I couldn’t help but notice a great article in Friday’s NYTimes.com highlighting Wild Rivers Expeditions, a Bluff Utah river tours company and one of its fabulous tour guides. According the article, freelance writer Kate Siber and a friend signed up for a three day float trip as a way to see the historic region of Monument Valley and linked article above was the result.
Beyond her witty writing evidenced by phrases describing her guide
Nathan Sosa, a Bluff native and self-described hydrologic navigation specialist, stood on the bow of an 18-foot-long baby-blue raft and described the protocols of the river and the boat. He wore a nylon American-flag jacket, button-down shirt and tie, flimsy prom-queen tiara and rubber boots — you know, traditional outdoorsman wear.
and the landscape
Rolling past a host of almost alien-looking geological formations, cliff-top Anasazi dwellings and pristine wildlife habitat, the river is something of a greatest hits album of southern Utah’s attractions.
this article reminded me of one of the areas of outdoor recreation I have not participated in for a few years-rafting.
However, I will be redeeming myself this summer with a raft trip through Flaming Gorge and hopefully, a few product demos at the upcoming Summer OR Show. Yeah for summer!
We all have our interests in life. A few around the office include cycling, baseball, volleyball, golf and fishing, and we’ve talked a lot about doing these activities together to experience something a little different and to get to know each other a bit better.
Well, last week we took an opportunity to participate in an activity together by taking the afternoon to play mini-golf and hit a bucket of golf balls at a local facility called, appropriately, Mulligans.
Here are some captions of the event:
The Team at Mulligans
FORE!
Can’t Quite Get Away
Scoping out the lay of the land
One too many practice swings…enough already!
For the Win!
Past the Windmill…through the tunnel…off the rock…up the volcano…in the hole!
Needless to say, we had a great time together. While we did keep score, everyone, it turned out, won. We built team unity and relieved a bit of stress…for those of us who could get away.
We’re planning to do these types of events every couple of months. Who knows what the next one will be, but I’m sure it will be a great time to be had by all, as this one was.
Recently my buddy (wilsontribe) and I headed out geocaching once again — the eternal quest to not get lost looking for hidden objects.
Although we did only hit two caches, I did snag my first geocoin (see picture). Geocoins are cool and come in all different designs. This particular one, the redhanded geocoin, has a couple goals: travel to all 50 states, all countries and continents and then return to the US.
After looking at the travel log of this coin I see that it has traveled a total of 77 miles between Utah County and Salt Lake County. So, for my part, I will be taking this coin back east with me in a few weeks to plant it in a cache beyond the Utah state line.
Our second cache was a virtual cache. This is usually a non-traditional cache that has some sort of historical significance or is designed to educate. This one was a memorial to a fallen Utah Highway Patrol Agent. Interesting, but I have to admit, not as fun as finding a little box hidden with trinkets or goodies in it.
Although my second geocaching trip didn’t prove quite as fruitful on the cache side I did learn some valuable lessons about going geocaching and how to make the most of the outing.
So, as a beginner, here’re my 6 tips to get ready for a simple geocaching trip:
- Decide ahead of time the area you want to geocache in.
- Download the cache waypoints and then upload them into your GPS.
- Review the map and choose a couple waypoints as starting points.
- Review or print off the hints for starting waypoints.
- Charge your GPS receiver.
- Be sure to take water and snacks, if needed.
Doing these beforehand could save you an hour or two before you get going, or, in other words, you could find a handful of caches or just two!
So my neighbor introduced me to, and subsequently got me hooked on geocaching; the ultimate game of hide and seek. Being the gadget guy that I am, I just love these little GPS units. My neighbor has a Magellan eXplorist 210 and that thing will tell you how fast you’re moving, sunrise & sunset, moonrise & moonset, phase of the moon, in short, it tells you everything! For $10 more it will tell you your fortune — kidding!
So as a new geocacher I set out on an adventure (well, we were close to home and went in the car so maybe not much of an adventure, more of an outing) with my buddy, wilsontribe, and my son, little beldog. The great thing, for us men, is that with a GPS unit I don’t need to ask directions, just give me the coordinates and I can call in an airstrike anywhere in the world. Now, given we were staying local in Midvale, getting lost wasn’t a real concern. So after downloading some cache locations (hidden stashes are recorded on geocaching.com where one can download them and then sync the coordinates into the GPS unit to go out and find them), we set out to find our first cache.
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Tuesday on BicycleRetailer.com I read that Dick Burke, founder of Trek Bicycles, died Monday night, March 10, due to complications from heart surgery. It was sad to hear the news. It made me think about what Dick and Trek have accomplished and about what bicycles have done for me.
