Sunday, June 17, 2007

Chainsaw Consultant

Today I decide to leave the bike at home, strap on the work boots, grab my chain saw, and head up the Silver Creek Trail to clear all those downed trees I saw on my ride on Friday. Guess what? They were all still there. I ran through a full tank of chain saw gas, running out on the last snag I worked on my way out. I had to put a shoulder to the damned thing and shove it off the trail.

A couple of those downed trees were big honkers. My little 16" saw had its work cut out for it (no pun intended).


Before...


After.

I had literally hours of Great Divide Racers' reports to transcribe before I could turn in for the night. It's quite a race this year. There were 25 starters, and they are dealing with some really cold, rainy weather. It's proving to be pretty much a preparedness contest. Tough.

6 comments:

Jill Homer said...

Very good use of a power tool.

You're doing awesome with the GDR blog. I just wanted to say thanks.

Tom Purvis said...

Thanks Jill. I remember hearing from you last year. I know you are a GDR fan, but do you know Pete B?

Jill Homer said...

Yeah. I was a little bummed that the GDR blog "archives" were taken down. I found it especially entertaining when one of the guys dropped out last year because he couldn't find anything healthy to eat, and I was trying to figure out whether he was riding this year.

I know Pete B., although not that well. We live in different parts of Alaska, but we've particiapated in a couple of the same races. He came down to ride the White Rim and hang out with us in Moab when we were vacationing in Utah this past May. He's an awesome guy. I wasn't following the GDR back in 2004, but I imagine it was quite the edge-of-your-seat type of race.

Tom Purvis said...

If you want to peruse last year's blog, I saved it on my own site:

http://tom-purvis.com/gdr/GreatDivideRaceUpdates.htm

Also, the racer that you mention is in it again this year, Kevin Montgomery.

I checked out your blog. Have you ever considered riding the Vapor Trail 125? http://vaportrail125.com

Michael Meiser said...

Howdy, Tom. Love your blog, beautiful pictures... have barely begun to sink my teeth into some of the stories that go with them. Just this one and a few others.

Stumbled on your blog through the Divide Race blog. Very innovative use of a blog to keep a record. I love it. it's what we geeks have come to call "telepresence blogging"... basically it answers the fundamental question "what are you doing". There's a really simplified system called twitter.com that's all the rage this year.

I was going to see if I could plug your RSS feed for the race into it... just to see if it'd work so I'd get the status updates as soon as you posted them. Just an experiment, hope you don't mind.

BTW, I was looking through your posts and a thought occured to me. Do you ever plot your routes on bikely.com or routeslip.com? They're to relatively new "ride sharing" sites. I love both but routeslip has had some stability issues so I mostly use bikely.com.

Just wonder if you'd used it, if not if you try it let me know what you think. It doesn't do topographic maps yet so that might hinder your use for singletrack mapping, but the satelite views are excellent. I use it 99% for road route mapping.

BTW, there is oe other service... it has no way to mark friends or discover others maps... but it does have topo maps and you can export or import GPX like the other services. So you could plot a route and then export it to GPX and reimport into bikely if you liked. Very simple. The site is gmap-pedometer.com

Oh... and that reminds me... the best way to enter routes may be to import your GPX data right of your GPS unit. I personally am waiting for a keychain size GPS that has an on/of and a USB... so I can simply passively record my rides. Such a device is on the market... just $250 right now.

Anyway, I've said enough. My bikely routes are at: http://www.bikely.com/listpaths/by/mmeiser

My routes probably won't interest you, it's all road stuff in the midwest, but flipping through a few may give you an idea of what the service can do. Oh yeah, this is all free stuff.

P.S. if you feel the need to respond simply comment here. I'm using co.mments.com to track comments so I'll get your via email.

Peace,

-Mike of mmeiser.com/blog

Unknown said...

Wow, a lumberjack and as well as a coder. Do you make house calls? (We had a couple of trees blow down in COS.)

Great blog - I'll say hi for Dan M. and Andrew S.