So, call me Donald, instead

I have had some compliments on my Sally haircut. Here’s one I got today:
“I like your haircut. It looks like a duck’s butt.”

Call me Sally

Here you go. This is my new haircut. Right now it looks like my hair is channeling Charlie Brown's little sister, Sally- the one with her hair in sort of a swoop/flip.

The very straight hair around my face hasn’t quite made friends yet with the curly, swoopy, flippy, mind-of-its-own hair on the rest of my head, but we’re working on it and I hope to achieve some kind of reconciliation soon. In the meantime, each day is a hairy adventure.

Here are some pictures of today’s version of the new do.




First- blown dry with no primping.

The other three are after some touch-up on the strands of straight hair and a few strands of excitable, frizzy hair.

Willy Wonka Wouldn't Wanna Walk With Us

One side effect of the climate at the Grand Canyon is the fact that chocolate really doesn’t work out as a snack or treat. It is just too hot. Even m&ms-you know: melt in your mouth, not in your hand- suffer from a failure of structural integrity in the heat of the day. They soften, melt, crack and then flatten, making a mess of the rest of your trail mix.

I know you really don’t want to leave your chocolate behind, but let’s say that you were to take just two or three Milk Duds, for example. Suppose you dropped them into your belt (fanny) pack with your snacks, planning to eat them before the sun came up. That would probably work, if you really did eat them before the sun came up. Then suppose that later in the day, while it was hot, and dusty, and you had been walking for hours, you noticed that you had a sort of dirt/dust stain way up on the front of your shirt. But the rest of your shirt was still pretty clean looking. Usually you get dirt on your socks and bum, but since you could possibly get stains up on your shirt, you don’t worry about it while you are on the trail. But you would probably rinse out the stain (a strangely crispy stain) at the end of the day to start clean in the morning. Then suppose that the next day, the stain came back and every time you stopped, you noticed that it was a little bigger than the last time. Then suppose that finally, you got suspicious, because the stain had worked its way through the shirt, and the shorts and yes, even the underwear. ‘Hmm, very strange for trail dust’, you think. And then suppose you have a flash of inspiration, and you dig through the snacks in your belt bag and find, yes- one very soft, flat (flat, flat) Milk Dud mashed against the inside of the bag where it rests against your shirt. If you did find a Milk Dud like that, you would be amazed at just how far one little milk dud can spread out when it is trapped between a warm body and warm snacks.

But since common sense and experience tell you that chocolate and hot weather don’t go together, you wouldn’t do anything like that anyway.



The large “gorge” running from the top to the bottom of this picture is where about half of the trail that we used is located.

Great weather, good company

As I mentioned, this was the best rim-to-rim ever. Every other crossing has had it’s own little patch of adventure. This year was notable for what there wasn’t: no blisters, no sunburn, no heat exhaustion, no fractures, no lightening, no cuts or scrapes or bleeding, no flash floods with rock slides, no beavers, no hiking out with flashlights, no food allergies, no little critters snacking on our snacks (not that one didn’t try a couple of times). This picture is looking back as we start up the last 3 1/2 miles to the South Rim

The weather was pleasant. The inner canyon- aka down by the river and everything else at the bottom- was in the low 90s. We have trudged through when it was 115 in the shade, so this was really nice. There was also frequent cloud cover. When you combine all that with the tall cliffs and the angle of the early autumn sun, we were in the shade at least 50% of the time. With all that shade we were able to move along fast enough to be off the trail on the first day before it even reached the high temperature for the day.

The trail was in great condition- no rock slides extending down multiple switchbacks, no mud, no scrambling and no places where we couldn’t find the trail. Last time we finally gave up in one spot and pushed our way through the rushes and undergrowth at the beaver habitat, climbed down into Bright Angel Creek and waded down the creek until we finally came to the trail again. This time there was a lovely little foot bridge through the beaver habitat. Nice!

