das loft

The moon is bright white again. I guess the smoke has suddenly moved on.

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Today the light was filtered. The sun shone golden-pink all day and the sky looked slightly hazy. Now the moon glows orange. They say this is because the smoke from forest fires on the mainland has finally blown to the island. Kind of alarming, in a way...

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Finally, here are my photos and videos from my arduous climb up Mount Cokely (near Mount Arrowsmith) last Wednesday (I didn't quite reach the top, though). This is the trail I followed (I didn't go around the loop, just along the right arm both ways). I rode my bike to Cameron Lake and parked my bike at the trail head and hiked the rest of the way. It was pretty hard. I got blisters on the descent, which made it even more difficult to go on. But I did and I think it was worth it.

I made three videos at a lookout point along the trail: first (4.1 MB), second (1.8 MB), third (1.1 MB).

Here are the pictures. The building in the second-last photo is the old Arrowsmith ski lodge. They're building a new one nearby.

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Here are a few pictures from my bike ride along the Weyerhauser logging roads more than a week ago. Again I had to sneak onto the road from a side trail; the guard wouldn't let me through the front gate due to high fire danger.

These roads are much like the many other logging roads found around here. I think I encoutered bear droppings on one of them, so I didn't proceed further on that one. I passed a farm with donkeys grazing. The mountain in the distance is Mount Moriarty. One day I'd like to hike it.

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"What the hell is Rocket Robin Hood?"
- Robin Cormie

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Heightmax, eh? I saw a banner for this on Suprnova.org and was rather amused. I guess it's time to purge the human race of them nasty shorties.

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Ohh yeah.. I made plum cake, blackberry crumble, and macaroni and salmon salad today. Right now I'm eating the salad along with a colourful garden salad from all our own veggies (with zucchini flowers and nasturtiums), and I'm very happy.

Now Kara's whining that "there's nothing to eat." "I guess you'll just have to suffer," I tell her. "Jerk," she replies.

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They have a fig tree! A fig tree, Jon!

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Kara and I just discovered that Irene (my uncle Brian's mother) has a beautiful plum tree in her garden - in addition to all the apple and crabapple trees surrounding her house. (Her property is adjacent to ours.) So while we were there we picked a ton of plums in no time. I also picked a bunch of injurious blackberries today.



Anna, Brian, Mya, Kara and I just came back from a swim in the river. The river feels slightly warmer today. It's nice because there are now several shallow streams crisscrossing the river basin, instead of just the one fat one. Someone upstream has been diverting the water. Hopefully it will stay like this.

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Well, not too much going on here. It's been pretty hot. People have been planting under the hot sun. I've been doing very little. My excuse was that my legs were sore, and it's true. Two days ago I climbed 1091 m upwards, almost reaching the top of Mount Cokely. Mount Cokely is a peak very close to Mount Arrowsmith, of which you've seen too many pictures already. But the pictures from my climb should be awesome. I just have to be motivated enough to post them. All in good time.

I haven't been doing nothing, though. I did bake a couple loaves of bread and make some quite delicious brown rice pudding. The blackberries are ripening, so it will soon be time for blackberry pie. The apples and crabapples are ripening too. Mm, mm, good.

Kara "inspired" me to sow a peach pit and a mango pit a few weeks ago, so I did. And they're both sprouting. I'm not sure which is which. It would be neat to grow mangoes indoors.

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I'm not sure if this is generally true of the west coast or what, but I've noticed that people here tend not to shower as much as I'm used to. The only person I know who showers every day is my uncle Brian. Everyone else showers less often (or so it seems), and some of my cousins seem to go for weeks without showering (though they are younger than I). I'm not saying there's anything at all wrong with it, I'm just making an observation. They may very well have healthier immune systems because of it.

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Last Thursday Kara and I rode our bikes to Lasqueti island (first rode to French Creek, then took them on the ferry to the island). Our idea was to camp at her friend's house if possible, or if she wasn't there, camp somewhere on the beach. Her friend wasn't there, so we looked for a place to camp on the beach. But there were "no camping" signs everywhere. When I asked a couple Lasquetians about this, they said they knew for a fact that there was no public camping allowed on the island. They told us that there was a lady who sometimes let people camp in her yard for a few bucks. We went to her but she said her yard wasn't in a state to allow safe camping, so she said (and we didn't hear this from her) that if we were quiet and discreet enough we could camp in one of the "no camping" areas. So that's what we ended up doing.

Here are some photos from the trip:


Here are some amusing videos from the trip:

• Kara pissed off because of the heat and the camping situation (3.7 MB)
  
• Kara and me at the beach discussing topics such as "alone time" (4.4 MB)
  
• Kara and me eating potato salad in the tent using clam shells (2.3 MB)

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Here are some pictures from my trip to the other side of Mount Arrowsmith one week ago. I rode my bike along the Alberni Highway past Cathedral Grove to get onto a logging road that was supposed to take me to the Arrowsmith Ski Hill Road. Unfortunately, that road went through a storage area for explosives, according to the "no tresspassing" sign (right). Had I gotten caught there, I would have had to pay a fine of $5000. I didn't think I should risk it. Instead, I explored some other logging roads that branched off in the area and photographed Mount Arrowsmith from the back a few times:


On the way back I passed several little streams of water coming off the mountain by the road. I wanted to drink from them, but I thought I should educate myself on the safety of that first.

