Arrowsmith via Main Gully

The GPS track of our route. We hit the snow
15 minutes into the route

It been quite some time since I've been out in the mountains on a spring trip. Young Al and I have had our eye on the Main Gully on Mount Arrowsmith for a year or so. As you can see in the Google Earth screenshot, it's an incredibly direct line up to the summit with good access up high logging roads.

It took us 4 hours to the summit with a fair amount of post holing through soft snow into tree wells and voids under boulders. The snow in the gully at the top was soft but we weren't sinking in past our shins so it was fast travelling.

In all, it was 6 hours return. We stayed overnight in Whiskey Creek at my good buddy, Darrel's house so we could get a 5AM start. As it turns out, if the conditions are good you can get the first ferry off of Hornby, get up to the summit and down and back to Hornby on a Friday.

Polar Bear Swim 2014

It happens every year. If you click on the "polarbear" label, you can see where we started 7 years ago and how we got to where we are today. 57 swimmers and hundreds of spectators. Good times!

Dragonfly freezes Windows 8.1. SOLVED!

My good buddy, Jeffo, warned me about crawling into the rabbit hole that is espresso coffee. At first you think, Ill get a machine and have great coffee. No. You need a grinder... A convex tamper... The grind has to be just right... The temperature can't be too hot... Or too cold. There is an infinite number of ways to tweak the variables when attempting to get the best cup of coffee.

These Klipsch S3's are the BOMB! As earbuds go they have amazing sound and block out 95% of external noise. I wear them when working and can hear podcasts really nicely over top of the saws and other power tools. Also, Klipsch has amazing customer service. They've sent me 2 replacement sets, no questions asked,  when I ripped the wires apart by catching them on various jobsite hazards.

There is another thing that is similar in the depth of the hole in which one can fall down: music reproduction. I like and appreciate great sounding music. Crappy sounding music drives me crazy. MP3's through an ipod, even with a nice set of earbuds just don't have the same appeal as sitting in front of nice speakers, driven by a great amp.

For my birthday Rachelle gave me a killer pair of headphones, the AKG Q701s. When I sat down with them plugged into my Yamaha amp I was astounded! When plugged into the computer, however, they really highlight the problems with MP3 compression and the horrible Digital Analogue Converters in almost every computer. The solution was to spend some cash on a good digital-analogue converter. The bang-for-your-buck choice is the
Audioquest Dragonfly, a USB DAC for a reasonable price and great sound. When paired with the Hifiman EF5 headphone amp that I got as a hand-me-down (one of the best ever) from  John McLachlan, it delivers an amazing sound that is as nice as what the Yamaha amp can put out. This is assuming that you're using MP3's with  low or no loss compression and a high sample rate.

OK, so you can see that I'm well on my way down the rabbit hole and heading to someplace really warm. I was really please with this setup until Microsoft pushed out Windows 8.1. All of a sudden, the computer started freezing every 5-10 minutes and was unresponsive. I traced the problem to audio or video, narrowed it to audio, then hit on the Dragonfly as the culprit. As it turns out, I had plugged the Dragonfly into a powered USB hub. THis setup worked fine for Windows 8, but failed miserably on 8.1. The solution was to move it to a direct USB port and all is well again here in the rabbit hole. 

More Before and After Shots

One day I'll make a web page specifically for my work projects but until then here are a couple of my latest jobs:

The decking, framing, stairs, and upper deck were all rotten. We tore it all out and started from scratch.

We used site-milled cedar decking and pressure treated framing. Instead of winding staircase, we opted to make a landing an a 90 degree turn.

We then moved our operation to another client, where we turned our attention to a mud-slide down to a rickety landing on the beach. The first job was to replace the landing with something a bit more solid to support the new landscape tie staircase. There is a sandstone wall underneath that mud bobsled track. The rock added complexity by forcing us to work around it, but also let us pin the landscape ties to something very solid.

This is the new landing with the mudslide above. The rock is only 4-6 inches below the mud.

The new steps. We created a series of boxes made of 8x8 pressure treated landscape ties. They are all, but 2, pinned into the sandstone with 1/2" rebar.  The boxes still need to be filled with material and top dressed with mulch or pea gravel .

Reclaiming Cedar

We took down our old tool shed which left us with a whack of 3rd grade old growth cedar that the lumber yard was having a hard time giving away.  I was thinking firewood or fencing when one of my clients asked me for a bench for his outdoor shower. It seemed like a quick and easy job I could knock off before we left for our paddling trip so off to the cedar pile I trundled.

I selected one piece and ripped the wane off on the table saw and thought, "Hmmm... edge grain!". A pass or two through the thickness planer uncovered a beautiful piece of wood with lots of colour and variations in the grain. All of a sudden I'm in a quandary. The client wanted a rough bench but the wood demanded something more finished. That jump crosses the line from charging per hour to charging for a finished art piece.

While I'm sure that they will like the bench, I don't feel right about charging them for a piano bench when they asked for a beach bench. As my good friend, Albini, points out, the first one always takes the longest and serves as a prototype for successive works. I think I'll chalk this up to a learning experience, take the lumps on the extra time I spent, charge for a rough bench, and just feel proud of my work.

Taking my Girl to Dinner... Island style.

I was a happy recipient of a gift certificate from our local pub for dinner and drinks for two as a thank you for setting up their fireworks on Canada Day. Last night Rachelle and I put our 2 kayaks into the water and paddled around to the pub to take them up on their kind offer.

Because I'm a geek, I took the GPS and overlayed our track on Google Earth so you can see our route. Dinner was great and we had a nice time with John and Darren who chickened out of rowing the 200m from their place and walked instead.

On the way back we caught this amazing sky just after sunset. Gotta do more paddling. Especially in the evening.

GPS and Google Earth

I've never been a huge fan of GPS's. My friend, Rochus, says it stands for Generally Poor Senses. I've always felt that its primary use was to help get you through the maze of logging roads in the BC back country in hopes of getting you to the start of the hike where you would lock it in the glove box and start the adventure.

In the last few years I've been the recipient of two hand-me-down GPS units, thanks to Jeff Oh. I used the first one on a paddling trip where I took it out at the end of every day and looked at how far we traveled and how fast we went. I never used it for navigation, preferring the chart and compass option. After all, the compass never dies because of lack of battery juice.

The newer one sat on a shelf for three years before I changed the batteries and fired it up just last week. It has the ability to display maps, so I downloaded an opensource map set and took it along on a hike that Al and I did yesterday. We climbed Kings Pk, one of the higher mountains on Vancouver Island at 2060 meters. It's a relentlessly steep trail that gains all that altitude over 9KM. It was an amazing day in the hills but what was really amazing, though, was what I learned afterwards.

Elkhorn from the King's Pk Summit

The next morning I plugged the unit into my computer and started playing around with some of the features. I noticed there was the ability to plot the tracking data onto a Google Earth layer. "Have at it", I told the computer, and my jaw dropped to the floor in amazement when I saw the results. Google Earth has some really high resolution photos of Strathcona Park and it drew a three dimensional view of the mountain with a line representing our route. I was able to fly around the mountain at different altitudes, rotate a full 360 degrees, and zoom in to incredible detail. My mind was blown.

Al  descending the snowfield

At this point people like Mike Coyle and Jeff Oh are shaking their heads thinking, "How can someone who claims to be computer literate be so far behind the curve?". Well, its a good question and I can only chalk it up to an old foggie attitude of, "I just can't see what this new fangled machine can do that my old fashioned compass can't". Maybe an old dog CAN learn a few new things, even if it IS years after the kids have picked it up.

The screenshot that made me go, "Woah!"