Walk Around The Block

I have been working on remodeling my home this winter and the fruits of my labor are almost in blossom. In the next couple of weeks I will be able to put the house back together and it will be like living in a new place. I love the feeling of freshness and revival of remodeling. Today I spent much of the day troweling drywall mud onto sheetrock and setting corners. Tomorrow will be the first sanding and then a second coat of mud. This pattern will repeat throughout the week until the handful of trouble spots are made to look immaculate. Then it will be time to texture and paint. After all the time getting to this stage it is hard to believe it will finally be over soon.

After my morning of buttering up my walls I decided to get out of the house. I have been contemplating a new device for monitoring my running and hiking. I am planning several multi-day hikes this summer and the iPhone is not up to that challenge as Apple neglected to give the phone any sort of battery life and after six hours it will be dead. I have been looking at the Garmin Forerunner 450CX and think it is a fabulous device, but in looking at it closely this week I discovered that it will not meet my needs at it only has eight hours of battery life. I did discover that the Garmin Oregon 550t can work with the Garmin heart monitor and can track running, while not as running specific as the Forerunner series should do a better job of tracking speed and distance that the Nike+. I will have to look into it farther.

I got in 3.23 miles today on a fast walk to the grocery store giving me a total of 104.79 miles. 4860.21 miles to reach Davie. Turn around and look behind me, that is the cinder cone from the Lion's Head. The Lion's Head is the plug from a long extinct volcano. This is one of those rare geologic spots where a volcano and a glacier collide. An actual merging of fire and ice as this volcano became plugged prior to the Ice Age and the glacial snows packed on top of the volcano and the river has carried the sediment from the volcano out towards Cook Inlet and into the Pacific Ocean as the glacier has melted and receded. The Lion's Head gets it's name from the resemblance of the volcanic cone when viewed from the river. Ir really does look like a lion's head. From the top side view it really more resembles a sphinx.

This is a marvelous place to hike, raft, and explore the vastness that is Alaska. The colors in the hills here come from the sudden supercooling of the volcano as it went extinct.

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