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I've been having lots of sweet baked goods lately. I think too much.

This week I baked blueberry muffins, a lemon cake covered with strawberries, blueberry-banana pancakes, and dark, moist and spicy gingerbread. Plus, Mya made devil's food cake a little while ago and then Kara made an amazing chocolate-crusted and -streaked cheesecake. I've probably eaten more than my fair share of all of the above. Oh man. It's pretty hard to resist temptation. Let's see if I can eat only vegetables for a week.

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I will finally recount my other bike trip (from last Thursday). It was a cloudy day with 40% chance of rain, but I decided to risk it anyway. In Parksville, rain showers have been pretty light and haven't usually lasted very long, so I figured I could handle it even if it did rain. My plan was to ride along the Alberni Highway and see how far I could get. The picture on the right is a view of the mountains on the side of the road somewhere between Parksville and Coombs. Below is a panorama I photographed somewhere after Coombs and Hilliers:


My first stop was Little Qualicum Falls Park. I took a bunch of pictures there:


I took some videos while I was there, but due to the miserable state of video software for Linux, I can't combine them into one clip for you. So here's the most entertaining one (1.5 MB).

My next stop was Cameron Lake, which is just after Little Qualicum Falls. It looked like this:



Finally, I ended up at Cathedral Grove, one of the last remaining stands of giant Douglas-fir in BC. I'd been here twice before, so I just made a quick tour (3.9 MB) and left.

I tried going a bit further along the highway, but it started to get dark and smell like oncoming rain, so I turned around to go home. It started raining, and then pretty hard. I was getting drenched. So I stopped at the picnic area by Cameron Lake and huddled under the roof-covered sign there for a while. Since I was still pretty wet and cold, I stood in the outhouse there for a while to see if I could wait out the rain. I ended up being there for quite a while, and the rain didn't stop. So I decided to just go for it and ride home in the rain. It was very uncomfortable. All I had was shorts and a T-shirt, and the air wasn't very warm. The rain lasted for quite a while, on and off. At Coombs I felt I might not be able to make it all the way back to Parksville, so I took a break at the market and almost called my aunt to ask her to pick me up. But I didn't want to inconvenience anyone, so I just kept going. Eventually, I made it - even without dying.

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I've been on two more bike trips since that one on Saturday, and recounted they shall be.

On Tuesday I went back to a logging road that branched off the highway and paralleled the Englishman River on the south side. I'd tried to go on this road on my previous trip but thought I wasn't allowed (when I actually probably was). The road is owned by a company called Weyerhauser. So this time I went and I talked to a guy who was manning the gate. He told me that the public is welcome to use the road at most times, but today they were hauling logs down and it was too dangerous to allow anyone in. So I was out of luck again.

I checked my GPS, and it showed a couple public roads that got pretty close to the logging road. I took my chances with the first one, hoping that a path would lead from that road to the logging road. After a little trek on my bike, I got to the end of that road, and fortunately there was a trail that seemed to lead to the logging road. The trail went through this fireweed-covered field:


But then I reached a voluntary dead-end, of sorts. I didn't want to continue alone, and I made a video explaining why (3.0 MB). What a shame. But I took a few more pictures anyway. Ubiquitous are many delicious wild blackberries, raspberries, and other berries in the same family.


Back home I took a few pictures of my aunt's garden:

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I just got back from seeing Fahrenheit 9/11 with Anna and Brian. We went for the 6:50 showing, but it was sold out (again!). So instead we booked tickets for the 9:30 showing. We got in line an hour early so that we could get good seats. The theatre was packed full.

All arguments about the content of the film aside, this was an incredible film. Michael Moore is a brilliant filmmaker, and this is his best film yet. It made me laugh, it made me cry, it made me think. I wish my mom could have seen it. I know she would have loved it, especially his sense of humour. Needless to say, I'm probably going to see it again pretty soon.

However, the things he says about the motives of the Bush administration weren't all that shocking to me. They were probably shocking to a lot of Americans, especially republicans, and Britney Spears, but not to me. It was already clear to me Bush's motives for invading Iraq, and I think Michael Moore only has it partly right when he attributes it to profits for Bush's friends in the oil industry. According to Thom Hartmann (author of The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight), that's only a desirable side-effect: "What the war is really about is the survival of the American lifestyle, which, in their world-view, is both non-negotiable and based almost entirely on access to cheap oil." You should read Thom's very good article about this. (Also read The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight if you haven't already; that will certainly help to make that argument more compelling to you.) I believe that if Michael Moore read Ishmael and LHOAS, he would be spending less of his time bashing Bush and more time trying to come up with a real solution for Americans and the rest of the world (which, by the way, I think is probably out of anyone's reach by now; sorry for the pessimism).

