Category: Galleries

Tahoe Summer

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While up in Tahoe this summer, I met up with Richard for a ride up to Stanford Rock on the west side of the lake.  This was my first time on this trail and, while it required a good chunk of effort (2200 ft over 7.5 miles one way), it’s a great trail to ride and has great views to boot.  Darlene joined me on it for a repeat ride a few days later.

Darlene and I also ventured out on a few hikes: one starting from the Martis Peak fire lookout to Rifle Peak where we stumbled on a rogue mountain bike trail full of big gap jumps; another up from the Olympic Valley floor to the Pacific Crest Trail junction near Granite Chief; and another part way along the Big Chief trail below Northstar’s Mount Pluto.

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Boggs Mtn Report

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Darlene and I loaded up the camper van with the cats and our bikes for a three-night stay in Boggs Mountain Demonstration State Forest last week.  I’ve been to Boggs numerous times for mountain biking with the Outdoor Adventure Club, but we hadn’t been back since before the catastrophic Valley Fire that hit the area in September of 2015.  While some 80% of the trees burned, a few scattered oases of old trees are still standing – most notably the trees surrounding the Calso campground as pictured above – and they’ve planted apparently 700,000 tree seedlings since the fire. These now vary in height across the area from two to five meters or more, depending on when they were planted.

Volunteers from Friends of Boggs Mountain have managed to rebuild the trail network over the intervening years and I was able to ride all of them but Jethro’s and Game Trail during our mid-week stay.  With the loss of most of the old tall trees, all the trails are more exposed to the sun but they’re fun and well built even though they of course don’t exactly follow the original routes after the fire salvage and replanting efforts.  Amusingly, they’re often quite a bit more windy now, zig-zagging between all the young new trees.  One oddball trail is the Creek Trail, as the creek’s ravine was apparently not salvaged after the fire and remains strewn and clogged with fallen trees, rocks and shrubs around and over which the trail now weaves.

90-second video montage showing the state of several trails

So yes, Boggs Mountain is definitely open for fun riding again and the campground luckily still provides much needed shade in the summer.  That leaves the question as to when we’ll back again…  Richard?!

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Snow and Rain in Tahoe

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After far too many dry warm weeks, we finally got a big snow storm across the Sierra in mid-February and Darlene and I dashed up to Tahoe with the cats just ahead of it to enjoy the snow for a couple of weeks.  Resi and Aiden joined us for the first week and we got a couple of days in at Northstar before and after the big dump.  Later in the week, I met up with Troy and Aiden at Homewood for three days as more snow piled up.  Unfortunately, Darlene wasn’t feeling well and missed out on the fresh powder.

We then joined Jon, Stan, Bill, Jim and Lewis for our annual ski week, getting a day in at Palisades before the rain came in for a couple of days to wreck all that fresh powder.  So we had a couple of board game days together before venturing back out at NorthStar and Palisades Alpine.  Over the first weekend in March, Jon and Roland joined us for more gaming and we got in another day at Alpine before eventually packing up and heading home.

A short video montage of our skiing over a couple of weeks.

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And There Was Much Gaming

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Another year of board gaming topped off with a gathering for New Year’s Day:

This gallery is from February 2025 through New Year’s Day of 2026 and includes SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Gentes, On the Underground: London/Berlin, Age of Rail: South Africa, Cloud Age, Arcs, Hollywood: 1947, Galactic Cruise, Bomb Busters, Gutenberg, Nucleum, Green Team Wins, Shackleton Base, Rings & Things, Dead by Daylight, Thunder Road: Vendetta, Heat: Pedal to the Metal, Andromeda’s Edge, Polynesia, Steam Power, Revive, Ecos, Merchant of Venus, Endeavor: Deep Sea, Wildcatters, Photosynthesis, Smartphone, Inc., Cosmic Encounter, Clank! Catacombs, Artemis Odyssey, Panamax, Flip Toons, Hot Streak, 1930 – The Golden Age of Airlines, Dead Reckoning, First Flight, Skate Summer, Rocketmen, The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship, Speakeasy, Slide 5, FaeKin, Magical Athlete, Cosmic Encounter, Deck Chairs on the Titanic, Pandemic: Iberia

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The Sphere in Las Vegas

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The Sphere in Las Vegas

Darlene and I just made a short trip to Las Vegas midweek to see The Wizard of Oz @ The Sphere.  They chopped the heck out of the original movie to make this production (and scale down the runtime) but the whole immersive experience is pretty wild and amazing – from tornado wind effects and flying debris to falling snow and apples.  It’s definitely fun and worthwhile.

This video highlights some of what went into producing this experience and it was clearly quite the effort but I was also amused to see all the funny compromises needed to fill out the massive spherical display from the original 85-year old movie.  In particular, you can see how they had to cut and paste various background characters to fill out the now expansive view – many are looking off in odd directions or stuck in little loops of motion or unnaturally still or even sized disproportionately.  There are missing shadows and other compositing difficulties and all of the dialog echoes like sound in a stadium (because I guess that’s how big the space is) but it doesn’t matter – it’s still a fantastic spectacle!  And yes, section 306 is the prime viewing area as others have reported – not too low, not too high and everything viewed straight on.

Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart at Area 15 in Las Vegas

We stayed two nights at The Venetian to have a view of the outside of The Sphere.  (We suspect now that the rooms at the Pallazzo have a more direct view than what we had in the North Tower but it was fine.) We spent the first half of the day at Meow Wolf’s Las Vegas installation (“Omega Mart”) – an interactive, immersive experience located in the Area 15 complex of attractions.  It was fun and the amount of detail they put into everything is impressive – from the props to the backstory.  You can engage with and digest the material to various degrees from just casually walking around to poring over the materials and interacting with the various terminals to solve the mystery or complete a sort of intensive scavenger hunt.  We spent a middle ground of three hours just checking things out and completing the objectives associated with the optional employee “boop” card.

After lunch we spent a little time exploring some of the other attractions in Area 15 and then we headed back to our hotel ahead of the Wizard of Oz show by way of a free demo ride in a Zoox vehicle – a unique looking autonomous vehicle.

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Cats in the House Again

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Yay! We have cats in the house again! We adopted Sabik and Jinx from the local animal shelter in late October.  They’re brothers and they were eight months old and very skittish when we adopted them but they’ve quickly grown quite comfortable with us and their new home.  They’re both very sweet and affectionate but still have some strong phobias about being picked up or held that we’re slowly working through.

Jinx is the tabby and the rambunctious one, tearing around the house and making a ruckus.  Sabik is more calm but still very playful.  They’re strongly bonded together and get along well, though Jinx tends to be overly aggressive in their play brawls.  Sabik is learning to fight back though.

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