Summer 2008

Winter...

It has been a while... and I don't even know where to start.
In February Bjoern and Jan visited us and we went for some skiing. I was taking a class and had already planned to miss a couple of lectures, so I didn't want to miss another week, thus we had a tight schedule and I brought the two up to Whistler even though they were both not 100% fit after their week of skiing in the Rockies. Sick or not - Bjoern is an amazing skier and so I was busy in keeping them busy. We had the first warm days of the season with some great snow, but no powder. We went out to various restaurants and the boys enjoyed Garima's delicious curries. They always ate properly!

Bäßler Buben in Whistler

Pretty soon afterwards my dad paid us a visit and we had a blast. We went up to Whistler, then came back for the long Easter weekend to go see Victoria together with Garima and then went back to Whistler. Wally, a friend of David was so nice to let us stay at his place, so we had the comfort of a house instead of a hostel. It wasn't exactly sunny, but we got a great deal of fresh snow. Wally was skiing with us and he showed us some places on the mountain that I haven't seen before. As a Whistler local he is an amazing skier (like totally amazing). David's mom joined us, too, unfortunately she hurt her leg on like the last run. Victoria was nice, too. We had some sunshine and Garima and Max haven't been there, yet.

Us in Victoria

Max

Bryan was so nice to borrow us his and his wife's snowshoes over the Winter and we got to use them a fair bit. The snow on Mt Seymour was plenty throughout the unusually cold Winter and Spring, always more than 3m, towards the end of the season close to 4m.

(she likes the toque!)

In April I went with David to build a snowcave. We hiked about 10 minutes away from the skilift and found a nice place to stay. Unfortunately it was foggy, so we didn't get a view of the city down below. At first we were piling up the snow and then started to dig into the pile so that the cave would be about half in the pile, half under ground. There was so much snow that we didn't really need to pile up that much snow. We made some airvents so that we could breathe and a downward entrance tunnel to keep the warm air inside. Unfortunately we didn't spend enough time to smoothen the walls and the ceiling and condensing and melting water started to drip down on us during the night. I slept really well in my new sleeping bag (thanks Martin!), but David said it was a bit chilly. I think it is not colder than a cold night in the alpine - we had a warm winter night though.

Snowcave on Seymour

Skiing was great this season, with 22 days in total. Just the end wasn't too great. My last day was on April 20 - imagine no Skiing in May! And that day was icy on top of it - good for 108km/h on the GPS though, with demo Fischer race skis. In total I got a great number of powder days with 20, 30 or 40cm overnight, so I am happy! The good thing about the early end to skiing is that I got onto the bike earlier this season. And I think I made some great progress there, at least for myself. While I am riding things that I thought would be impossible before there's still many crazy things out there.

Spring...

Cherry blossom at SFU

Our boots above Squamish on top of the Chief.

Mount Baker

I went on a couple of hikes, Wedge Lake and Cheam Peak. And Garima joined me for the Chief. With her new hiking boots she's doing really well! The best one was no doubt Mount Baker, the huge Volcano that we can see here on clear days. Ferdinand, a friend of a friend of David was kind enough to be our guide on this all-glacier trip. We stayed overnight at a camp just at the bottom of the glacier and left early in the morning for the peak. We had great weather and Ferdinand safely led us around huge crevasses and icefalls. I think we were there just in time, with only a few crevasses being wide open and many big and stable snowbridges allowing an almost direct route across the glacier. The final section is a snowfield called the The view from the peak was spectacular and we could see the stinky steamvents down in the crater. It reminded me a lot of Iceland - a.m.a.z.i.n.g... (first I thought it was one of the guys on the peak). It was nice to see sunset and sunrise high up on the mountain again.

I recorded a GPS track for the Coleman Ridge on Mount Baker, it can be found on the 'Hikes' page. Keep in mind that the conditions on the glacier are constantly changeing and thus the GPS track can only be used for orientation.

Wedgemount Lake	Mount Baker

Rio de Janeiro and ICPS-29

Only a few days after the Mt Baker trip Albion and I left for the International Conference on the Physics of Semiconductors in Rio de Janeiro. We both had oral presentations and it was nice to see that other people show interest in my research topic. We went to the conference center on 6 days, so that kept us quite busy, considering that it was an hour long bus ride each way from the hotel in Ipanema. The conference center is far outside the growing city and we had to drive (see map) through an endless urban sprawl of shopping malls, gated communities, condo towers and, ahm, shopping malls. The city planners managed to pick up almost all the great and sustainable concepts of North American suburbia, but they thought they wouldn't need anything like elevated freeways to separate local and through traffic.
One of the city's trademarks is the mix of affluent and poor neighborhoods. The rich live in the flat areas in between the mountains and the favelas are clinging to the steep rock in between. What would be a million dollar property here, high above the city, amazing ocean, beach and inland views, is home for the poorest people there, and are we to believe the reports, subject to drug trafficking and gunfire between armored children working for different bosses.
As long as you stay away from these places things seem to be rather safe, at least during daylight. Around our hotel in Ipanema the nights were always lively with many people visiting the bars and restaurants. The only annoynace we found were the mustard squirting shoe shiners along the beach, but once I had two squirts on my shoes they stopped annoying me. Other conference attendees actually paid them $30 to remove the "shitty shitty" mustard - quite the scam!

