Wow…

On a daily basis, anyone, at anytime, should simply stop and listen to the world around us…just for a minute or two.

Wow…

24 hour news channels, non-stop internet analysis of anything and everything, pertinent to anyone’s life or not.  Blackberry’s and iPhones streaming realtime ‘news’ (really?  Is Ricky Martin being gay really ‘news’ – or anyone’s business for that matter?) all the time, whenever you turn a corner downtown, flip on the radio (aka Clear Channel Corporate Streaming Mechanism) or walk through a store.

It’s overwhelming.  No wonder people are constantly strung out, stressed to the max, and completely preoccupied with what is not real.  I get sad and distressed when I start noticing these things, not the ‘issues’ or ‘subjects’ themselves, but the fact that they are news – they are out there – they are Important – that I even know about them…all the while, the hard stuff, the important stuff, the Real Stuff, is being ignored or not understood, or not trusted, and the effort is not being made to understand them.  “It’s so overwhelming – there is just so much, so I shut it off”  Yeah…right.

So many issues, so much information, and so much opportunity exists for real discussion and true dialogue.  But that’s not happening.  The Tea Party Express is happening, and Sandra Bullock and Tiger Woods are happening, and Conan O’Brien.  People are having a hard time even thinking about health care (not reform, but being healthy to start with), or climate change (I call it ‘personal responsibility’) or real happiness (like, self improvement in whatever form that may be).  Loving your spouse or enjoying your kids or a grandparent.  Seeing a beautiful place and slowing down long enough to soak it in.  Having a discussion in quiet tones, in a calm voice, in a soft setting, with no timelines and no pressure or judgment.

My house has a fireplace in the living room.  It’s one of those grand ‘sitting spaces’ that are more or less gone from today’s houses because it does not have a TV in it.  I wonder what kind of discussions were had, or conversations started, or thoughts provoked in that room because there was no distractions and no deadline.  There was wine, a couple of people, some chairs, and a gentle fire.  That sounds nice right about now.

I have been railing on hydropower now for some time, and in Colorado, its about to get a whole lot more important real quick.

There is currently a bill in the statehouse that defines what ‘low-impact hydropower’ is.  Some believe that putting a wattage limit on the dam or diversion (say, under 10Megawatts) makes it Low Impact.  But does a fish know that?  Does the dammed river and altered ecosystem of that river know that?  Only humans and their tax schemes know that.

Take a quick look at this video – its only about a minute long.  It is a recent AMEX commercial featuring Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia, and lifelong crusader for wild places.

In the middle of the commercial, notice that the subject switches to a dam that he has been trying to get removed for years.  Now, if you look at that dam, you notice that its not that tall, and there is not all that much water going over it.  In Colorado (under these new rules) that would likely be classified as low-impact – there is no way that thing would generate 10Mw.

But look at it more closely – it is a concrete wall.  There is no migration for species, and upstream in the four-foot deep pond, the ecosystem is radically altered, not to mention the warm water sitting below it (water running over the dam warms, changing the system downstream).

Is this what we want our streams in Colorado to look like?  Do we want this as an acceptable COST to having a few kilowatts or megawatts of generation?  Its our choice, here…if it were your favorite stream, or your home, how would you feel?

Rivers and streams are the arteries and capillaries of life in the natural world.  We can’t go around cutting them off and expect to have a healthy ecosystem.

Was it a race, or was it just a training ride?

Maybe the paying a fee and getting a number makes it a race, although originally I was assigned to do a Peak Power test on a trainer last weekend…but the weather looked to be pretty good, and Coach Yuki suggested that I do this time trial instead.  Who am I to argue?

The time trial was hosted by Metro State College Cycling, as part of the collegiate race series in Colorado – so a bunch of college kids from the Colorado schools (CU, CSU, Metro, Fort Lewis, AFA, Mesa State College, etc.) travel around and compete on each others’ home courses.  There were also some racers from afar (saw one kid in Middlebury College gear), and then regular Joe’s like me can show up and race too.  Its a good time, pretty mellow environment, and the entry fees go to support the schools’ cycling programs, which is money well spent.

