January 2011 – David Kotz

Port Townsend

The Olympic Peninsula of Washington state is a magical place.

I was in Seattle for a workshop and decided to stay for the weekend so I could go out to the Olympic Peninsula and visit my advisor, Carla Ellis, for the weekend. What fun it was to see her and her new retirement home. It was a gray and even drizzly weekend, but I had fun taking some photos from a state park where we went for a stroll.

Olympic peninsula – even the trees are covered in green growth.

The Olympic Peninsula of Washington state is a magical place, which in its low slopes is much like a rainforest. Here, near Port Townsend, is a fantastically moss-green forest, quite a sensory experience coming from snowy NH. Above is a shot of the eery, mossy woods in the park. The peninsula gets a lot of rain and fog, so the woods are green year ‘round.

At right is a close-up of the bark of a madrona tree, which sheds its bark annually.

See the photo gallery.

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Great Bear cabin

Great Bear cabin is one of the DOC cabins on Mount Moosilauke.

We spent two nights of our four-day MLK weekend on the snowy slopes of Moosilauke, visiting Great Bear cabin with our friends. Great Bear cabin is a log cabin built and maintained by the Dartmouth Outing Club, and it is one of my favorite winter cabins because of its snug design and its close accessibility. It is located on the southwestern slopes of Mount Moosilauke, my favorite mountain in the world, and this weekend it was surrounded by many feet of fresh powdery snow.

We had two nights and a nice long day in between. On that day, it was sunny and reasonably warm, so we set out for a daytrip skiing up some old logging roads. To get there we had a tricky bushwhack through the woods, and to break trail up the logging road. The sunshine and powdery snow made for a really pleasant ski. Unfortunately, some of the kids were pretty tired, and Andy was under the weather, so we turned around well short of our goal of reaching Mud Pond.

Andy got sick when he returned to the cabin, but I have to give him huge credit for doing all that skiing despite being dizzy and nauseous throughout!

We had a fine time in the cabin, stoking the woodstove, playing cards, and doing lots of cooking. It’s always a lot of fun and very relaxing to spend time at DOC cabins with friends.

See the photo gallery.

Bangalore again

I was fortunate to be able to visit Bangalore once again, to attend the COMSNETS conference.

It is so nice to be back in India, in Bangalore. I came so I could attend COMSNETS, a computer networking conference, at which I had organized the NetHealth workshop. Those were great, as was an afternoon spent visiting Microsoft Research. What was best, though, was a chance to visit some of my favorite places, including MG Road, Cauvery, Infinitea, Sampige Road, the IISc campus, and friends in our old IISc neighborhood. Read on…