Trip Reports and Pictures
Pictures coming when I scan them in.

Outdoor Quotes:

  1. You know that lasagna juice is the best part of the meal.
  2. I know you don't want to sleep outside tonight. It's freezing cold and rainy sure, but it is the best way to gain the wilderness experience. Trust me, you want to do this. Don't worry, if you need anything just let me know, I'll be in the car.
  3. Those weren't moan's of ecstasy, she kept on kicking me trying to get out of the tent to go pee.
  4. Advice to a female backpacker from a male backpacker on what to do with a frozen power bar:  "Just put it in your mouth and suck on it till it's soft and mushy.
  5. When you use a public campground, placing a tuba on your picnic table will keep the campsites on either side vacant.
  6. You can duplicate the warmth of a down-filled bedroll by climbing into a plastic garbage bag full of geese.
  7. A potato baked in the coals for one hour makes an excellent side dish.  A potato baked for three hours makes an excellent hockey puck.
  8. You can compress the diameter of your rolled-up sleeping bag by running it over with your car.

July 18, 1985 Canoe Trip:  Canoeing in the Boundary Waters of the Minnesota/Canada.
Did you notice the one month difference between writing? It's been a while. Went on the school trip to Canada. Was awesome. Wound up second-in-command, lead the way over the terrain (heavy stuff) and got deserted on the best planned raid in history (read the heavy sarcasm in that one). Only thing I'm proud of is I made it back at two o'clock in the morning. Pitch black, everyone else had the flashlights. You would have had to been there to understand. I'm serious when no one (including me) knows how I made it back without killing myself. I went by one cliff that, had I slipped down it (it was steeply sloped and I was crawling along it sideways) I would have dropped 20-30 feet into rock filled water. I earlier earned and here proved the name Grizzly Adams. Jeff Molander was the only one to catch any fish. Mrs. Blake was ticked at him because of that. He was the only one who even got any bites. By the way, I went into their (Hinchcliff's) earlier alone to disarm any traps (which I did-all the fishing string) and I set some of my own at our camp.

1994 Mar & Aug:  Grand Canyon/Blue Spring.  Trip to the Little Grand Canyon ("Little" being relative) on the Indian Reservation.  Attempt to climb down to the bottom where there are no real trails and find Blue Springs. It’s highly mineralized making it bright blue, and it’s so highly charged with CO2 gas (carbon dioxide, like soda pop) that it fizzes and bubbles.  It's also near a religious Hopi Indian spot called a Sippiu (spelling off on that) where we were all supposed to have crawled into this world from the previous on to escape the evils there.

1998:  April 25, Ayakalypse Now.   A journey down the upper Salt River Canyon with the water 4.5 times higher than normal...and 39°F.  The cold water gave me a lot of jokes involving my 2 millimeter shortie.  OK, one joke but I used it a lot.

1998:  Nov 26, Sierra Club Big Bend.   A trip to Big Bend, Texas, on a sleeper bus with the Sierra Club and some friends, old and new.  12 pictures (More or less).