First Snow

Janky quality* notwithstanding, 11 inches in October is a beautiful thing. It's a La Nina year and that usually means more storms for the Northwest.

*Scrappily rendered from Sun Valley's webcams via SnagIt video capture. 

Serving Mark Zuckerberg in Sun Valley

At the Allen & Co. conference in Sun Valley last week, media luminaries from around the globe descended on the central Idaho mountains for a week of R&R and M&A. Many famous deals have been brokered at the conference over the years from the Google YouTube acquisition to Comcast's bid for a controlling stake in NBC/Universal last year.

This year the biggest news was Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg getting duped by a would-be autograph-seeker who turned out to be a process server notifying mighty Mark that he's being sued for an 84% ownership stake in Facebook.

The lawsuit may be frivolous (claiming Facebook was bought for $1000 back in '03 by one Paul Ceglia), but the rush experienced by the process server must have been as real as it gets. As depicted in Pineapple Express, process serving is a high-stakes game of cat and mouse, even when dealing with low-profile scumbags like drug dealers. Imagine when your quarry is Mark Zuckerberg, what kind of assassin's thrill that must bring when you realize he'll be in Sun Valley for the Allen & Co. conference and you head him off at the pass. A perfect plan meets perfect execution as your spring the trap and ambush the biggest name in Silicon Valley.

Most Awesome Dream Ever?

After a restless sleep last night I woke up at 4am to wander around my apartment for a little bit and drink a cool glass of water.

Returning to bed, I hit the pillow for a few more hours of sleep and delved into a star-studded trip of a dream. I was at a party in Sun Valley at Jamie Lee-Curtis' house and as things wrapped up I somehow found myself and my trusty but unglamorous Subaru playing the role of designated-driver for Mick Jagger, Robert Plant (who rode shotgun together) and the Black-Eyed Peas in the back seat.

It Wasn't a Dream

When I was a teenager, my brother had this dream in which my parents displayed an irresponsible largesse and bought him a Porsche. He woke from this lucid dream one school morning with the feeling that it was real and went downstairs with an extra bounce in his step, anticipating how awesome it would feel to roll up to Boise High in a hot new Carrerra GT.

Needs to say, his dream was crushed. There was no Porsche in the driveway, just our beat up Volvo 740 TurboWagon (which was fast and danger, but still no Porsche). Despite the readily dismissible fallacy of his expectations in this scenario, Pete stayed salty with our parents for failing to live up to his dreams.

For my part, I tended to expect the letdown of coveted ideals realized in dreams. But not this morning.

Early Season Dump in Sun Valley

That's 18+ inches so far today, October 4, and hopefully a good portent for the season to come.

See you in December and again in February!

Road Trip: Idaho

Even though central Idaho's not really on the direct road to anywhere, I've broken up all of my preceding 6 cross-country roadtrips with a deliberate and prolonged pit stop in my native land. Since I left just over 10 years ago, I have found that nothing really recharges my batteries better than a visit to the central-Idaho Rockies in and around Sun Valley.

We pulled in late the day of the drive across Nevada and were treated to a lasting day in the Northern Rockies . Idaho, by dint of being in the northwest corner of the Mountain Time Zone, has extremely late evenings in the summertime, with ample light available until well after 10pm around the solstice.

Being before the 4th of July, the tourist seas

on hadn't quite kicked in and we basically had the place to oursleves. Plus which, the spring had been kind to the land with mild temperatures and more rain than the area typically sees. June, it would later turn out, was a record-setting month for Sun Valley with over 5.5 inches of rain, and we caught the margin between the bad and the good weather. The land was lush and green and the streams flowed fully.

Daily hikes from mellow (Adam's Gulch) to grueling (Pioneer Cabin via Corral Creek) were the order of the day and provided the full range of nature experiences, including the death defying when a surprise thunderstorm chased us down

hill from a 9000' ridge with uncomfortably close lighting strikes, crashing thunder, cold wind and pelting hail stones the size of grapes.

Summit Creek was perhaps the ideal blend of wild, high scenery and good weather. We got a late start, leaving Sun Valley around 4pm, which is insane if you know anything about mountain weather. But we got lucky and enjoyed blue-bird skies into the mid-evening and were the only people exploring a lush alpine valley with extensive beaver dams and excellent views of the northern end of the Pioneer range. The terrain was a little muddy in places, after the wet spring, and we were surprised by a lot of snow still clinging in the shadier parts of the trail. But all in all this is a great hike, with a gentle uphill and a great payoff for the effort.

On the way back down we surprised a cow moose who'd been grazing in the willows. She crashed out of the creek bottom like a freight train and headed up the opposite side of the ravine, stopping after about 50 yards and looking back to check us out.

Some Hairy Shit Out of Idaho

Being an Idahoan who's waded into the more populated pools of the world has its peculiar set of challenges, not least of which is dealing with my native turf's notoriety. Increasingly this tends to fending off embarassing news that wafts up fart-like to the national consciousness and generally for having to do with the 'sticksiness' of the place, both in terms of it's backwards political stars (Helen Chenoweth, Larry Craig, Sarah 'Go Vandals!' Palin) and the assorted wilderness-based 'news of the weird' (forest fires hotter than the sun, Ruby Ridge, the completely bat-shit crazy McGuckin event) that tends to dominate both in terms of interesting goings-on and ability to captivate city folks for its essential otherness. 

Other than the reliable, golden flagpole of Boise State Football, it seems not much good news comes out of Idaho. Thanks be to Google Reader for trying, and delivering the goods on this latest bit of word from the homeland in which the Phantom Hill pack of wolves killed a mountain lion over an elk carcass. Though not bad news, per se, this is undeniably raw stuff of a distinctly different variety than we see in downtown San Francisco. Furthermore it happened right across the road from our place in Sun Valley, which I never knew was a set for the Trials of Life.

*Credit Lynne Stone for the photo.