[svgallery name="Mount Ellinor - Sept 09"]

We did this hike back in September on Labour day. I do have to admit the hike up wasn’t the easiest i have been on, with 4.5 round trip and a total elevation gain of 2100 ft the climb is quite steep. Usually on these trails the beginning feels easily and it gradually gets harder, but this one as soon as we started the trail looked like a staircase the climbed through the woods. The switchbacks get shorter and more and more steep until about half way through the hike at which point you should be clearing the tree lines. That is when you truly appreciate the beauty of this climb. Once you get to peek above the trees you get to feast your eyes on  a vast scenery of Washington state. The second part of the climb is fairly rocky but very well maintained. We were told that we would be greeted by mountain goats, but all I could find were quails (hence they are in the pix). One of the cool things we saw was when on the top, the clouds parted for a second and you could see a chunk of snow which I presume is permanently there just appeared out of nowhere.

Total trip time for Orsolya and I was about 3.5 hours. We got there late around 4 pm and started to climb. We managed to be back in the car around 7:30 as the sun was going down. If you are planning to do this trip bring some strong shoes. You need to go through some rocks so be prepared. Water is as usual very recommended since you might get winded fast. Take the first wooded part slower, its steep so don’t tier yourself out. Also have a sweater handy with you, on the top it gets cold. We hit heavy fog; a cloud was rolling through. Hiking poles might be a good idea too. They would definitely help with the climb up and down. If you are a photographer, be ready to take a ton of panoramics.

During the past little while I have noticed my friends, coworkers, people on the bus and pretty much every kid walking the streets have become more and more addicted to the concept of social networking. Everyone has a Facebook page, msn account, chat account and a smart phone with unlimited data plan to follow all of the above. Every time I turn around one of my friends has his/her phone out, clicking away and chuckling about some dumb comment someone else left on their Facebook wall. I know I am probably the last person in US and Canada not to have a Facebook account, and according to my friends I don’t really exist until I exist on Facebook, but personally I neither enjoy for just about anyone one the WWW to have access to all of my info, nor do I think anything I do is interesting enough for others to follow. And honestly, I am surprised you are even reading this post right now.

The reason I am writing this post is that frankly I am FED UP with people talking about this whole concept of sitting alone on their phone clicking away on a keyboard that is microscopic with a screen that is even smaller social networking. I barely do this on my desktop, with an ergonomic keyboard and dual screens, let alone on my phone. I do understand the concept, which like any other theoretical concept is great and wonderful until bunch of board people get their hands on it and then it’s just ruined. The idea of social networking, Facebook, Twitter and all alike is to keep people in touch. People that do not have access to each other and that under normal circumstances wouldn’t be able to communicate. This was never intended for a bunch of people that see each other on daily basis and talk to each other face to face to share their thoughts on a blog page.

 Social networking gone wrong:

For the 4th of July weekend we went backpacking in the Olympic National Park. So here we are miles away from civilization, we have backpacked for miles, camped on the beach and now on a hike along the coast with some sceneries that we have never seen before. One of my friends (in the photo above) sat on the rocks by the beach, away from cell phone reception, writing entries on his blog to be saved on his phone and synced at a later time. Now don’t get me wrong, I paint, photograph and occasionally scribble a line or two and totally understand the creative process. You see something beautiful and fall in a state of total inspiration and you need to write about it, I get that. And knowing this guy, I believe he is writing about something interesting (don’t know yet what it is – haven’t read it, but it’s probably good), but my problem is that instead of hanging with the rest of the 6 people on the hike and sharing that thought with us, he decided to sit on a rock and click away so that in a week or so I could read about the thoughts that he had standing right next to me. I surely would have engaged in that conversation with him and enjoyed it too.

 Good application of social networking:

In June,the international attention was focused on the struggle of the Iranian youth with the regime. Now I don’t want to get into the whole political side of things, but the amazing thing was that they used social networking tools such as Twitter to their advantage, to a degree that it got dubbed the first Internet revolution. People tweeting about where the rallies are happening, who is there and what to avoid, literally saved lives of 100s of people. Whatever the outcome of the whole struggle was, the Iranian youth showed the world their faces. They fed the information internally and to the outside media, allowing their voices to be heard, in as little a time as they had. I think that’s where social networking truly becomes powerful and in a way essential.

