There is no such thing as "the Fall season"

Okay, that's it, it's winter. Just like the temperature oscillates wildly between night and day here in the desert (50 degrees is not uncommon), so it fluctuates between seasons. "Fall" around here is considered prime skiing season, and the aspen turned a brilliant yellow almost overnight last weekend. The natives tell me that the wind will claim the leaves in a matter of weeks, and then it's winter. Note to self: time to buy outrageously warm down jacket. And pants. And gloves. And better get a new hat, too. And gaiters, crampons, snow shoes... Not that my assistantship salary is enough for that kind of shopping.

Knowing that the season was drawing to a close, I wanted to get a nice summit hike in before the snow started for real. One of my fellow grad students, Stan, turned out to be a dedicated hiker and outdoorsman, and he thought it sounded like a great idea. He suggested we go to Medicine Bow Peak, which has some great views.

(Now, before anyone says anything: yes, I had a "date" this Sunday with a man. In Wyoming. To go up a mountain and "enjoy the great outdoors". And yes, I have seen Brokeback Mountain. At least there weren't any sheep involved. Now get your mind out of the gutter and enjoy the narrative)

The forecast was 60-70 degrees, sunny skies, but with about three inches of snowfall the previous night. No biggie, I thought, a dusting of snow is nothing I can't handle. I put on enough layers for a pleasant Fall hike, grabbed my hat as an afterthought, and we set off. Unfortunately, "forecast" and "actual conditions" are not always the same. We got an early start to avoid afternoon thunderstorms (people are killed regularly by lightning strike on Medicine Bow Peak), but that landed us smack dab in the middle of the remnants of last night's storm. And as we ascended the range in Stan's trusty Toyota, the sun turned to cloud, the cloud turned to rain, and finally the rain turned into snow. When we reached the parking lot at the trail head, it was so full of snow that the car couldn't make it in, and conditions quickly worsened:


After getting out of the car and being hit by a blast of frigid air, a friendly guy driving a snow plough came by and advised us a bit. It took him all of 30 seconds to figure out that we were grad students, out-of-towners, and completely clueless about local conditions. In the most respectful way possible, he suggested that we at least switch to another parking lot higher up. By the time we got there, it was a complete whiteout, and the weather wasn't going to get friendlier up on top of the mountain. We decided that today wasn't a good day to die, tucked our tails between our legs, and sped down the road to sunnier climes. A few thousand feet further down, we found them:


The short hike around Libby Creek was lovely (and very reminiscent of home), but its absolutely best feature was one we didn't actually get to see: Swastika Lake. Yes, I shit you not, a few miles into the woods, there's a good-size lake by name of... Swastika. We laughed for a few minutes about that, and vowed to come back with Nordic skis later in the season and explore what was obviously Nazi High Country. Really, what were they thinking?
Also, Stan stumbled upon what looked like a good place to go fishing (plenty of trout, even now):


Say what you want, but they don't make the scenery ugly around here.

We stopped in Centennial for lunch on the way back. An ex-logging/mining town, it would barely qualify as a minor village back home. It seems driven by tourism these days:


And of course, by that time the skies had cleared, and the promised beautiful weather materialized. The fall colors are vivid, although short-lived:


In my bid to climb/hike/bike up the side of as many things as I can, I spent most of last weekend in Vedauwoo. In a fit of hubris, I decided to have a go at the real wide crack climbs around here, having been lulled into false security by the amount of tape the locals use. However, you can't tape your whole body:


The rock beat the living crap out of me, both Saturday and Sunday, but I did have a lot of fun along the way. Climbing is a bit masochistic even at the best of times, but climbs like this really highlight that aspect of the sport. But since I'm not slight of build, tall of stature or an endurance monster, I figure this is where I can make my mark. These cracks basically require (in addition to awkward technique) a lot of brute strength, relatively big hands and a willingness to suffer. All these attributes I got. Horn's Mother, here I come!

Harboring further delusions of grandeur, I also went biking with one of the international students, Irene from the Chezch Republic:


She plays basketball for a living (or, well, for a scholarship), and in addition to athleticism brought a lot of youthful exuberance to the enterprise. That was a damn good thing, because it was looking like a long ride:


We set our sights for Pilot Hill, which my good buddy Joe claimed to be "not more than an hour of of town". I knew something was fishy about that advice, since he's coaching the cycling team. That hill also happens to be visible for miles around, which means it's fairly tall. Nevertheless, we biked toward it. We picked up the standard trail after about an hour - that should give you an indication of how good Joe's advice was. The trail went on seemingly forever, always at an infuriating angle: steep enough to suck the life out of your legs, but not steep enough to excuse getting off to walk. Since both me and Irene are flatlanders, we were huffing and puffing like badly treated locomotives all the way. My legs actually cramped out on the final hill, but I tried not to let on. Really, I'm more humble than I once was, but I'll be old and gray before I give up on anything in front of a pretty girl. As luck would have it, we did finally summit:


Was it worth it? Yeah, kinda. You forget the pain soon enough, and it was a damn fine view. The ride down was pretty exciting, too, since it was five miles of fairly steep biking. My shitty Walmart bike was rattling as if it was going to explode at any minute, and the noise scared up a big herd of antelope. Their flight behavior is interesting: typically the does go off first, and then the buck only comes out and checks it out once he's satisfied that the situation is under control. Yeah, real brave...