The race was at Bear Creek Lake Park – on nearly 9 miles of pavement.  A fun loop, for sure, but if you have not experienced the pain of a time trial, it is a new thing – I had never done a time trial, so it was totally different than other racing I had done, and a good fitness check for the first week of March.

My goal was 24 minutes – I came in under that by about 20 seconds, which is good.  My power was good, and overall I ran a pretty good race.  My placing was not so hot, but given that there were some college kids in my division, it was not broken out by age group, and some people had TT bikes (I did not), I consider it to be pretty successful…Oh, and it was fun too!

No, I don’t care.  Yes, I hate golf.  Why, then, would I waste my time to write about it?

Because of the absolute disrespect and disservice and dissing that it does to our (somewhat) amateur Olympic athletes.

Julia Mancuso becomes the most decorated US Women’s Olympic skier – ever.

Shaun White (more or less) nails a 1260 McTwist.  Gold.  Again.

Shanni Davis – Gold.  Lysacek – Gold.  Vonn – Gold.  Ohno – Gold.  Spillane – Silver (Rad!!)

And now Tiger, and his ego and self-pity, upstages ALL of those accomplishments by having his little speech, TODAY.  Couldn’t wait another week?  Couldn’t respect and honor all of those athletes and families who support them all these years by allowing their time in the glory?

Nope.  Today.

Ass.

Rocked a 24:35 on Lookout! Personal best! Thanks Yuki and Junko for the preparation – good sign for 2010!!!

This week, the Administration proposed increasing funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund, a 45-year-old program that protects wildlife habitat and provides recreation in Federal lands in Colorado and across the US. These are places where people can escape the stresses of everyday life, experience open spaces and enjoy species that construct our natural heritage.

Instead of using taxpayer money, LWCF uses a small portion of royalties paid by companies conducting offshore drilling. It simply makes sense to use funds generated from natural resource extraction to reinvest in America’s natural places – protecting open space and clean water which benefits us all.

Conservation creates opportunity. Opportunity for people to enjoy increasingly threatened wild spaces. Opportunity to generate sustainable tourism revenue.

Kudos to Secretary Salazar and Senator Udall for striving to meet our responsibility and working to safeguard America’s great outdoors.

So many good intentions, so little time.

Its amazing sometimes to sit back and watch and think about many great ways that the world is changing.  Take energy generation – the American Dream of convenience and low cost has been plugging along great since World War II – flip of a switch or the press of a dial, and you can illuminate the night, or warm your living room by a couple of degrees, simple as that.  And its cheap too!

Fast forward to the 1970′s (I was, like, 2 then) – and there are lines for blocks to get gas.  Carter responds by declaring a new, renewable energy push – putting solar panels on the White House.  Reagan takes them down, and we languish in an every increasing pattern of dependence on foreign oil.  Sure, there have been sporadic attempts to introduce renewables into the mix, but with the big oil companies like BP and ARCO owning much of the rights to solar cell technology, they were effectively able to keep the industry reined in all this time.

Here we are in the 2000′s – energy becomes a real issue – natural gas and oil prices explode last summer.  People start to get real about conservation to save money, not cause its a green issue.  Colorado voters put in place a rule that 20% of Colorado’s energy much come from renewables by 2020.  Achievable, in that Xcel has already gotten far down that road by the time the bill was put into law.

Well-meaning people would like to see that be 30%, and frankly, I would too.  But one avenue that is to be expanded that will count as a renewable, is hydropower.  Now, most people think of hydropower and they think of Glen Canyon Dam, or Grand Coulee, or Hoover Dam outside Las Vegas – big, powerful monuments to American engineering.  We have probably all heard about the fights to have regular flushing flows in the Grand Canyon for the benefit of fish and wildlife (and beaches for rafters).

