The Gulch Adventure Trip Report

The trip report for my September canyon adventure in The Gulch, Escalante country, Utah is now online:

http://reidster.net/trips/2010-gulch/

I hope that you enjoy it! Thanks to my lovely wife Erin and all my friends that came on the trip, for making it a great trip and giving excellent feedback on and comments for the report.

Here's a sneak peek at a few of the photos:

Again, the full report is here.

Please e-mail me with any comments or questions. I'd love to hear your feedback.

Red Scooter on an Overcast Day

Bonus photos is the following. Erin has taken to making delicious homemade yogurt. Below is some of her yogurt in a red bowl adjacent to some strawberries in a white bowl.

Raindrops Balanced on Grass

Book Review: Blind Descent: The Quest to Discover the Deepest Place on Earth

I really wanted to like this book. Caving is fascinating, and reading about it is utterly engrossing to me, perhaps more so than any other type of adventure writing. And, there aren't anywhere near enough caving books. Unfortunately, this particular caving book (by James Tabor) suffers from pervasive crappiness and fundamental errors which could easily have been avoided.

First, the style is needlessly sensationalistic and breathless. Did Tabor and his editors somehow think that a caving book would not sell if they didn't pump up an already complex and fascinating sport to the point of self-parody? It's a real bummer.

Second, the book contains numerous significant errors. For example:

1. The book misuses the word sump. The correct definition is: a submerged passage. Tabor seems to use it to indicate any cave lake.
2. All the photos in the color plates are listed as "copyright 2010". That is not how copyright works – a photo is copyrighted as of the date it was taken.
3. The whole premise of the book is the search for the deepest cave that could possibly be. First off, that's a ridiculous premise; establishing a cave as the deepest possible rather than simply the deepest known would be extremely difficult and would certainly take years for the community to accept the claim. Second, the book itself claims both that this ultimate (i.e., unbreakable) record was reached ("they had made the last great terrestrial discovery", page 246; "October 18, 2004: Bottom of the world, 6,825 feet deep" on the last color plate) and also that it was broken ("In August 2006, ... pushed its ultimate depth to 7,188 feet"). How anyone can make such a blatant, fundamental error and call themselves a journalist is beyond me.

Bottom line, if you are desperate for any caving book you can get your hands on, like me, you will probably want to read this book. But it's not very good. And, if you are looking for someone to write a book about your adventures, find a different author.

Yet More Flower Photos

Hopefully the quantity of flower photos is not causing you too much distress. I certainly enjoy them a great deal. As usual, these are all from my commute – the walk between home and Porter Square Station.

Book Review: What's Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption

It's particularly galling to me when arguments that I find convincing are filled with unnecessary sloppy thinking. This book was thus quite disappointing.

For example, one of the statistics breathlessly cited in the introduction was that of purchased items, only 1% are still in use six months after the purchase. The conclusion drawn is that 99% of items are thrown away. But, what about things that by definition are consumable, such as food? This sort of uncritical analysis is pervasive in the book.

Sloppy arguments like this are unnecessary for making our case (which I agree with!) and make us look bad.

I'm not going to finish the book, so it won't show up with an "NR" rating, but I wanted to take this opportunity to complain about it.

Flower Update

As many of you know, I've been out of town having wonderful vacations in the Southwest. However, the flowers have not ceased to grow back in Cambridge. Here are some updates.

Several of these were made while the homeowners watched (I didn't notice until I was done). One guy chatted with me for a bit. It was awkward, but they seemed to like that their flowers were appreciated.

These last ones, while the flowers themselves are pretty mundane, are one of my favorites. They are some daffodils growing as weeds in the middle of a very concrete-jungle type office park a block from where I work. I think it is pretty great as a subversive statement, along the lines of the iconic flowers in gun barrels protests from the 60's.

On a final note, I've become incredibly fed up with Bibble and am experimenting with Lightroom, which is what I used to convert the above photos. More on that later.

Flowers Under Snow

Friday morning we woke up to a decent snowfall here in Cambridge, and I took the opportunity to make some photos of flowers poking through the snow.

These are all made with a Nikkor 70-200 f/2.8 which I rented. This is a huge professional lens; it's the size of a one-liter water bottle and weighs half again as much. It's quite unwieldy. However, it's definitely a step up from my own (much cheaper) lenses. The build quality is great and the optics are noticeably better as well. For example, the "bokeh" of the out-of-focus areas is more pleasant (something you can compare here on this blog) and it's noticeably sharper. It will be a lot of fun.