I would
like to once again draw your attentiopn to one of th3e coolest, best little online adventure documentaries I"ve
ever seen. Called Powde Road, the site is the product of passion. Passion for
the outdoors, for good friends, for the yawning expanse of Alaska, and the promise of extreme back-country skiing. I
can really go on and on about how great Powder Road is, both the book and the
site, but I think you need to go there and see it for yourself.
Skiing From New York
I’ve been wanting to do a post like this for quite some
time. Here I’ve been living in New York City for over six years. Six years! man, when I came here I planned to stay for
two years, tops. But I honestly can’t leave this place. The city’s energy, the endless number of things to do, the
incandescent vitality of the city is like no other I’ve ever experienced. Now, that said…when it comes to getting
outdoors, New York can be a pain. When I was in Seattle, all it took was a quick walk out your front door, hop into
your car, perhaps lashing your mountain bike to the top, and lo! in half an hour you were in the wilderness riding some
sweet single-track. Not so here.
Now this rambling preamble is to call to your attention this fine post on Gothamist that lists some of
the places you can go with your board/boards to ski. Some of the areas are familiar to me, like Camelback in PA, but
others were unknown. But now I know. And I have got a serious ski jones on, so this the kind of thing I need to fire me
up.
Red Corner: 2014 Olympic Games?
Today not only begins the 20th Winter Olympics Games in Turin, but also speculation on where the next Winter Games will be held. Vancouver has already been selected for 2010 (get your tickets now), but the location for 2014 is still up in the air.
With this in mind, Nick Kaye of the New York Times looks deep into his crystal ball to explore those venues being considered for the 22nd Games. I was happy to discover that four of the seven locations are surprisingly in the former Eastern Bloc; Almaty, Kazakhstan, Borjomi, Georgia, Sochi, Russia and Sofia, Bulgaria.
Kaye’s short article introduces the reader to these winter playgrounds that are very well known in their home countries, but rather unheard of anywhere else. He then weighs the pros and cons of each location-such as no W Hotel in Borjomi.
Although Kaye doesn’t come right out and say it, I got the impression he feels most of these former commie resorts are going to be long shots and that Western darling Salzburg, Austria may get the eventual nod.
Snow in the Desert
You think of the great accomplishments of man:
curing polio and decoding the genome, landing on the moon, Ulysses, Pop Rocks. And then you see something like this and
you ask yourself whether it qualifies as a great human accomplishment, or whether its falls under a more suspicious
category of quintessential human folly.
I’m talking about the idea, nay the reality, of building a ski area in the desert.
We’ve blogged about this a couple of times before, but I was thinking about it this morning and an interesting question
occurred to me. But first, the facts: In Dubai, one of the world’s riches, oil-soaked Sheikdoms/Emirates/etc.,
conspicuous consumption has reached such unfathomable heights that they have put permanent snow where once there was
only sand. Here’s something for the religiously-inclined among you to ponder:
Could such an act as
building a ski area where He put a desert be in any way construed as defiance of God’s will? Just food for
thought on this Thursday morning.
Zanier Heat-GX Gloves
Nothing’s worse than cutting some sweets turns on
the hill and having the experience compromised by very cold fingers. OK, there are a few things worse. Being caught in
an avalanche, slammed into a tree and having angry squirrels eat your eyeballs while you’re unconscious, well, that’s
worse. But being cold is still a drag.
Now over the years I’ve seen my share of remedies for cold
extremities. Remember those little shake and bake bags you could buy and stuff into your gloves. They were pretty good,
but they didn’t last very long and you had to throw them away afterwards and besides they really didn’t reach into your
glove fingertips.
Well, check out the Zanier Heat-GX
gloves. Each hand is powered by a rechargeable 4 oz. lithium battery that can be configured in a trio of heat
settings at are 86º, 98.6º, and 131º…(really, 131 degrees?). The batteries last for 10, 4.5 and 2
hours respectively, which means you’re likely gong to have to cart around a lot of extra batteries, esp. if you want
that uber-hot setting. And what’s the price of comfort? 250 bones.