure Cycling Association’s “Great Parks North” route.
We started in Missoula and our first destination was Glacier National Park. The following pictures are all from the first 2 days. The weather started out a little cold and rainy but thankfully improved as the trip went on.
On a technical photographic note, most of these pictures were taken as RAW files using the Canon Hack Development Kit (CHDK) on my Powershot SD 850. If you have a Canon point and shoot camera loading this free program onto a memory card is a non-destructive, non-permanent way to enable a lot of different functions your camera is capable of, but aren’t built into Canon’s firmware.
CHDK has a lot of different functions you can enable, such as live histograms and motion sensitive photography. I was most excited about being about to take pictures in RAW format. If you aren’t familiar with RAW, Anytime you take a picture as a jpg your camera is deleting a lot of the information it originally collected from the sensor to create the relatively compressed jpg file. A RAW file, typically only available with higher end cameras, saves all this information.
Badger Pass Downhill Video
Three minutes and twenty seconds of downhill after climbing Badger Pass, taken with a Gorillapod attached to my handlebars.
