A glorious winter day, right after a big snowstorm.
My friends Kathy and David and I decided to head up Mount Moosilauke, after Friday’s big snowstorm. There was about 6” of new snow on top of several feet of solid base, which made for fantastic conditions. With a group of 4 snowshoers breaking trail a couple of hours ahead of us, we cruised up the Glencliff trail. Read on…
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.
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 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.
This post was transferred from MobileMe to WordPress in 2021, with an effort to retain the content as close to the original as possible; I recognize that some comments may now seem dated or some links may now be broken.
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…
On ten-ten-ten we climbed this mountain near Moosilauke.
Black Mountain is a nice little peak in the midst of a broad valley to the west of Mount Moosilauke. On this special day – 10/10/10 – we scrambled up and were treated with a gorgeous view of the Connecticut River valley and The Mountain and a distant peek at the Franconia Ridge.
See photo gallery for more!
This post was transferred from MobileMe to WordPress in 2021, with an effort to retain the content as close to the original as possible; I recognize that some comments may now seem dated or some links may now be broken.
We spent four days and three nights backpacking in the Pemigewasset Wilderness, the central region of the White Mountains National Forest.
Every year at this time we try to get out for an extended camping and hiking trip. The weather this year turned out to be fantastic. We delayed our trip for a day to skip the showers on Wednesday, but other than a brief shower during the hike in on Thursday, we had four days of spectacular sunny, warm weather. Read on!
A few days in Avignon and some of the surrounding areas, under sunny skies and in fantastic weather.
I had a chance to spend a long weekend in Avignon, one of the most beautiful old cities of Provence. Read on!
A chance to return to Bangalore, for 8 days.
I had many reasons to return to India. There are the professional reasons, of course – I had a paper accepted at WISARD (a workshop associated with COMSNETS in Bangalore), and I was invited to participate in an Indo-US workshop on infrastructure security, held at IISc. But, personally, I was really missing India. The friendly people, the fantastic food, the sights and sounds and smells, and let’s face it, the nice weather this time of year. Read on for more…
Our first-ever family backpacking trip, through Zealand notch in White Mountain National Forest.
On Labor Day weekend, we took the kids on their first backpacking trip. We hiked in from Zealand road past Zealand hut to Thoreau Falls, within the NH White Mountains. The weather was fantastic, and we found a nice campsite off in the woods away from the falls. We spent two nights there, with a dayhike up to Ethan Pond in between. We had campfires and went swimming under the falls.
See the photo gallery.
This post was transferred from MobileMe to WordPress in 2021, with an effort to retain the content as close to the original as possible; I recognize that some comments may now seem dated or some links may now be broken.
Almost a year away from home.
We’re home! After just 24 days less than a year away from home, we’re back. According to the airline, we flew 29,000 miles, from Boston to Paris to Bangalore to Sydney to Auckland to Fiji to Charleston to Boston, not to mention all the layovers in between.
It’s nice to be back, although a little strange. The house is pretty much the same, though I now see it through different eyes. It seems huge, and we seem to have so much stuff. The cat recognizes us, and seems to he happy that we’re back. We’re buried in boxes, having shipped home almost two dozen bags and boxes as well as the 10 checked and 6 carry-on bags we brought with us (and which, believe it or not, I managed to fit into my Prius along with all five of us, to get home from the bus stop.)
I’m not sure I’ll be adding much to this blog for a while. I think it will be nice to not be traveling. If I find some time, I might dig through some of the videotape I shot while in India; although I focused most on still photos, some of the videos might be fun.
This post was transferred from MobileMe to WordPress in 2021, with an effort to retain the content as close to the original as possible; I recognize that some comments may now seem dated or some links may now be broken.
David Kotz 