But what about the little dams – the ones that are only 10-15 feet tall?  They can’t hurt much, right?  Oh, so wrong.

Think about a fish – she is swimming upstream, booking along, and bump…there is a wall of concrete.  Now, to you and I, that wall of concrete may only be 5 feet tall, and that wall of concrete may only generate a few hundred kilowatts or a megawatt or 9 megawatts over the course of the year – that’s small!  That’s low generation!  We should not be concerned about those!  They’re green – no carbon emission!  Yeah!  Hey fish, getta ladder – you’ve got fins!

But what about for that fish.  Its habitat has now been fragmented.  There is no migration up and down that river any more – it has effectively turned into two fragmented rivers, the only thing common now is the flowing water.  Its like someone put a random fence at a diagonal in the middle of your backyard.  You can’t use the rest of your yard, your spouse is on the other side, and you can’t get across.

Oh well, they’re just fish, right?  Tell that to the Salmon, and the billions of dollars trying to truck them around dams, reclaim the rivers, and rebuild healthy, native fisheries that are so important to so many people, and are basically the life pumps for wildlife in the Pacific Northwest.  Is Colorado going to go that way?  Have we not learned anything over the past 50 years?

Low generating capacity does not mean Low Impact…Low generating capacity can still mean…Mega Impact.

In almost every way, clear-thinking lovers of open spaces, unbroken habitat, and forests agree that clear cutting of forests are bad.  But when is it good, or at least acceptable?  Is there ever a time when a clear cut is a thing of beauty – or at least an acceptable means to satisfy human entertainment?

In Colorado, there have been over 200 ski areas pop up over the course of the state’s history – the vast majority of which are now defunct.  Some probably have removed their lifts, shacks and buildings, but others have just boarded up the windows and walked away, leaving their old buildings, mechanical litter, and lift structures to rot on the landscape.  Worse, have any of them made any efforts to reforest the slopes that were clear cut in order to create the swaths of open runs that makes a ‘ski area’ possible?  I strongly doubt it.

I recently saw a review of a new book and related film called Powder Ghost Towns by Pete Bronski and thought it looked pretty cool.  A guidebook that chronicles and celebrates the history of skiing and ski areas in Colorado – safe enough, right?  I then watched the trailer of his related video, and there was something in there that really peaked my interest – one of the text lines in the video reads “The ski areas have been returned to the backcountry from which they came.  And their quiet solitude and untouched powder await rediscovery.”

Wow.  Really?  The ski areas have been returned to the backcountry from which they came?  Far from it.  They are clearcuts – they are scars on the landscape, they are a visual blight in the forest – a reminder of man’s destruction of thousands of acres of forest for nothing more than the entertaining self interest of the few, coupled with an attempt of economic gain for even fewer (and clearly, that didn’t exactly work out, did it?).  If they had been returned to the backcountry from which they came, then they could not be seen – they would have been reforested when they were closed, or at least have reforested themselves naturally – back to nature, blending back in to the backcountry from where they came.

Now I have nothing against Mr. Bronski’s book (I don’t have it, and I have not read it, so I can’t really talk about the book itself – I am not dinging on his probably great efforts to think about this interesting subject), but what I am harping on is the romantic notion that ski areas are an acceptable use of the forest, and that for our own personal enjoyment, it’s ok to seriously disrupt virgin forest.  There is nothing that we can do about the probably 180 abandoned ski areas in the state, accept to enjoy them as the book probably suggests, but what can be done is to not expand what currently exists.  Not promote the idea that lift-served skiing is an environmentally acceptable use of our (usually) National Forests, and that there is no harm in creating these places for people to play.

It has been especially disturbing to watch the actions of the state government and the ski areas with regards to the Colorado Roadless Rule.  There are proposed exemptions in the Colorado Roadless Rule for more than 8,000 acres for ski area expansion.  When the ski areas expand, they cut down the forest – they make clear cuts, plain and simple.  They destroy intact forests.  They fragment habitat.  They alter migration patterns.  They change hydrology.  They encourage erosion.