Anyway, I highly recommend this film, whatever your views are about Moore and Bush. It makes some really good points about how fucked up America is. :P

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Moonshine from a few days ago.

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I saw Life is Beautiful last night. It's Italian and it won 3 Academy Awards, including Best Foreign Film. So Danika and I figured it was worth watching. It was all right. The first half of it was Marx Brothers-style slapstick comedy; the dialogue was so fast that it was really hard to keep up with the subtitles. The second half took place at a concentration camp, which I imagine made it more difficult for that kind of comedy to work, so it became mostly just "sweet" or "cute" comedy (if you know what I mean). On the whole it was all right but somewhat unrealistic.

Listening to 8bitpeoples right now. How comforting.

Today was nice. For breakfast I had muesli with freshly picked raspberries (there are lots of those already). It was mild and sunny with a few clouds - a perfect day for a bike ride. I looked at the maps on MapQuest and my GPS, and they both showed these nice long roads that ran along the Englishman River towards the mountains. One of them seemed to go to Englishman River Falls, and beyond. So I decided I'd bike that way to the falls. I asked Kara if she'd be interested in going, but she had to work a shift at the stand at 1:30 for an hour. Once I whined enough that I wanted to leave soon, however, she told me to scram. So I packed some bananas, an apple, slices of my sourdough bread with organic sheep's milk cheese, some water, my camera and my tripod, and I was off.

I first rode some really indirect way to get to the road that I wanted to get on. So I stupidly went up a mountain and came back down for no good reason. When I finally got the head of the road, I realized that it was gated off because it was a "private industrial road" (belonging to a logging company). That sucked. My GPS showed another way to get to that road, through some farmlands, so I tried checking that out. It turned out that I would have had to basically ride through someone's yard, maybe even through their house, in order to get to the road that way. How bastardly.

So I decided instead to just ride to Englishman River Falls the normal way (through Errington). That was a nice, long, healthy distance, and it was mostly uphill. I arrived there pretty exhausted, so I sat down at a picnic table and ate, drank, and was relatively merry. There were lots of cars coming into the park - one every few seconds it seemed. People of all ages, shapes and sizes.

My GPS showed that I'd already passed the point where that road exited the park towards the mountains, so I turned around and went back to that point. A sign there said "Service Road - Do Not Enter". But the gate was open, and I saw two women walking a dog on it, and I felt left out. So I entered.

The road was pretty rough - the perfect terrain for my mountain bike. It was mostly uphill, so I got quite a bit of a workout. I emerged from the forest in an area that looked as if it had been logged years ago, as there was lots of healthy vegetation in the clearcut areas. The land was covered with bright pink fireweed. I pushed on a bit more and then filmed this entertaining video (2.3 MB).

The road reached a dead end at a forest, where some trails split off in all directions. I was a bit wary of poking around in the forests without a buddy or a weapon (for the cougars and bears), so I tried to stay on a main roads where there was a good view of my surroundings. There was one trail, however, that went along the side of the forest and up a mountain. I started to walk my bike up it but then set my bike aside because it was too steep. I finally got the top and found myself on another logging road. I was pretty high (340 m to be exact) and had a good view. I photographed some panoramas:


I could see Little Mountain from the other side for the first time. Here's another silly video (2.3 MB) I made while I was up there.

After that I headed back down that steep trail to get to the first logging road. There was a fork in the trail about halfway down. It wasn't heavily wooded, so I checked it out. It headed underneath the power lines and hit another trail that went up the mountain. I went up a bit and took some more pictures and another educational video (1.3 MB).

I finally returned to my bike and rode back towards the park the way I came. At one point the road kind of ends at a gravel hill, and up the hill is a rough trail that goes back to the park. When I got to that hill I heard a rustling on my right. I looked over and a black bear popped his head up from behind some bushes by the road. Startled, I almost fell off my bike. I should have kept calm, but I forgot to read the bear warnings at the entrance to the park before I left, so I didn't know that. So I ran with my bike up the gravel hill (I couldn't ride it up there) and sped down the trail as fast as I could. Silly me.

Then I rode back home. As the sun was setting I had a craving for raspberry pie. So I went out and tried to pick four cups worth before it was completely dark. I got about three cups when it started getting really hard to identify the ripe ones. So I put on my LED headlamp and continued in the dark. It works great. I'm going to pick things in the dark all the time now. (I power the headlamp with four rechargeable AA batteries, and I charge them using a solar battery charger I got on eBay. Got to live the sustainable life...)

So starting late at night, I made the pie with Kara's help. We listened to Aimee Mann and Yann Tiersen (Amelie soundtrack). Kara had the brilliant idea of carving a face into the top of the pie. Here are the pictures, before and after baking:

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