Does this scare you?

I went for my last bike ride 4 days ago and my first ski today. There is only a little bit of snow in town, but 20 minutes up into the hills and it is full on winter. Don't worry, it isn't as scary as it looks.

But if you want to be even more frightened, then how about a picture of me in tights?

Downhills are still the most fun.

Jenny and I already have our seasons passes, so we'll be seeing a lot more of this for the next half year.

The end.

Creature Comforts

Popeye has been home with us in Whitehorse for almost 5 months now, and she seems to have adjusted to her new larger aquarium and heat lamp without any hiccups. She spends so much time in the artificial sun that I feel a little guilty for not setting a heat lamp up for her sooner.

Still looking pretty good for a 12 year-old reptile. Just a couple of wrinkles around the neck.

Lady Luck

A couple of weeks ago, a good friend from geology visited Canada after spending much of the past year exploring for uranium in Africa. Mike and Lindsey came up to Yukon for a week of northern fun, which included going to Dawson City to have an end-of-season celebration with drinking and gambling at Diamond Tooth Gertie's. Dawson City is unlike any other town in the world -- at the peak of the Klondike Gold Rush in 1898, Dawson was the largest city in western Canada at 40,000. Today it is just over 1000 people, and local bylaws stipulate that all buildings (new and old) must be built to look like frontier buildings from the first half of the 20th century. All of the streets are dirt and all of the sidewalks are boardwalks.

Jenny and I stayed at the Downtown Hotel. This is what all of the hallways looked like. I don't know who the women in the paintings are, but I'm going to assume that one of them is Lady Luck. The lowermost painting is of the outside of the Downtown (I forgot to get a picture).

The Downtown Hotel is also home to the Sourtoe Cocktail -- put the toe in a shot of booze, drink it and have the toe touch your lips in order to become a part of this elite club. This is in fact a real human toe that has been dehydrated. Jenny and I didn't do the shot this time around, but became Sourtoers last summer when we did a week long canoe trip on the Yukon River to get to Dawson City for the summer music festival.

Our Dawson trip was made even nicer by the fact that it was financed by Lady Luck. The morning of our canoe trip on the Takhini River, Jenny and I walked outside our front door and found four $50 bills blowing across the ground. We found $200 on the ground! This became our Dawson money. There is no need to go into details about where it went, but needless to say an evening of drinking and gambling in a frontier town can easily lay waste to Lady Luck.

Domesticated

Most of my recent posts have been about being outdoors, but don't think that all is not well on the home front. Jenny and I have joined a cooking co-op comprised of a group of 10 Whitehorse friends. Once a month, everybody gets together and exchanges frozen meals in meat, chicken, veggie, soup, and baked goods categories. So for the next few weeks, we have a bunch of ready made meals in the freezer. Of our new meals, we've only tried a tasty dahl and chickpea curry, and lasagna will be next.

We made enough Indian Jambalaya to feed 40 people.

In order to join the cooking co-op, we needed more freezer space to keep a mound of food. I looked in the newspaper for a used freezer, but my search was unsuccessful and we ended up having to buy a new, small (3.6 cu ft) freezer. What I did find in the paper was a lady selling this gorgeous philodendron. I've liked these plants ever since seeing Marcie's and Dwayne's. They wouldn't be nearly as cool if they lacked the holes (the leaves that is, not Marcie and Dwayne).

Grey Mountain

Just a few shots from a day-long hike'n bike I did to get to the north peak of Grey Mountain (the peak on the left in the picture below). The south peak can be reached in about an hour with a drive and a hike, and I've previously posted pictures of its view. The north peak sees way fewer visitors and felt like more of an adventure.

If you drove straight into this picture down the South Klondike Highway, you'd see breathtaking mountain views for an hour and a half, then end up at the Alaskan coast in Skagway. Along the way you'd pass by Carcross, where there is amazing biking, Log Cabin, where there is great backcountry skiing/boarding, and the Chilkoot Trail, a popular hike that takes you over Chilkoot Pass, which claimed many prospectors' lives during the Klondike gold rush in the 1890's. That highway holds a lot of fun.

If you drove straight into this picture, you'd pass by the left hand side of Marsh Lake (big lake in the background) and be heading east on the Alaska Highway -- our main supply line to the rest of Canada.

Powderface Ridge

Quite a few of my friends who I've known for 10+ years have gotten married over the past year or so. That necessitated going through stacks of old photos to find incriminating evidence for wedding slide shows. Although not incriminating, this picture is probably 12 years old, was taken with a really crappy point-and-shoot film camera, and is still one my favourite photos. It epitomizes my summers during the early years of university when whoever was free on a particular weekend would pack camping and biking gear into a vehicle and head out to Jasper or Kananaskis. This particular photo was taken along the Powderface Ridge trail in Kananaskis, and was one of the first times I remember playing photographer and setting up a shot that I thought would look really good. I remember thinking the light was stellar, and had Jasen pose on a knoll just off the trail, with the valley and the Rocky Mountains in the distance. I had only been mountain biking for 3 or 4 years at this point and I learned a lot about photography by looking at photos in mountain bike magazines. Even looking back on it now, I think it is a stellar photo, and wonder how much better it would have looked if I had used a nicer camera. I didn't even have the pleasure of seeing the photo immediately on the screen of a digital camera.