On the second day the hike out was also good. We were on the trail by 6:00 a.m. after a hearty 5:00 a.m. breakfast of bacon, eggs, pancakes, peaches and juice. That’s one thing about sleeping and eating at Phantom Ranch- you don’t go hungry. We stayed ahead of the sun until almost to the top of Jacob’s Ladder, a tough stretch of switchbacks that becomes grueling if you are in the sun (you can see part of it in this picture). After a snack and a change of socks under the trees at Indian Gardens we headed out again and enjoyed a partly shady trail the rest of the way up to the top. The higher you get in the Canyon, the cooler the temperatures. The temperature in the shade that day was below 80 degrees at each shade house. We still sweated plenty because it is a strenuous hike out, but the shade and frequent breezes were welcome relief and we reached the top earlier than we ever have before.






Evening shadows move across the canyon as we walk over to the El Tovar Lodge for an early dinner before a good night's sleep.

"Now the day is over, Night is drawing nigh,
Shadows of the evening Steal across the sky.

Jesus, give the weary Calm and sweet repose;
With Thy tend’rest blessing May mine eyelids close."

I hiked the Grand Canyon rim to rim

...and I got a haircut.

(forgot to mention that little item in the last post)

I'm not cured yet!

There is a strange malady that commonly strikes Grand Canyon hikers. I was afflicted ten years ago when I did my first rim-to-rim hike. What is this malady? It's the urge to return again. The drive to do it one more time. To either do it better, faster, more enjoyably or simply to add another crossing to your count. It can't be explained. (After all, it's hot, long, hot, exhausting, hot, hard on the toes and hot.) We have asked other RTR hikers why they come back again. They get this familiar look in their eyes, shrug, and then admit that they can't explain it- they just have to do it.

This year, as we trained and prepared for our annual rim-to-rim, I thought I was cured. (see parentheses above) Evidently not. I was really just cured of the urge to hike the Canyon smack-dab in the middle of the hottest part of the summer.

As you can see, I am back from the Grand Canyon. Best Canyon hike ever for reasons that I will mention later. We plan to go to the Canyon less frequently so that we can have more time to see and do things on a list of places that keeps getting longer and longer. Secretly, I had thought that maybe this was going to be my last time through. Orland isn’t ready to give up the Canyon, though and now that I have done it again, I have to admit that I plan to go back.

I hope this isn't a trend

I am teaching again this semester. This week my students turned in their first reports. I try to keep the class pretty informal and don't expect much. I gave them all a list of what was required in each report, you know- use spell check, don't triple space, use appropriate margins, tell me the name of the person you are writing about. Nothing too hard.

Here is a little excerpt from the email I had to send to my class now that I have read all their reports.

"Also, please remember
• These words have very different meanings and are NOT interchangeable:
Our-are
Their-there-they’re
Course-coarse
Then-than
–y’s and –ies a the end of a word (as in country’s and countries)
s and ‘s (as in dogs and dog’s)

• A paragraph has more than one sentence.
• Put your name on each report, even if you submit it as an attachment in an email.
• It is not acceptable to use text message abbreviations in college level work.
• Do not change fonts in the middle of your work."

Just in case you think I'm kind of hard on the kids, none of them are fresh out of high school and most of them are between 25 and 30.

Oops!

So I have this little habit that backfires on me now and then. Sometimes, I put something in the microwave that only needs 15 or 20 seconds and hit the instant minute button and then just open the oven as soon as it is ready. Then I might put in something else to use up the rest of the time. Once in a while, I forget that the thing I put in needs to come out before the cycle ends. And it gets overdone.

Yesterday, I put in a pat of butter to melt and pulled it out after about 12 seconds. Then I put in my little plastic squeeze bottle of homemade pancake syrup and hit the "add a minute" button because it would need just a little more than a minute, intending to give it a shake halfway through and then pull it out before the one minute and 48 seconds was done. Then I got side tracked.

My attention returned to the syrup when I heard a loud pop and then a steamy whistle from the microwave.

My syrup bottle had had a blow out.

On one side of the bottle.

While the turntable was still going.

Oops.