Pisgah forest hike recap

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Monadnock and the forest floor from the Pisgah ridgeline

Monadnock and the forest floor from the Pisgah ridgeline

Susan and I had a great Saturday. We started the day by heading north to Brattleboro, VT, where we stopped for coffee and lunch fixings at the local coop. Then we headed East on route 9 to the Pisgah State Forest in NH, where we went on a ~7 mile hike along the Pisgah Mountain ridgeline. It was a beautiful day and the views from the ridgeline were great. By the time we hiked out we were exhausted. We headed further east to Keane, NH, where we stopped for coffee and watched the ‘Freedom Party’ crazies chatter a bit incoherently about their dissatisfaction at a small rally in the heart of Keane. After that we headed south to Greenfield, MA, and visited Greenfield Games. Last stop before home was dinner and drinks at The People’s Pint. I love that place!

All in all we had a fantastic day. The only downers were Soolin, who had to hike with her lead on because of her still-healing hotspot from last weekend, and my sore body which apparently wasn’t quite recovered from last week’s adventure. By the time we got to the car my ankle was super sore.

trail map and links to a gallery of pictures below. One note on the trail map – it’s slightly inaccurate because I had to manually edit the trailmap. If anything, the hike was a bit longer on the southern end of the trail than is represented below because the gps lost signal for a bit while we were in the deep forest towards the SW end of the trail.

Trail Map

http://www.trailguru.com/ui/embed/embedTrack.php?thid=435238&width=500&height=500

Image gallery

You can checkout the image gallery here. Below is a sample image to give you a sense of it:

Beautiful fall colors starting to peak through around a pond on the forest floor

Beautiful fall colors starting to peak through around a pond on the forest floor

Friday Fun: Spelunky, a roguelike…platformer?!?

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Mix together Jumpman, your favorite roguelike, and some inspiration from Indiana Jones, pour it into a PC and offer it up for free and you get Spelunky, a fabulous little platformer featuring retro 8-bit style graphics, rock solid platforming controls, and procedurally generated levels that are never the same. It’s a complete blast. Check out the video below then go download your copy over on the Spelunky site. Oh, and I should note the developer’s being rewarded for his excellent work – this is coming to Xbox Live Arcade.

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/NJPIFKSkuT8&hl=en&fs=1&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999

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High peaks hike up Wright and Algonquin recap

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Andrew JT and I summited two of the Adirondack 46ers this weekend, Wright and Algonquin. We had a pretty great time despite it being socked in at the higher elevations.What we lacked in dramatic vistas from the summits we made up for with drama on the hike. Andrew managed to forget his boots and hiked ~9 miles and ~3-4k in elevation change in his slippers, then had his newly installed crown crack out of his tooth while eating lunch. JT broke his arm the week before the hike but stuck with it anyway despite the risk. I hiked in with two dogs to save Nori from having to spend the day alone at home and ended up having to haul both their canine arses up and over some pretty rough terrain. Soolin put a period on the expedition by developing a nasty hotspot on the ride back from the hike, caused (apparently) by her pack abrading her forearm. Still in all it was a fantastic experience. I’ve knocked off 4 of the 46ers now and Soolin’s done 3. We’re already talking about our next trip. Below you can find the map of our hike and a link to a picture gallery with tons of photos.

http://www.trailguru.com/ui/embed/embedTrack.php?thid=428495&width=500&height=600

The image gallery is here.

Remembering Scott Leighton: 1-900-playdnd

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Another memory of Scott, this one poking a little fun at him. It’s possible no one outside his family remembers this one.

When I was in high school a proliferation of 1-900 for-pay calling services emerged. They covered every genre under the sun, including porn. Some of them were even free. Scott was still a little kid back then, and somehow he figured out about a 1-900 fantasy role playing game you could play over the phone. I think it played along the lines of those old fighting fantasy books – they’d read you a paragraph of text like ‘you enter a dark room. You can hear scritching noises. Press 1 to cast a light spell. Press 2 to draw your sword. Press 3 turn back,’ etc etc. I suspect F.I.S.T. was the game, though it could also have been Phonequest – I’m not sure. Anyway I remember him telling us about it at the time, and how he was trying to make his way to the end –  if you managed to get to the ending you’d win a prize. You can probably tell where this is going – Scott managed to rack up hundreds of dollars in fees before his parents figured out what he was up to.

We teased him about it at the time, one of those awkward juvenile moments for him where his older brother and friends gave him shit for not having much common sense, but I remember him standing up for himself, trying to explain how his plan was to win the prize – it wasn’t that he didn’t realize he was racking up a bill, he just figured he could make it pay off in the end.

This sort of captures another fundamental piece of who Scott was for me. He was by no means a conventional thinker, and he knew it. He wasn’t embarrased by this, or mostly not, and he wasn’t afraid to defend his ideas even in the face of withering criticism or the good natured ribbing of his friends. The truth is I really admired him for this. I often thought he was a crackpot, but he was a crackpot with a plan and the willpower to carry it out no matter what anyone else thought.

There’s a gallery of all of my pictures of Scott here. I’ve also written a few other remembrances of him, which you can read here.