Christine and I went to Kauai a few weeks ago for our 10th wedding anniversary (I can’t believe how quickly time has gone by). I’ve been lax about writing about it, so I’m just going to post a few photos.
More photos here: http://alexandchristine.smugmug.com/Travel/Kauai-2009
I don’t normally rant on my blog, feel free to delete…
Christine (my wife) is on her way back from a trip to New York.
Her experience on the flight out (Delta Airlines):
Her experience on the flight back (USAir):
The airlines negligance costs flyers money (over $100 in this case, but for a traveller staying in hotels this would have been hundreds of dollars). As flyers we have no rights when it comes to cancelled flights if we haven’t left the source airport. USAir isn’t responsible for getting Christine from Newark to La Guardia or putting her in a hotel for the night. For all of this hassle she doesn’t get anything.
For years I’ve been trying to keep my vacation time close to home (hence going to Ross Lake this summer) and this is just a reminder of why. We have a trip coming up soon to Kauai and I hope that our flying experiences are a little better than what Christine had this last week.
I’d like to say that I’ll just avoid USAir and Delta from now on, but it doesn’t seem like there are any “good” airlines that don’t get into these messes.
Christine and I just returned from our first kayak camping trip, a 5 day paddle on Ross Lake. Ross Lake is in the North Cascades, about 3 hours northeast of Seattle. The lake is 24 miles long, a mile or two wide at the most. It is not directly car accessible, so it stays pretty quiet despite being close to both Seattle and Vancouver.
To get there we drove up the North Cascades Highway to Lake Diablo. We put our kayak in at Lake Diablo, then paddled 5 miles to the base of the Ross Dam and paid $25 to Ross Lake Resort to portage us and our gear up to the lake. There are alternative ways to get to Ross Lake, but this is the easiest method if you have your own boat.
The lake is surrounded by mountains and there are tons of camp sitesalong the shore or on the islands. We reserved 4 nights worth of them and set off for our first one atCougar Island. Cougar Island was about 3 miles from the dam (don’t forget that we had already paddled 5 miles along Lake Diablo).Itwas a great campground with only two sites set on opposite ends of the island. We had a neighbor, but barely heard or saw him. At Cougar Island we became aquianted with what we called “feet fish”. We later learned that they are a bait fish that were illegally introduced about 6 years ago. There must be millions of them in the lake now, and you couldn’t go swimming without them swarming around you.
We were greeted that evening with a thunderstorm. Those are always fun and exciting for us because Seattle rarely gets them. The storm blew through quickly, didn’t get anything too wet, and cooled it down nicely for dinner.
The next morning was Monday and I woke up to thick fog. The lake already seemed quieter with much of the weekend traffic having gone home. We were due to move toTen Mile Island, about 7 miles up the lake. We choose a longer route and stopped by both Big Beaver campground for lunch and Devil’s Creek for a exploration. Devil’s Creek is a very deep canyon that you can paddle about a mile into. It is incredible looking up at these cliffs going right into the water and it felt 15 degrees cooler in there (nice on a hot day).
It was already 3 or 4pm by the time we got to 10 mile island and 2 of the 3 camp sites were taken. The last one was very exposed,right next to some loud campers,and didn’t offer good kayak parking. We decided to look around and found a much nicer site at Dry Creekand set up there (it is okay to move sites if you tell a ranger what is going on). The new site had great views on 3 sides of water and mountains, and a lot of space for our gear. We stayed at Dry Creek for two nights, using the day in between to go for a short hike and to get in some relaxation.
Wednesday came along pretty quickly and it was time to move again. The lake felt deserted at this point, the only people around were those who were staying the week. Our paddle back down to Spencer’s (our next campsite) was very quiet and we only saw one or other boats. The day was hot and we took a pretty exposed route to check out a waterfall across from 10 Mile Island. By the time we stopped for lunch it was 2pm and we really needed a cooldown swim. We hung out at Rainbow Point (with more feet fish than we had seen anywhere else) for a couple of hours, then headed onto Spencer’s.
Spencer’s was another really nice campground. It offered two sites and both were pretty private. Ours had a great swimming area and a lot of open trees. I wanted Christine to try out hammock camping, so we didn’t setup the tent here. Pretty shortly after arriving we started to hear thunder and it began to rain. It rained on and off that evening, but left large enough dry areas for us to make dinner and enjoy one last camp fire.
I woke up pretty early in the morning to more thunder. Everything was pretty wet (except for us), so we packed up pretty quickly and headed out. The lake was silent and calm and we had a nice and quick paddle back to the dam and our portage home.
