I haven’t posted an external link in a while but this is a great recent find I wanted to share: Wait But Why. Tim Urban puts together some really brilliant, fascinating and in-depth posts about a myriad of topics. I stumbled on it by way of his amusing post about his unexpected call from (and subsequent visit/tour/lunch with) Elon Musk (“The World’s Raddest Man“). I later found myself up late, still caught up in his fascinating, two-part exploration of the current state (and potential, future existential threat) of artificial intelligence.
There’s an archive of posts to explore and upon subscribing for updates, you’ll receive an enticing list of popular articles to sink your time into, including these on “Science, Philosophy, Space and Anything Mind-Blowing”:
The Fermi Paradox – “The mind-twisting discussion of whether alien life exists and why we’ve never seen evidence of any. The post I get the second-most emails about.”
The AI Revolution – “A long, two-part post that took me six weeks to do—a full overview of what everyone’s been talking about with AI and the reasons I believe this is the most important topic in the world right now.”
Putting Time in Perspective – “An infographic that starts with today and works its way backwards, in increasingly large time increments, all the way to the Big Bang. Good way to put all of history in perspective.”
For Darlene’s birthday last week (mid-April), I took her on a ski trip to a surprise destination: Banff, in the Canadian Rockies! We stayed for five nights and skied at Sunshine Village and Lake Louise. We also spent a little time exploring the national park: hiking in Johnston Canyon to see the ice falls, up to Lake Louise to walk out on the mostly frozen lake and out to Lake Minnewanka. We were super lucky to decide to go revisit Lake Minnewanka after dinner on our first night because not only were the skies clear but the aurora borealis made a pretty good showing that night. It also happened to be the first time either of us had ever seen an aurora in person!
Aurora Borealis over Lake Minnewanka, near Banff, Canada.
Click through to see the full gallery and video montage:
I was worried about the snow conditions when we arrived because there was no hint of snow in the valley around Banff (and the previous times I was there in the winter there was tons of snow everywhere). There wasn’t even any snow on the drive up to Sunshine on our first day. However, Sunshine is actually up pretty high and you take a gondola to get to the runs from the parking area. And, even before the weekend snow, it was great conditions and good coverage.
We went to the lower elevation resort at Lake Louise after the storm came through and I’m glad we waited because there were plenty of clues of how nasty and frozen the snow was on some parts of the mountain underneath the new snow. It definitely gets warmer there than in Sunshine. This was mid-April of course.
Compared to Whistler/Blackcomb, Sunshine (Banff) and Lake Louise certainly have a better chance of snow and cold weather, but they’re not as convenient. Sunshine is like 15 minutes from Banff and Lake Louise like 40 minutes or so. You don’t have to drive as there are free shuttles (with resort passes) to/from Banff and the drives are very pleasant. And there are other things to see and do if people want to take a day or two off from skiing.
Short video montage of our trip.
Sunshine and Lake Louise are both fairly large resorts, with plenty of terrain to explore. Their trail ranking is pretty strange at both resorts: lots of green runs and black diamond runs which would be rated blues in Tahoe. At times it seemed pretty arbitrary how the runs were ranked. You had to just go and check it out. You couldn’t trust the ranking at all. (Didn’t try any of the double-blacks: just assumed they were super steep chutes.)
One negative is that Sunshine has a few large portions (maybe a third) of completely open terrain above the tree line. Not only are these areas open to a storm but they also don’t let you feel like you have anything to explore in those areas. It’s just one big open expanse that feels the same all over, rather than many runs to check out. This certainly isn’t true all over the park, it’s just a couple chunks of it. Also a couple of sections of their acreage are special, restricted areas where you have to partner up and carry avalanche gear.
Similarly, as big as Lake Louise is, most of the backside terrain is double-black diamond: presumably chutes which Darlene and I didn’t try. But there are lots of other fun blue and black runs. Unfortunately, we found our favorite run after lifts closed on our last day!! D’oh!
I think it would be easy to enjoy five days skiing between the two resorts. There’s also little Mt. Norquay but we didn’t bother. It looks much smaller than Sugar Bowl (here in California) and I like Sugar Bowl.
Pictures and videos from a week of skiing (and tabletop gaming) in Colorado at Breckenridge, Vail and Keystone with Jon, Bill, Stan, Rick, Jim, Lewis and Tom:
Darlene invited her cousins, Travis and Dylan, to join us for their first kayaking adventure and we took them down to the Elkhorn Slough today. It was a pretty windy day – lots of extra paddling required but they got to see lots of sea otters, sea lions, brown pelicans, white pelicans, cormorants, canadian geese, snowy egrets, blue herons, godwits and curlews.