When I was in high school, my brother Steve was an Italian fanatic who had an Alfa Romeo Spider and a Pogliaghi road bike. I wanted to ride road bikes like him, so I bought a Japanese made Centurion (I couldn’t afford a nice Italian bike). I didn’t ride the Centurion too much. Riding bikes wasn’t the cool thing to do in high school. Continue Reading »
For more than 10 years (1994 - 2004), I wrote a self-syndicated column called “Utah Tech Watch” that began as a biweekly column and six months later moved to a weekly schedule.
Over time this column was published by three papers — the Deseret News (now the Deseret Morning News), The Daily Herald (in Provo, Utah) and The Enterprise (Utah’s weekly business paper) — as well as being distributed for free via email to several thousand subscribers.
Each year, one of my most fun and yet difficult self-directed assignments was to identify the top 10 stories of the year.
I plan to resurrect “Utah Tech Watch” as an online media property in 2008, and when I do, I’ll also resurrect its annual Top 10 stories piece. But for now, let me transpose this idea to this SOAR Communications blog with what I propose are the Top 10 Global SOAR Stories of 2007.
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I have to admit it: I love Man vs. Wild.
I saw my first episode in a hotel room in Oakland, California, and I was soon mesmerized. Whether Bear Grylls, the star of the Discovery Channel show, was dropped off in the arctic, on a deserted tropical island or deep within the Amazon rain forest, his weeklong struggles against nature and the elements were fascinating.
The few times my wife and I have both caught an episode together, we’ve wondered aloud afterward if Grylls is actually on his own or not. Turns out, the answer is most of the time.
For a great exclusive with the British Special Forces chap, check out the Outside magazine article in the November 2007 issue or the full interview here. Great stuff!
Officially, winter is close to two weeks away. But when I look out my front window and spy close to a foot of fresh snow in my yard here in Sandy, Utah, I know that winter is here whether the calendar says so or not.
Yup, during the past 36-48 hours Northern Utah has gotten slammed by a major storm that dumped as much as two to three feet of powder at local resorts.
For example, Snowbird Ski and Summer Resort now has 48 inches at mid-mountain. Alta Ski Resort reports 54 inches at the base, while Deer Valley has a base of 42 inches.
Who knows? Maybe this will be the year our multi-year drought in Utah gets knocked out cold. All I know for sure is that it’s right time to be living where we have “The Greatest Snow on Earth.”
Wow. It’s been a busy few months since my last post on September 20. I need to learn how to juggle blogging, while at the same time serving our clients.
I have a lot of things I’d like to blog about since my last post, for example, working with the media at Interbike, meeting my cycling hero Greg LeMond in the Media Center at the show, and taking a road trip vacation to Colorado - mountain biking and hiking along the way, etc. I’ll write about those later.
This week was a busy week, but a good one. Monday, November 12, we were in New York City for the PepCom Digital Focus media reception. We took our new client, Delta 7 Sports. They make a $12,000 carbon fiber/Kevlar reinforced Arantix mountain bike using a unique tube design called IsoTruss. Before the evening event, we met with “Popular Science” and “The Wall Street Journal.” The staff at both publications were very interested in the Arantix and its IsoTruss technology for possible stories.
Following those meetings we went to PepCom. Even though PepCom was predominately a “digital” high-tech event, we knew the media outlets slated to attend would also be interested in the IsoTruss, because of its highly engineered, science-based, well thought out design.
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I’ve been putting off writing something for our blog for a couple of reasons. One, life here at SOAR has been incredibly busy. Our biggest client, Interbike, is having their annual bicycle tradeshow in Las Vegas in 4 days and we have spent the last couple of months ramping up for that. The other reason is, I’m new to blogging, and I wasn’t sure I had anything interesting or significant to post. Now I do.
I’m bummed. The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency found Landis guilty of doping (see AP story here). I haven’t ridden regularly in a while, but I’m still an avid fan of cycling and racing. My wife and I cheered loudly at the TV during Stage 17 of the 2006 Tour, only to stare silently again later while learning that Landis was accused of doping.
I’m not even going to pretend to understand the facts surrounding the case and spout my opinion here in this post. I’m just bummed for Landis, racers in general and for recreational cyclists and potential recreational cyclists who might think twice about participating in a tainted activity.
The news about Landis will make for an interesting next few weeks, especially with the industry’s largest trade show, Interbike, and the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) World Championships taking place at the same time. I’m sure everyone will be talking about the verdict and will have an opinion.
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