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. 

Valient Thorr Loves Idaho

Valient Thorr |MTV Music

I was surfing on MTVMusic.com's Featured videos section and caught this hairy-looking maniac from a band called 'Valient Thorr' and was scrolling right past it when, hang on, was that guy wearing an Idaho t-shirt? All references to my home state being so rare, and generally detrimental, in the popular culture, that little yellow caution flag in my brain went up, so I went back to check it out.

Sure enough Valient Thorr himself (of Chapel Hill, North Carolina) rocks out for the duration of the song 'Tomorrow Police' with an Idaho t-shirt beneath his leather jacket and above his heavy metal belly. The best part is there's no hint of the hipster irony I'd expect from someone wearing this sort of shirt, just straight up metal. And as a result of his excellent sartorial taste, Valient Thorr has a new fan in Pennsylvania by way of Idaho.

Funny how things just seem to work out sometimes.

Leonid Meteor Shower: The Sky is Falling

We're in the middle of the Leonid Meteor Shower and here's video evidence captured from Hailey, Idaho's Friedman Airport runway camera of a meteor the size of an oven erupting in the atmosphere at 80,000 miles per hour at 12:02 am, Mountain Time Wednesday morning.

According to the article in the Idaho Mountain Express, remnants struck the ground in northern Nevada and the fireball was likely visible from several Western states. Amazing.

One Thousand Words on What's Wrong with Idaho

Road Trip: Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado and Kansas

At this point, after five days thoroughly recreating in Sun Valley, the Special Lady had appointments back East with her new job and I was saddled with the responsibility of the car and our stuff, packed into the car with all the organization of a mash of sundried tomatoes, and getting said collective out to the East Coast.

Originally a daunting prospect, some 2,800 miles of solo, man-on-freeway action, was fortuitously thwarted by the welcomed (and uncoerced) intervention of Blake - my voluntary wingman who flew in from California for the chance to hit the road and man up the Interstate system one more time.

We struck out from Boise at 6am, because suddenly we had a goal - get to St. Louis, Missouri in time to catch the San Francisco Giants at the Cardinals the next evening. We were looking at almost 1,700 miles to cover in less than two days and a heroic first day was simply a requirement.

Idaho and Utah slipped by easily, under the heady fuel of enthusiasm for the opening hours on the road and nostalgic delight at the forgotten tracks on Blake's battered, old CD collection. Somehow, amid the emergent weirdness of two guys talking nonsense in the car for hours on end, the R. Kelly/Notorious B.I.G. collabo 'I'm Fucking You Tonight' from the album 'Life After Death,' became the anthem of the roadtrip. As amusing as we found this to be, it was tough to convey to people we ran into along the way. It's hard to share the sacred space of a road trip.

Wyoming was an entirely different proposition. I-80 soars over the high plains in a mostly straight line for nearly 500 miles. We stopped in Evanston on the southwestern edge of the state and made our first gastronomic mistake of the campaign - an eight taco lunchtime pigfest at Taco Time - a place which surely occupies the second to lowest rung on the fast food taco ladder, just barely outclassing Taco John's.

From there it was a gassy, malaodorous, 85mph slog over vast, open spaces, among herds of antelope, high winds, and mile after mile of the proverbial 'Big Sky.'

By the time we turned south, the sun was getting low in the sky and the scarp of the Rocky Mountain front near Fort Collins, Colorado was backlit. We arrived in Denver a little after 8pm with the express intent of dining at Illegal Pete's, where the concept of the enormous burrito is further advanced by the so-simple-it-should-have-been-obvious step of stirring your filling ingredients together before wrapping in tortilla. This way you capture the full flavor experience in each bit and avoid the unfortunate (and now former?) inevitably of the odd biteful of sour cream or lettuce.

By 8:30 we were headed east again, but on I-70 blazing out into the Great Plains and noticed that Colorado doesn't end just outside of Denver after the nose of dogfood from the Purina plant has left the air. In fact, it goes a long fucking way east and I was starting to think, that we'd made a big mistake housing enormous burritos before needing to drive another 350 miles into the night.

I was fading fast, eyelids leaden, and beginning to hallucinate in that way particular to the weary driver. Shadows of animals and obstacles flashed on the side of the road. My reaction time and decision making were slowed by the dearth of blood in my head as Illegal Pete's product ground slowly through the GI machinery. The Classic Rock, even, wasn't having any effect.

Things were looking grim, and the decision was made to get a tin of dip at the next gas station in Goodland, Kansas. Thereafter the little wad of tobacco and fiberglass sped the nicotine to my brain and I perked right up for the long cruise into Hays, Kansas. We arrived 1am local time, thanks to the timezone crossing and settled down for 5 hours of sleep at the Best Western.

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.

Butch Otter's Got Veto Power!

It's easy to get swept up in the race of the information age and assume the superiority of all things digital as far as process, communication and generally making things easier. As a corollary to this bias, I experience frequent astonishment and sometimes scorn at the relics of systems that now seem old fashioned, hokey or obsolete. I'm talking about things like gavels, paper voting ballots and highs that don't come in pill-form.

Then there are also a few instances where old is still better. Did we improve on the wheel? Certain mechanical systems are not enhanced merely by making them more complicated. Take the penumatic suspension systems on certain British cars for example. They seem sweet at first, but I've been present at two separate failures of said systems in Range Rovers and after that the ride wasn't so smooth you must be a limousine.

The raw power in Butch Otter's ridiculous giant, red veto stamp is another such thing. I always knew veto had power, but to see it wielded in bold red ink really takes the symbology to a new level. Plus which it looks like fun while a digital binary for executive-level rejection would not be nearly as viscerally emphatic.

That said, it sounds like Butch might be getting a little crazy on veto power. Such is the risk of a powerful old tool in the hands of a powerful old tool.

Cell Phone Photography - Idaho Spring Thunderstorm

Snapped on the back of my parents' porch in the Boise foothills using the mighty 3.2 megapixels on the T-Mobile G1.

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.