The temperatures were quite bearable in Rio, after all it was Winter! It can be quite humid though. I wouldn't really like to know how it is there in the Summer though.

On out first day there we went to the Sugar Loaf. It was a very clear day and we got a great view over the city. Interesting: Two lineups for the gondola, one for Cariocas (people from Rio) and one for tourists. The tourist line was much shorter and as far as I could see the price was the same. After coming back down again we walked through Urca, a small and quiet neighborhood right at the Sugar Loaf, before we took the subway back to catch the bus that would bring us to the conference reception. The reception was more like soso... black bean soup in 2cl cups, some crackers and yuca (Maniok). Yuca is really good, fried, deep fried or as Farofa - yuca flower fried with ham and some veggies.

On top of the Sugar Loaf, Copacabana in the Background.

The conference excursion took us to the Corcovado with a Swiss built cog-and-pinion railroad. The platform around the Christ the Redeemer statue is about 700m over the city, offering a view of about 270°. We were there just before sunset and I had to be quick to get some photos of the city before it would be in the shadow of the surrounding mountains. Unfortunately we had to leave before the lights in the city turned on, I am sure it must be looking awesome.

On Thursday morning we went for a swim and walk along the beach. People there just love the beaches. Copacabana and Ipanema are both more than 4km each, plus a few others, the one in Barra (where the conference was) is 18km long. There are many volleyball nets set up on the beaches and kiosks selling coconut water and beer. There's also a cycle path going along the beach. We've even seen a beach child care. Well and then there are the girls at the beach, but I am not allowed to think about those ;-)

After spending Thursday afternoon and Friday morning at the conference we went to see downtown Rio on Friday afternoon. It's a very crowded place during daytime and a crazy mix of public buses, people, concrete towers and historic buildings. A few blocks away are narrow lanes with many small stores. I took some photos of them, but Albion was not brave enough to enter them - I thought walking through Granville Street at night and driving through eastside downtown is scarier, am I too naive?

Rio de Janeiro	New York

We took it easy on Saturday morning and went along the large lagoon over to Leblon. We also went into a mall. Very interestingly this must be one of the cleanest malls I've seen and people there seem to buy a lot of Rolex and Armani stuff, besides Mont Blanc pens and diamonds. The whole mall was full of iPhone posters.

The highway to the airport then made it clear again that this city also has it's scary sides. Everyone races along way faster than the speed limit would allow on the 3 narrow, elevated lanes. Is it because we read that there are frequent road blocks and robberies on the airport connector?

Here I am again... looking tired this time.

After a 40 minute flight to Sao Paulo we had to switch aircraft to get to New York, where we used our 12 hour stopover for a 16km walking tour through Manhatten. At 9 in the morning the line-up for the Empire State Building already went around the block, so we decided not to go for it. The glass cube Apple store was packed with people and some were lining up for the iPhone on a Sunday morning at about 9.30, almost a month after it's initial release. After a short stroll through Central Park we went to Times Square and were greeted by one of the scariest amounts of tourists that I've seen in a while. (That's something to note here: very few tourists in Rio, you'd only see a handful a day, not even the usual German teacher-family :) From there on we went on to the B&H photo store. A very overcrowded place, not really a cool store though, but it seems they have everything you'd ever wanted to buy. We continued our walk towards the financial district and picked up some lunch on the way. Walking through Greenwich Village it is hard to believe that your're in a megapolis... The construction site at Ground Zero is huge, so hard to imagine how it used to be a whole ensemble of buildings there, I can't really rememer how it all looked like when I've first seen it just a week before it came down. We went to see Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty before we caught the subway and train back to Newark for our final flight (out of seven) back to Vancouver, it takes more than 6 hours, almost as long as from New York to Germany.

Crankworx 2008

Vancouver got the first rainy week in months while we were in Rio and the sunshine came back for us. Last weekend I went to Whistler to see the Crankworx Slopstyle event and it was sooo hot and dusty. The camera wasn't black anymore and you couldn't take a photo towards the sun, the dust would just completely white out everything. The competition was amazing. Comparing the festival to the one three years ago it is clear that the whole sport is still developing a lot.

This time it's not me!

The village was crowded, and endless amounts of sponsors were showing off their goods. The track had full video coverage and two big screens and a large number of photographers with multiple cameras each were fighting over the best spots. The track itself was huge, the number of stunts and the their size has grown a lot, and the skills of the riders are just amazing. Ok, I'll stop talking now, see the photos, I think I've actually gotten some OK ones there.

Crankworx 2008