We took our time heading back to the car on Lake Diablo. Neither of us really wanted the trip to end and were enjoying the scenery. Lake Diablo is glacier fed (Ross Lake is not) making it both colder and greener than Ross Lake. We thought about camping another night on Diablo, but the best looking camp site was taken so we just headed back to the car. When we got back to Seattle we learned that we missed a week of record heat.
I really enjoyed Ross Lake and expect that we’ll return in a couple of years. It was a great first kayak camping trip because the paddling was easy and we didn’t need to worry about tides or currents. The campgrounds were mostly excellent. It was the perfect mix of relaxation, swimming, and staying busy. The only thing that I’d change if we went again would be to take less stuff. The kayak fits way more gear than a bicycle or backpack, but that doesn’t mean that I need to bring more than I’d take for cycling or hiking.
I’ve had a couple of friends and blog readers ask how the frame is coming along.
Right now it’s on hold. This has been an extraoridinarily nice summer for Seattle (it’s hardly rained since the first week of May) and I haven’t felt inclined to spend time in the basement. Christine also lost her job, so when I’m home I like to spend time with her (where before I had a lot of workshop time when she was off at work).
I’m not a very good relaxer (you know, where you sit around doing nothing and not working with your hands), but I’m trying to get better. Maybe by the end of the summer I’ll even be capable of napping!
Anyone who reads this blog knows that I really can’t get down to 0 projects, and some minor things have been going on. In particular I’ve been fixing up our kayak (new seats, rudder lines, rudder control pedals, hatch gaskets). I’ve also been experimenting with stuff related to the Hennessey Hammock, which I’ll report back on once I’ve had some camping time in it. My goal is to make the Hennessey Hammock as fast to deploy as a tent, eliminating my only real complaint with it. I’m not inventing anything new here, I’m just copying ideas from http://www.hammockforums.net.
The photo above is from last week’s point83 ride where around 60 of us dressed up like revelers from the Running of the Bulls, and 2 people dressed up as bulls. We also had a Lego Minifig,a Ronald McDonald,and a few other characters for good fun.
Check back in September or October for some more bike and metal projects. In the meantime it might be quiet around here, with just an occasional trip report.
Scott organized this point83 trip to the Suiattle River. Until 3 years ago there was a car accessible road that followed the river and went up to three National Forest Campgrounds, tons of hiking trails, and lots of great old growth forest. The 2006 wind storms flooded the river and washed out the road and a bridge in some key locations. Now you can drive halfway up the road, then walk or bike into the campgrounds.
This changed 3 very busy campgrounds into three very remote areas.
12 of us drove up to the trailhead and rode in. Since we were only riding 8 miles this afforded us the luxury of bringing a lot of stuff. I brought two stoves and a lot of food. Rogelio brought Monica on the XtraCycle (she hurt her wrist and wasn’t supposed to ride a bike). Andre brought ice cream sundae makings to share with everybody. Derrick brought a chair, fishing gear, and a lot of booze. Kalen, Clair, Ryan, and Caroline brought a lot of food to share, including a few pounds of bacon and some home made goat cheese. Was it car camping or bike camping? The line was blurry.
The road up is very easy to navigate on a bicycle. It’s a little sandy in spots, but no one had any real trouble, even those on 23mm tires. There are few sections that were walked. There is almost no climbing to speak of.
We went to the second camp ground and had the whole thing to ourselves. The winning feature of this campground is a large lean to over an established fire pit,nice and scenic access to the river,old growth forest,and no visitors. The first campground is only 2 miles in from the trail head and still gets a good number of walk in visitors. We rode past it, but I saw at least 4 tents in the woods. The 3rd campground is after a lot of blowdown (making it harder to visit) and pretty grown over. There was one camp established there, and they had been up there for 5 days without seeing anyone.
We arrived at camp early and had most of the afternoon to enjoy ourselves. We played in the river, some of us drank too much, and there was a lot of fanastic food and laughing around the fire. No one stayed up too late or woke up too early. We had another huge and varied meal in the morning (bacon, ice cream, scotch oats, coffee, breakfast burritos, hash browns, fruit salad, corn dogs) before rolling back down to the cars. Just as we were leaving camp a light rain started, but otherwise we had a cloudy and dry weekend.
Christine was supposed to come with me, but hurt her foot on Friday and had to skip this trip. I hope that we can return later in the summer because I think it is about the easiest and most approachable backwoods bike camping imaginable. She would have had a great time, and it might give her more context for my love of bike camping.
