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In high school I was pretty close to the last desk of the viola section (which takes some doing) of the Central Kentucky Youth Orchestra. It was a fine way to keep me out of the pool hall, I suppose, but what’s particularly fun and absurd about it in retrospect is that our conductor was overly ambitious and had us play things we had no business playing. Once we played the Ives Camp Meeting Symphony, which is supposed to go in several directions at once but maybe not as many as we took it in. I think there w
Trip report day 2: The next morning it was evident that temperatures had gotten down to freezing or a bit below, at least the air right over the lake: the previously unfrozen edge of the lake was covered with a thin layer of new ice, and there was a spot where meltwater feeding the lake had pushed this thin ice layer into concentric rounds of smashed ice ravines, some kind of Arctic tectonics in miniature.
For me, part of the impetus for this trip was to regain a feeling of competence in backpacking. I did a moderate amount of backpacking in my teens and early 20s — I was very much not an expert, but I could generally make things work, knew what to pack and what not to. I quit doing it when I moved to the East Coast, and really didn’t do much hiking at all for 15 years or so. When I moved to California, I bought a pack on clearance, but it still took me a couple of years before I arranged things to get out on
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