Hiking in the Rockies

I went out to Salt Lake City, Utah, where Nick's father recently moved to. He got this amazing house on the side of a mountain with a glorious view of the city below. Pretty much all of the house that faces the valley is made of glass in fact. There's also a hot tub and each bathroom is equipped with a jacuzzi. A great place for a little hiking and business retreat with the Winter family and George!

We spent a good portion of our stay climbing up the enormous mountains surrounding the city. These mountains are intense, at least compared to what I'm used to; they're much higher above sea level and steeper than the Appalachians I grew up with. Mount Olympus was particularly rough. It was a four mile hike that climbed from 5000 to 9000 feet. I got most of the way up, to the point where we could see over into the next valley, but I skipped out on the final scramble up an almost sheer rock face, feeling thoroughly exhausted and needing to husband some energy just to get down the rocky and slippery path. Even so, I got some great pictures, particularly of the curtain of rain that was at that moment pouring down onto the other side of the city.

See them pics

I discovered though that I do not in fact want to use RAW photos. On a lark I switched my camera to save all pictures in RAW format without realizing how much longer it would take me to process the photos. Back to JPEG I go.

Besides hiking the mountains, swimming in the pool, and eating tremendous food provided by our hosts, we also got in a few good games of Dominion, playing online. If anyone wants to join in a game sometime let me know!

http://dominion.isotropic.org/

And finally, for about the last month I've been steeped in the western/fantasy epic series The Dark Tower by Stephen King. I have only one half of a book left to go and I'm really looking forward to seeing whether or not the plucky heroes can save all the universes from destruction. I recommend checking it out; listening to it via my Kindle's electronic voice while driving a two day car trip really made the time fly by, let me tell you.