October 12, 2006

This Fall has been phenomenal. Since I came back we only had about a week of rain and a few foggy days. The rest was sunny with usually no clouds in sight. The temperatures during the day still reach the twenties, it's just that I don't get much out of it - my class and research is keeping me quite busy these days. I really was missing the shore riding at home and I did that a lot after coming back.
There's also a new student from Austria in the department, David. He spent most of his life in Germany though. He likes biking, hiking and snowboarding, what a surprise he came to Vancouver!
I also got my last ski seasons pass on student conditions this season, so I am also looking forward to the weather turning really bad in December, with lots of rain and frigid temperatures here in Vancouver and snow on the mountains!

I also added an RSS feed to the website, so that you can keep track of the frequent updates! Your browser will show an icon similar to this one in the address bar, and if you click on it you can for example create a live bookmark in Firefox. If you don't have Firefox download it with the link on the left side - don't use Microsoft's faulty Internet Explorer!

Google in Stanley Park

Hiking to the Lions

Last Monday David and I went for a little hike to the Lions - two peaks that look like lion heads when seen from downtown Vancouver. We knew it would be more than a short hike, but it was way more than that. We actually got to see the sunset on the mountain, but we didn't need to pull out our flash lights - it was just bright enough to find the car on the parking lot! In the morning the meadows and some ponds were frozen, but later the sun was blazing hot. What an amazing October day. The hike lead us along the Howe Sound Crest with awesome views of sea and mountains at the same time. After about 10 kilometers we reached the Lion - it seemed kind of endless, climbing one peak after another along the crest, with the destination remaining far away. Reaching the base of the western lion head it turned out that we had to do some climbing to get to the top - at times it was quite scary with simply nothing underneath us and a few flimsy ropes here and there to hold on to (no DAV quality). It was a great hike, it took us 10 hours for about 20 km!

And here is the profile of the hike, made with the glorious GPS Altitude Chart software! Fairly symmetric and with an obvious barometric drift which the GPS did not correct properly.