I have nothing against true backcountry skiing.  I have nothing against human powered recreation.  I have nothing against using these historical areas for recreation and exploration and the quiet and adventure that Mr. Bronski’s book likely advocates.  But let us call it as it is – we destroyed those areas of the forest for short term gain – let’s be diligent to not further exacerbate the problem.  And if we really want to set an example, let’s truly help the backcountry reclaim the places that were taken from it.

Legend has it that back in the day (mid-1980′s, I think) the planes were so loud coming in over Park Hill to land at the old Stapleton International Airport, that at times it was simply unbearable.  The Park Hill neighborhood was improving, and a mayor named Federico Pena was moving up in the political ranks and looking to a possible national political future ahead.  I don’t really know about all that political stuff, but I do know that airliners 200ft above your house can be pretty loud, and as Denver grew, I am sure the volume and frequency of planes overhead grew as well.

I have heard that one strategy the city used to placate the residents of this neighborhood was to give residents who wanted them free storm windows to cut down on the noise.   Our house is one that (allegedly) accepted those storm windows.  Well, 25 years is a long time for cheap aluminum storm windows to survive, and frankly most of ours are hammered!  Coming apart in the corners, or the glass window part wont slide open, or if it does it may not stay open, crashing down in the middle of the night…not fun.

Since we are going to [finally] get the house painted this year, it was suggested that if we could swing it, that we get new wooden storm windows put on as well.  So we are – we contracted with Lyons Historic Window to build new custom storms, that match the Arts & Crafts character of the house, for all 22 windows on the top two floors, and to do field restoration of 6 windows at the same time.  (Replacing ropes and weights, making sure they slide well, all that…)

I decided to save a little bit of money and removed all of the storm windows on the first level myself – half of them just fell apart in my hands as I pulled them off the windows.  They were pretty hammered.  Lyons will take care of the ones on the second story…they start that as well as measuring and field restoration tomorrow, then our new windows come in 3-5 weeks.  Should be fun!

I often am asked, by those outside of the mountain bike world (and even from some within…), Why Singlespeed? Why would you not want to have gears on our bike, to go faster in the flats, to help grind up those hills…it’s got to be so hard on your knees! What happens when the hill gets really steep? But with only one gear, going downhill must not be any fun because once you spin out, you can’t go any faster! You’ve got to be crazy!

All of those may be true – but the bottom line is this…Singlespeeds are just more fun (and if you are a blonde on Singlespeeds…well…) They are just more fun, plain and simple – and mainly because they ARE plain and simple. Without all the extra shifting and chainsuck and crap on the handlebars and cable housings and stuck derailleur pulleys and cable tips that poke your shins – you just hop on it and ride. No worry, no thinking, no scheming – just ride.

The added benefit is the benefit to your skills by riding a Singlespeed. The rider has to be much more in tune with the terrain, much more adept at predicting what that hill up ahead is going to bring, or how to power through that rocky obstacle when there is none of this shifting down to the granny gear to save your butt in the middle of the climb. You have to buckle in and power up that hill, or stand up and grunt through it. Those reactions make you focus on the task at hand, quickly parsing out and evaluation how you are going to deal with what is right in front of you – do you sprint or grunt? Do you see the line to the left or to the right? Do you try to trackstand and maneuver through the field of rocks, or put your head down and crank? With time, it becomes so much more natural than the analysis that goes into thinking about gearing and shifting.

When you do go back to a geared bike, those Singlespeed skills transfer right back. Your legs are strong and firm from gutting out those climbs, your sight is more focused on what lies ahead, and your giggle factor, well, that is probably on the shelf for the day, but you know that your trusty Singlespeed steed is waiting there for you – waiting to provide the simple, direct, just plain FUN that only a Singlespeed can deliver. In some ways the challenge is bigger, but the rewards are commensurate as well, but more fun is always worth the effort!