This group is getting pretty creative with the S24O rigs, so I took some photos. Hover over these photos (or almost any photo in my blog) for a description.
Andre’s photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrjoeball/sets/72157620069717291/
Scott’s photos and commentary: http://sweetbike.org/?p=392
All of my photos: http://alexandchristine.smugmug.com/gallery/8648448_EboEF
Andre, Andrew, Lee, Rory, Scott and I met around 5:30 on Friday at the start of the North Fork Road outside of North Bend. The plan was to repeat our previous trip up the North Fork of the Snoqualmie River, but to use a little extra time to dive deeper into the forest.
We got to the Lennox Creek fork around 7:30 and had a decision to make. The road splits here into three different directions and smaller groups explored the start of each of them. We decided to follow along Lennox Creek (which had as much volume as the Snoqualmie River at this point). Lennox Creek had the best scenery and comes tumbling down from the Snoqualmie Pass area in a very tight valley. I had a soft goal of maybe getting up to the road closure near the Bare Mountain trailhead.
The road is technically closed at the start of Lennox Creek, but trucks have moved the barriers out of the way and the road is being used as a 4×4 track. We still only saw two vehicles up there. The road surface is loose enough that it can be tough going ona 35mm slick bicycle tire, and I think Lee even walked his Pugsley with it’s 90mm wide tires up a couple of sections. Rory’s excellenthandling skills let him climb everything on the bike even with narrow tires and no granny gear.In exchange for the rough road and a little hike a bike we got some wonderful views and a surprising amount of solitude for being about 30 miles from downtown Seattle (as the crow flies).
At about 9:15 we were still about two miles from where we thought the road might end and needed to find a camp site. On the maps it looked like the valley was going to get narrower, which makes the likelyhood of finding camp harder. We pressed on anyway, exploring every side trail to see if it lead to anything good. We found the best option and started to scope out hammock and tent sites when Andre decided to look back on the road a couple hundred feet. He found a nice section of open forest and we setup campthere. The forest was pretty well established and had a thick canopy which left the forest floor much more open and accessible.
Hammocks and tents were erected just as night fell. Rory, Andrew and I filtered water while Scott, Andre,and Lee built a fire. Dinner was in darkness around the fire with a couple of beers. I slept surprisingly well through the night and woke up around 7am. The bugs were bad in the morning,so we skipped breakfast and started rolling early. By 10:30am we were back in North Bend getting breakfast at the cafe from the TV show Twin Peaks.
This might be it for my exploration of this area this summer, but I still have sections that I’m curious about. Sunday Creek and the hills over the river seem to have some promise. I still haven’t been up to Hancock Lake or Lake Callighan either.
About a year ago Alistair Spence and I proposed starting a local group of hobbyist and professional framebuilders to meet once in a while and discuss projects, techniques, whatever. Alistair came up with the name SABMA (Seattle Area Bicycle Manufacturer’s Association). This weekend we had our fourth meeting, which signified the start of the second year of SABMA.
So far the meetings haven’t had much of a theme, they’ve been more of a chance to explore other people’s workshops and to get to know each other. This time around I proposed that we do a little hand’s on work too. I brought over my oxy/propane rig and we setup Alistair’s oxy/acetylene rig. Mark and Martin offered to do some demonstration joints. Alistair prepared the lugs and I mitered some tubing. The meeting had a good turnout for such an event,8 of us showed up for it (Andy, Alex, Alistair, Dan, Eric, Mark, Martin,Thomas).
First up Martin brazed a Ritchey dropout to a chainstay:
Mark brass brazed a lug using oxy/propane:
Martin silver brazed a lug using oxy/acetylene (this shot wasn’t taken through didynium like the rest of them,so you can see the red sodium flare from the flux):
As a Grand Finale Mark quickly mitered up the remaining scrap tubes and fillet brazed for us. Since I’ve been working on my fillet brazing myself I learned a lot from this quick demo and look forward to practicing some more at home:
We didn’t have too much time for show and tell this time. Martin brought a road/disk bike that he is working on, Alistair showed his latest bike (well documented on his flickr site) and I bought a couple of front triangles that I’ve built. Eric Bailey came with this neat stem with integrated decaleur:
Thomas from Idaho also brought his latest kokoPedli folding bike and showed it off to us.
I didn’t take a photo of the awesome spread of food that we brought together for the event. Alistair and Alon made a nice Gazpacho and there was a variety of store bought and home made muffins, bread, cookies, cheese, and beer.
