Cleaning Mt. Rushmore Gallery

by Erik Olsen on

For my first job out of school (not counting working as a ski photographer at Squaw Valley) I got to travel around
the country and see many of our National Parks. That’s one of the reasons that I rave so often about the
National Park Service and maintain a deep respect for the people who work for it…at
least the ones outside of Washington. And one of the coolest trips I ever got to take was to see
Mount Rushmore. The view from the bottom that most tourists get is cool. You see
the four heads up there carved into the mountain, and you think, hey, that’s pretty neat. I was lucky enough, however,
to get to climb up on top of the heads, to walk around on Lincoln’s prodigious brow, to hang a loogie off Washington’s
nose. Ah, those were the days.

Well, as I say, most people can’t get up to the heads anymore. But the next best thing for people sitting at the desks
right now is this gallery from MSNBC of the
recent effort to clean the heads of Rushmore. According
to this piece it was the
first time that the four Presidents have had their faces washed since the sculpture was completed. They probably washed
off my loogie, too. Damn.

Ski Chile – Thermas de Chillan and Ski Arpa

by Erik Olsen on

Coupla times here we’ve blogged about the skiing in Chile, so why not do so again. After all, it is winter down
there right now, and the slopes are open and welcoming. Chile is one of my favorite countries in the world. I lived
there for a year some time ago and consider it one of the best times of my life. When winter rolled around, I took a
few trips down south of Santiago to do some skiing and found the raw open splendor of the Andes a terrific contrast to
the often over-crowded, over commercialized (and over-priced) resorts in the US.

This article in the
Globe and
Mail takes on two places in Chile. The first is an area that I confess I’d never heard of before. Called
Ski Arpa, this little area is owned by Toni Sponar, an Austrian skier who used
the money he’d saved working as a ski instructor in Aspen, Colo., to buy the property where his little resort now
stands. There are no lifts at Ski Arpa. You get up the mountain on two Sno-Cats that haul your a$$ uphill to wherever
you want to go. Talk about mobility.

The other place mentioned is Thermas de Chillan, which I
have skied. It’s a fine little area, perhaps not as well-developed as
Portillo or other places, but that’s the key to its charm.
There’s still time to buy your ticket and hit the slopes, so if you’re jonseing for some snow, check it out.

Michael Fay Interview

by Erik Olsen on

I will bet you today that when the history books are written about great explorers of this
century, one name that will be more than a footnote is that of Michael Fay. Fay, you may remember, completed an amazing
journey crossing Africa on foot. He called it the Megatransect. And just recently, he
also crossed the entire continent
in a small plane, recording data to help us better understand the environmental changes taking place there.

NPR does an interview with Fay as part of
their superb worth listening to. This is a modern day adventurer who is teaching us a great deal about a place we
hardly know. Btw: don’t miss the additional material on Fay and his exploits
here.

Africa Planner

by Erik Olsen on

Africa is in the news a lot these days for a lot of nasty things.
Starvation, war, genocide. Africa is in a bad state. But the reality is, Africa can still be a decent place to travel.
We tend to look at the continent holistically, as if the devastation and misery we see on TV and in the paper affects
every country. That’s not true.

Here is a travel primer
for Africa that helps you decide where to go (first choose the part of the continent you want to visit), helps you
figure out what you’ll need in terms of both packing supplies and inoculations, and provides tips on clearing customs
and so on. If you are heading to do a safari, there’s help on the site to do that as well. It is a very handy guide,
expertly written and comprehensive, and has sections worth perhaps printing out to help you figure out your Africa
trip.

McSweeney’s: Extreme Accountant

by Erik Olsen on

Always on the lookout for a good laugh, we often check in with the folks over at McSweeney’s. Why? Because they are,
as Alduos Huxley might have put it, so frightfully clever. A few times I’ve posted McSweeney’s pieces that have no
relevance whatsoever to travel or sports…but today things are different. You’ll get a belly-laugh out of
this piece by Julia Haslauer called Richard
Salvatore: Future Extreme Accountant Endorsed by Gatorade. I don’t want to explain what it’s about because, well,
explaining humor always seems to drain the humor out of things. So give it a read. And if you think it’s funny…would
you could you?…maybe you’d enjoy a story I wrote a few years ago, which is similar in a way, called
The Matador.