And work? Oh, it's progressing. My week days are pretty much spent in the lab and in class. When I finally make it home, it's time to eat something and then read journal papers until I go to bed. Which reminds me, I have a big-ass stack of things to go through before tomorrow. Time get to it. Catch you later.

The shape of things to come

Things are settling down in the Wild West. My most basic needs (money, food, shelter, coffee) are finally all in place - the cash was touch-and-go for a while - and I've been diving into my new life as a grad student. Being a creature of habit, I find having a routine pretty soothing. I've established a fairly good one now, I feel. Work at the lab (occasionally interrupted by classes) all day long, eat free food here and there, go climbing at the gym two times a week, read journal papers and/or biochem book in the evening, leave town for The Great Outdoors during the weekend. This is a considerable improvement in many ways on my average day in London.

Especially health-wise -- I'm losing weight like crazy, here, despite being fed greasy pizza and cheese-drenched Mexican food a few times a week. Cutting down on the booze worked real well too, although after about five minutes of uphill hiking (or just biking to work in the morning) I'm still huffing and puffing. I guess I can still blame the altitude, but that excuse is only good for another month of so. On the upside, I'm going to have more red blood cells than the most EPO-infused Tour de France sprinter before long.

And I seem to have promised some pictures. And now, after getting that long-lost power adapter (thanks, mom and dad!), I can deliver. First, I get up in the morning and wander aimlessly around my shiny new apartment:



Take a look out the window - the weather is usually good, but afternoon thunderstorms hit at the drop of a hat:



Anyway, time to be off. The lab is there waiting for me:



I admit, the lack of windows is a bit depressing... But it's not like I'm staring at anything except the computer screen anyway. The research is going, well, forward. There's a certain amount of grunt work involved in generating a dataset, irrespective of how you do it (lab bench or database search), but I should be hitting the "now, what does it all mean?" stage pretty soon.

But if it's a suitable day, you can always bugger off to the climbing wall to refresh yourself. If the day is especially suitable, you might even go to a comp. And should you by some miracle be the best competitor in your class (because e.g. the hardmen aren't there), you can be a genuine, certified bouldering champion:



That T-shirt right there pretty much tops any previous athletic achievement for me. I have way more awards, diplomas and medals from running track, but none of those actually say that I won something. Ah, America, the land of oppurtunity...

Soon enough, hunger drives me home again. I continually thank God that I have a kitchen of my own, because the alternative is fast food (argh) or eating at the Washakie Dining Hall. According to those unfortunate souls who live in the residence halls (the tallest buildings in Wyoming, by the way, at all of 11 floors) the options over there aren't exactly enchanting. And really, are they gonna cook me up some nice Thai food? I think not.
On the way home, you might happen to see the sun go down over the Snowy Range:



Ah, man, I love living here already. In London, there was no way to see the sun go down because three million buildings were in the way. And of course, clear skies weren't particularly frequent. Here, I can usually enjoy the view of snow-covered peaks as I bike to the lab, and catch the last rays turning Pilot Point over on the Laramie Range a lovely shade of pink as I make my way home. Truly, I seem to have hit the right spot.

The work week, intensive as it is (take a look at "Piled higher and Deeper" (what's the acronym? Think about it...) if you don't believe me), eventually ends, and then you can get the heck out of Dodge! There's nothing to do inside Laramie, except possibly drinking, and I've had plenty of that during the last couple of years. I try to spend as much time outdoors as I can, and one very good place to do it is Vedauwoo:



Not twenty minutes from home (in a car, of course), I have an entirely mountain range's worth of forest, hills and huge piles of granite. Could it possibly get better? This place pretty much outstrips the entire Västerbottens län for climbable rock, and them routes are mighty tasty, too. My bizarre fetish for cracks that are wide enough to swallow your entire leg is working to my advantage, as Vedauwoo is famed all over the climbing world for its variety of wide cracks. Unfortunately, it's also quite renowned as a place that will eat your flesh and drink your blood if you don't wrap your entire body in tape:



Those stories of flesh-eating cracks are slightly embellished (as all good stories are!), but not that much. They bit me good today, and although I didn't leave much blood behind, it certainly hurt pretty bad. As compensation, the rock treated me to some really excellent climbing, and in three days I've done an entire season's worth of classics. I'll admit this place doesn't quite have Offerhällans grandeur, or Ringkallen's sweeping vistas, but for sheer quantity and quality it beats the pants off either. Woo-hoo!