Another one of the cool applications of Twitter I found was Etsy on Twitter. Etsy is a website where members can sell their hand crafted “things”, anything from handmade wedding invitations to a handmade fire pits. So getting your stuff on top of the list, getting people to notice your work is important. Etsy would publish the latest things that are posted on the site and if you follow their tweets you can find out about them quickly, sort of a new marketing strategy. (BTW, check out Etsy: http://www.etsy.com/ and their Twitter page http://twitter.com/etsy)

Now I know we all don’t have revolutions to fight and I am not saying stop posting your thoughts, articles and works online. All I am saying, next time you are sitting at a staff meeting at your job, with your manager and his manager, don’t pull out your phone and tweet about how you still wish you had more of those steak fries you had for lunch. There is a time and place for everything. I post this stuff too and I don’t really know if anyone would ever read this – by the way I’m really surprised you are- but I do it at a time that there is no other soul awake around me. I sit in front of my PC at 3 AM and write about things that have been pestering me for the past little while, sort of a rant if you would. I think the aspect of all of these amenities that the Internet can now provide to bring people closer and gets them to share their ideas and thoughts is absolutely amazing and mind boggling, but I don’t think most of us use it for good.

Listen, I AM a geek; I do spend 80% of my time in front of a PC screen. But when I have one or two other human beings around me, especially if they are my friends, I tend to just want to talk to them and exchange ideas, no matter how good or bad they are. But hey that’s just me …

How does Evian make me feel? A little creeped out and sick to be honest. I don’t think i can listen to Rapper’s Delight, look at roller blades or even a child for a long time now.

The next day when we all woke up (some later than others, yeah OK fine, i was the last to wake up. Don’t tell me you thought otherwise) we realized that the fog had been so strong the night before that none of us realized there were a few other islands in front of us. On Saturday we went for a very nice hike along the the beach, sometimes sandy, sometimes rocky and watched the fog go inland and back to see.

One of the most amazing things that i think caught us all by surprise was how high and low the tide can get. On the first night the water was a few meters from our tents, but by the next morning the water had receded so much that you could pretty much walk to the nearby islands.

I know I am not the best candidate to feel nostalgic about the Walkman since the device is older than me, but I still have had a good amount of exposure to it, and to be honest with you until recently I was still using it to transfer some of my dad’s old cassettes to digital format. Since tape decks are hard to come by nowadays and if you do find one the belts inside are pretty much loose and worn out so the sound distorts. Surprisingly the Walkman still has kept up its fidelity after all these years and is still the best way to play a cassette (if you can still find one).

What I found interesting about this article wasn’t the Walkman itself, but the general era of electronics. Again, I know some of you reading this probably have a much wider range of experience with this – yeah I know, you remember the days that everyone had to gather around the big box in the living room to listen to the radio since there was no TV or you can remember that the TV took 10 minutes to warm up before you could watch it in black and white – but I still have seen them, used them and know about them. In the past decade or so technology has advanced so radically and so fast that the upcoming generation won’t even know about the things that existed in my time and that’s not that much time. To list a few the film cameras, slides, slide projectors, Beta Max, VHS, cassettes, Atari, Commodore 64, B&W TVs, standard definition TVs, Gamma tubes, 286 and all the other types of computers and last but not least dot matrix printers.

The amazing thing is that the technology has advanced so fast and so dramatically that at 26 it has gotten me talking like my great uncle talking about his younger days, when he had to hike 10 miles, uphill, in the snow to listen to some guy sing if he wanted to listen to music. Not that I’m complaining or that I feel bad, I just think the newer generation needs to be educated on the older technologies just so they don’t take the new things for granted. We are all a little guilty in taking things for granted, so next time when your internet doesn’t work or god forbid gets a little slow or when your cell phone drops the call don’t yell at, and in the words Louis C.K. “give it a minute it’s going into SPACE”.

If you want to read Scott Campbell’s article go here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8117619.stm

#1 BIG ASS STOP SIGN ON THE ROAD MEANS DON’T CROSS: DON’T CHALLENGE IT.

Valuable lesson learnt here is that Nissan Rogue is not a big enough SUV to be able to overcome washed out roads. I tried and the car proved to me its not going to go across, so lets leave it that. Next time you come across a road that there is a huge chunk missing out of it, although there are tire tracks around the crack, avoid and turn around and go home.

#2 WEAR PROPER GEAR: I KNOW ITS HOT IN THE CITY, BUT WEAR NICE PROPER HIKING APPAREL AND BRING SPARE SOCKS.

(I dont think i need to expalin this one)

#3 IF THERE IS SNOW ON THE GROUND, WATCH WHERE YOU STEP