Saturday, September 13, 2014

Episode 32: Monastic Murmurings

On outdoors:
  • Swan Creek Mountain Bike Park: Tacoma's MTB Playground
    • Trail Notes: arrived at dusk and did the outer loop three times. Definitely need a headlamp with the bike lamp to light the way. Jason, Sean, Dmitri, Jeremy, Jeremiah and a couple others- the most so far! Can't wait to do it during the day.
  • Camp Muir: Mt. Rainier's main base camp
    • Trail Notes: We headed out from Tacoma around eight-thirty and arrived at Paradise a little before ten in the morning after a cup of coffee. Sean and Nicki were the companions for the day. With lots of wind coming from the northwest, we departed from the lower parking lot of Paradise ten-fifteen. Trail mix, cheese balls served as fuel. In a little under four hours, we reached base camp at two-thirty and had the BEST quinoa salad, courtesy of Nicki. Super good! The ice fields on the way up were slippery. No crampons, and headwind that eventually died down made it worse. Altitude sickness kept us deliberately judging our efforts. Retina burn from the snow fields also kept things interesting. I drank 48 oz. of water- way too little for a six and a half hour round trip.

On bookshelf:
  1. This Place Called St. Martin's, John C. Scott, OSB
  2. Dark Night of the Soul, John of the Cross
  3. Into the Silence, Wade Davis
  4. Spiritual Writings, Flannery O'Connor

On media:

  1. Anton Bruckner: Symphonies
  2. Sergei Prokofiev: Romeo & Juliet