Click through for the gallery of pictures and videos:
Darlene and I just spent twelve days in Kauai, my favorite of the Hawaiian Islands. There’s just so much to do and explore there – you can never have enough time! Twelve days was still not enough for everything we wanted to do. I last visited Kauai about eleven years ago on an REI Adventures trip. And, as I found with the extra days after my REI trip last time, I highly recommend Andrew Doughty’s The Ultimate Kauai Guidebook to making the most of your time in Kauai.
We stayed four nights in the southwest, in Waimea, and did a bunch of hiking in Waimea Canyon and Koke’e State Park. Our first full day was along the Awa’awapuhi Trail – out and back only as the Cliff Trail is currently closed due to cliffside collapses. Another day was the Pihea Trail through the Alaka’i Swamp to the wonderful Kilohana lookout and another day for the Cliff Trail to the top of the Waipo’o Falls. Every trail was more than the usual adventure (and slow-going) due to all the clay, mud and severe trail erosion, particularly along the Pihea Trail. Finally, we also explored a little bit in the south near Po’ipu along the beaches and cliffs.
We found ourselves getting a late start on seemingly every day-long excursion so that we were always the last ones out of a given location, which was pretty cool for feeling like we had the place to ourselves and getting pictures without anyone else present.
Our next four nights were at a rented condo in Princeville, overlooking the ocean and we were thrilled to be able to watch the lengthy parade of humpback whales blow and breach right from our lanai. The super dark night skies here were also fantastic for star watching. From here, we visited the Kilauea Lighthouse and Wildlife Refuge, hiked the Kalalau Trail through the start of the Na Pali Coast to Hanakapi’ai Falls, checked out a couple of the wet and dry sea caves (including swimming into the “blue room”), watched the winter storms pound the coast around Hanalei Bay and at the “Queen’s Bath” and kayaked one evening up the Hanalei River. (And unexpectedly met Josh, my guide from my previous Kauai trip eleven years ago, who now owns a kayak rental/tour outfit of his own in Hanalei: Napali Kayak Tours.)
Our last four nights were spent at a hotel on the east side in Wailua. From here, we rented kayaks and paddled up the Wailua River and then hiked the remainder to “Secret Falls”. (This is a very popular and well-known kayak/hike outing. They’re anything but secret!) We also visited Wailua Falls and hiked our way down one of the very unofficial trails to swim in the large pool of the falls. Another long day was spent trying to hike into the center of the island and the crater of Waialeale. Once again there’s no real dedicated trail: it’s more about repeatedly finding and following and re-finding hunters’ trails to make your way as far as you can. And of course we encountered plenty of mud along the way! We got further than I managed the last time I was here, despite having to hike the road a couple of miles due to fallen trees blocking our rented vehicle.
We made a few attempts over the trip to get in some snorkeling from various beaches but were repeatedly thwarted by high surf conditions due to the winter storms and/or too-shallow sheltered waters in low tides. We finally squeezed in a little snorkeling at Lydgate Park by ignoring the protected but shallow fish-feeding/snorkeling pool and swimming out what seemed like nearly a half-mile on a relatively calm evening. (We had to go that far out to just get like a dozen feet of depth and find some fish.) On some future trip I still want to set aside a few days to go out on a boat for scuba diving. We ended our trip like my first one with a spectacular helicopter tour around the island.
As an almost-surprise gift this year, Darlene signed us up for a pair of “flights” at the indoor “skydiving” facility iFly in Union City, CA. Glenn and Michele came down from Portland for the weekend to give it a try with us along with several friends in the area: Martha, Dave, and Greg as well as Darlene’s 79-year old aunt Betty and her two young charges, Travis and Dillon.
After a bit of instruction on how to hold your body, we each got two one-minute “flights” in the vertical wind tunnel with our iFly instructor, Charlie. As beginners, we were all just learning how to hold a more-or-less steady hover in the 110-145 mph winds. (They adjust the wind speed on-the-fly for the size of the person.) Everybody had a blast and opted for the “fly high” option on our second flights where the instructor takes to the air with you and carries you aloft spinning up and down the shaft.
Glenn and Michele came down from Portland this past weekend to try “iFly” with me and Darlene, but on Saturday they joined us for their first taste of mountain biking. They rented some nice, new demo Trek Fuel EX bikes and we set out from the Epicenter bike shop in Santa Cruz to take them on a nice beginner’s course around the middle half of Wilder Ranch.
They took to it so quickly, picking up each new handling skill easily and conquering all the climbing and maneuvering, and always up for more. So much so that we ended up climbing to the top of Wilder and on over to do some UCSC back campus trails before coming back by way of my favorite descent in Wilder. So much for sticking to the beginner’s route! But I think they enjoyed their first time out!
And… bonus!! A video of all of us belly-dancing (sort of) the night before at Menara’s, a Moroccan restaurant in San Jose:
