Nerd Em's Adventures
The sun is fighting its way through the thin overcast when I climb out of the tent in the morning. There is no wind. But in the time it takes to pack up my gear, the sun has disappeared again. A north wind picks up and escorts in a bunch of low cloud and fog.
Wispy pieces of moisture fly along the lake’s surface, skimming along with the wind. The world goes damp, cold and grey. Read more
There is heavy dew on the tent this morning, but I was never assaulted by sprinklers in the night. The wind has not yet swapped to the south. The terrain is a rolling plateau with long sight lines and distant vistas. The landscape is still ridiculously green. Many areas in northwest Nebraska have had nearly their annual rainfall in the past month. Read more
It’s like they come twirling about on tiptoes – flashing their leggy lengths of recklessness beneath a short skirt of cover. Oh, how far do you want to go? How fast? Just slide out there and get them behind you and away you go. They tease you with possibility. They torment you with incredible memories of times past. They pound into you and push you harder and faster than you ever thought you could desire. Oh, tailwinds, the ultimate seducer. Forget cardinal sins, it’s all about cardinal directions – and which one you are heading toward and which one the wind is coming from. Read more
Tourist areas like the Black Hills are full of attractions – some a rip-off, some well worth your time. It seems most people see the National Museum of Woodcarving to be a rip-off. I’m not sure what to think when I wander down there after a sleep-in (we did 89 miles on 2 hours of sleep yesterday, so a bit of recovery was needed!). I’m hoping to find a wood carving of a turtle to send to Nigel. Read more
On a hot, dry day in late August 2000, a woman stopped on the side of the road about a mile and a half west of Jewel Cave National Monument. She lit a cigarette. Then she dropped the match. It was a day of record low fuel moisture and gusty winds in the middle of a drought. But she wanted to watch a fire; she just never imagined that it would get so big. Read more
So I’ve just been hanging out the last few days. Yesterday I went into town and stocked up on food, went to the library, then headed back out for a lazy day at a Forest Service campground. It stormed a couple times in the afternoon. It seems to be a pattern at the moment.
Today I just hang out again. My friend Wayne is coming up from Ft Collins, Colorado and we’re going to meet up to do some hiking. If we weren’t planning on meeting today or tomorrow, I would have taken off after the Hell Canyon Hike. Read more
Eighteen years ago I worked for part of a summer at the mountain campus of my university. Wayne was the kitchen manager; Brendt was a cook. I got along with both of them – they were easy to work for. However, they had a fearsome reputation among the kitchen and housekeeping crew as big-time bad boys. So, out of curiosity, one night I went to hang out with them at their cabin. Read more
Wayne and I rise early. So do all the other people at the Hart Ranch Resort. We go down to the office so he can book another night, and there are so many people around and everyone is so cheery, you’d never know it was only 7.30 am. Read more
The health fairy must have come last night and beat me with the bad wand while I was sleeping. I’m very raspy and phlegmy this early morning – my asthma is playing up in the cold, damp air. My fingers seem to have been replaced with inflexible wood stumps, too. The arthritis in my fingers means they often ache and it can be difficult to form a tight grip in the mornings, but this morning the pain is pretty searing and I can’t bend them much at all. Read more