Of course you can't go climbing without some good buddies to hold the other end of the rope, and yell/encourage you when the going gets tough and you think you're going to fall to your death. This weekend, I've been out with Dan and Karin (sadly, no Swedish connection there), Laramie's only color-coordinated climbing couple:



Who knew that married people could be so much fun? Ooh, bit of a preconception creeping up on me there...

If you want to see some more pretty pictures, including some halfway decent shots of my co-workers in the lab and on the rock, take a look at my Flickr page. You can also look at just the climbing shots, if you want to.

To Montana on a bicycle

Sweet Jesus, I'm tired! And it's related to biking to Montana (well, almost), but we'll get to that.

So now I've survived my first week of classes here in America. Of course, nothing much actually happened since it was almost all introductions ("You will be graded on your attendence [...] GPA [...] office hours"), but still some sort of milestone. To my considerable glee, I only have one bonefide lecture-and-exam class this semester (Biochemistry), which means more time for actual work (i.e. research) and climbing (hooray!). Nevertheless, one professor has already managed to put the fear of God into me and presumably most of his students: I swear the guy is some long-lost twin brother to my physics teacher from junior high (Olle, for those of you who were around then). The only real difference is that Olle wouldn't have worn those loud shirts...

Speaking of loud shirts, let's makee some cultural observations regarding the Americans. For one, most of them are not snappy dressers. The professors and other professionals do don shirts and slacks from time to time, but mostly the all-pervasive uniform is jeans and t-shirt (or cargo shorts and t-shirt). On one level it's liberating, but on a Swedish cultural level I think they all look less than impressive. Really, guys, would buying some nice outfits be be too much to ask? But naturally, within the year I'll look the same.

Another oft-stated opinion about the US is that everything is bigger here. And it sure as hell is. For instance, I just had a muffin that actually contained more calories than my entire lunch (some lovely Gulaschsuppe). The cars -- or rather trucks -- around here are so big that I keep looking over my shoulder expecting to see a bus or 18-wheeler zoom past me when I bike to school. The streets are wider, the cups of coffee are more voluminous (but tasteless), the veggies look like GMOs all the way, and people... no, people aren't actually bigger here. I haven't seen more than about five real fatties all week, which is considerably less than in London. People tell me it's the altitude: it just makes you waste away. I'll believe that, and hope for it: still have hundreds of pints from British pubs to atone for.

More specifically, Laramie is nice so far. I came here looking for a break from the high tempo of big-city life, and the town sure delivered. The traffic is leisurely, people are polite, and no-one really seems to be in a hurry anywhere. Of course that comes back to bite you every so often: the raging incompetents at the local electronics store aren't just dull-witted, they're lazy to boot. I've been trying to buy a power adapter off them for two weeks, and still no sign of it. Eventually I just gave up and asked my parents to send one from Sweden. Indubidably it'll be faster.

And the bike ride to Montana? Well, it's tied into "everything is big". I don't have a car, and since my climbing plans on Saturday fell through, I thought I'd bicycle to the nearest climbing spot instead. Roger's Canyon was supposed to contain decent limestone, and be placed just "ten minute's drive out of town". That works out to about 10 miles, or 13 if you count going from my house to the edge of town. So I set off, thinking that I could easily bike 10 miles. Hell, I'd done so in less than 30 minutes before! Unfortunately, I failed to take several things into account:

1. Altitude gain. The canyon lay in the hills to the north-east, and they were of course higher than the surrounding plains. I don't know how much higher, but I sure spent a lot of time in first gear.
2. Road condition. Roger's Canyon Rd turned out to be under construction, and half of it wasn't paved. Going uphill on gravel pretty much sucks.
3. The wind. A bit silly to forget about that, but the wind always blows in Wyoming. Yesterday, in 40 mph gusts. Biking into it meant shifting down to about 0.5 gear.
4. The distance. You can see so far around here -- looking north you can almost imagine Billings, Montana in the distance -- that everything seems close. But in fact, it's miles and miles and miles to go still.

So what I actually did was bike there, sat around in an exhausted daze, half-heartedly pawed the rock a bit, and then started home when thunder started breaking over the hills. Going home was marginally easier than heading out, but by the time I came home (25-odd miles later) I couldn't quite decide whether I should pass out, seek medical attention or just sit down and cry. In the end I opted for just lying still for about four hours. If this doesn't get my red blood cell count up to Tour de France levels, I don't know what will.

And that's it for now. I just told Joe I'd see him fairly soon down at the climbing wall, and I need to swing by my apartment to pick up my shoes first. But next time, I promise, some pictures!