I really enjoyed this meeting and look forward to the next one. I think we’ll be discussing alignment at that one, and hopefully having a bit more time for show and tell. I might even have a bike to ride down to it.
We went to the Mercer Slough today to enjoy the nice weather with a little wildlife.
It’s a large wetland on the south end of Bellevue, WA. The best wildlife wetlands inside the Seattle metro region seem to be under highways, and this one isn’t an exception. We were both pretty amazed at how large it was though. It was strange to be in area which often felt pretty remote and then you’d go around a bend and see tall buildings just a couple of miles away. Farther down the slough you find office buildings backing right up to the water.
We parked at Entiat Park, but if I were going back I’d park at Mercer Slough Nature Park. Entiat Park has a skinny little area to load the boats and was really busy. There is good wildlife down at that end of the slough, but you could paddle there from the other put in. The end of the slough is a loop which made the paddling a little nicer than just doing an out and back.
We saw a ton of herons, ducks, and turtles. There were a lot of other birds too which we need to look up. No otters on this trip, but they are said to be living there.
I brazed the front triangle of my first frame this weekend.
Things went pretty well. I did have one mistake which has made a fairly minor change to the geometry. My brazing order around the downtube, seattube, bottom bracket area should have brazed the front of the downtube and the back of the seat tube first before any of the crotch in between them. The fillet in the crotch pulled them them together, which made the seat tube angle a bit tighter. I think that this is all okay, I’ll just build the bike with a 72.5 HTA and a 73 STA instead of the opposite as I had planned. The seat tube is 56cm C-T and the top tube is 56cm C-C (giving me a virtual of around 57cm because it has a sloping top tube). The top tube slopes at roughly 4 degrees. This is a learning frame, so I’m okay with a few little mistakes.
The seat tube to top tube junction was one that I spent a lot of time thinking about. I wanted to put a sleeve here to keep heat distortion down and I don’t like brass brazing long sleeves. Mark Bulgier had the best suggestion for handling this area, but I didn’t have the right materials on hand. My solution (a pretty common one) was to sleeve out of 1 1/4″ x 0.058″ (which sleeves perfectly over a 1 1/8″ seat tube). The top tube was brazed to the sleeve first with brass, then the sleeve was brazed to the seat tube using silver. The silver inside the joint will melt a bit when I braze on the seat stays, but the sleeve is so long that the top and bottom will stay solid and the silver won’t be able to go anywhere. That is the theory anyway, we’ll see if it is true in a few weeks. My biggest concern is that I probably don’t have good silver penetration between the sleeve and seat tube behind the top tube fillet. I’m not worried about the lack of strength there, but I hope that it doesn’t create a good area for rust.
I used a pin through the sleeve to align the vent hole in the top tube with the one in the sleeve.
Everything came out fairly straight when I checked it on my alignment setup. The head tube has a very slight twist when compared to the seat tube. I might try to cold set it out of there, but I’m not too worried about it.
I mitered everything on my milling machine. My setup for this was really simple,but seemed pretty effective. I used two of Alex Meade’s clamping blocks and clamped the tube into the milling machine. I set the angle using the machine’s head (I don’t really have a good angle table to adjust the angle of the tube itself). To keep the miters in phase I always kept one block locked onto the tube at a time when I moved the blocks from one end of the tube to the other. The final miters came out nicely. I only touched up one miter witha file,and that was the top tube to seat tube miter because the top tube length shortened a bit when my ST/DT angle tightened up.
If you aren’t bored with this project by now you can see tons of other photos in my smugmug gallery.
There is this great bike rack a couple of blocks from my brother’s house in Fishtown. Not as functional as the Seattle Bike Racks, but much cooler looking. Click for big to check out details:
I visited Drew at Engin Cycles yesterday and he showed me a couple of ways to slot dropout tabs in the milling machine. The first one is for a trammed mill, the chainstay is rotated:
In the second one the head is rotated and the chainstay stays square to the table:
I like his method of using the V-block with a little shim of 058 tubing to hold the chainstay in place. He is a lucky guy to have two mills, one that can stay in tram all the time and one that he can move the head around on.
This sign in Delaware made me laugh:
I know the 35mph is for cars, but it made me think of a 35mph speed limit for runners.
Remnants of a steam tractor in Blackwater Wildlife Preserve near Cambridge, MD. There is some great photo potential of that on an overcast day with some good B&W film. Digital on a sunny day didn’t do it justice.
