New Year's Eve: an unexpected reunion

When Julie and I first mooted the idea of a New Year's party at our place, we expected to pull in, optimistically, two or three friends from ye auld college days.

So, imagine our delight and surprise when we spent the first hours of 2012 with our floor covered in 3Denizens passed and passing out in various states of insobriety. It was like the best sleepover ever.

Even the kitchen wasn't spared.







(that's Elar doing his Snuggie-Christ-hibernation pose)

Grandma's Boy aside, it was a fabulous night and one that 2012 is going to have to do a great deal of work to live up to. Thanks for coming!

Urban Mountaineering

Year Two of life in a small New England city is underway, with some significant changes:
1. I am noticeably better at teaching than I was last year. Though I still resort to my methamphetamine-paced jabber when I run out of coherent things to say, and sometimes make veiled references to things I shouldn't make veiled references to in front of youth.
2. Julie has moved from lots of part-time jobs to one for-real job: she's running after school programs with an environmental focus in two different housing projects in New Haven. This being Connecticut, there are hiking trails within walking distance of housing projects. In other words, she's doing the way more hardcore version of my job.
3. Jeff Woodward '06 just started at Yale Forestry, so we don't feel like the lone DMCers of the Elm City anymore. Woo hoo!

But, I gotta keep you all entertained. Sometimes, shit just gets real out on the sharp end. Sometimes, the mountains of the Nutmeg State unleash with the fullness of nature's fury. (Seriously, read this: one of the firefighters got injured by a barrage of falling choss.)

http://www.nhregister.com/articles/2011/10/07/news/doc4e8f5260f2f15432754852.txt

Lily Says Hello

I will start this blog post by saying I hope we get some amazing updates in return given this may be the most boring post this blog has seen. Also, since I haven’t written more than 5 sentences together since graduating, I think I will stick to something much easier: lists.

Things I Have Learned Since Graduating

+ Despite having a Netflix account of my own now, I still walk the one block to the blue Blockbuster Express machine to rent movies

+ Keeping your beer monies fund stocked up is still important – some would argue more important

+ I have become worse at pong…and I suck at Beirut

+ You do not put periods at the end of bullets because they are technically not complete sentences. Although this bullet may be…

+ People “appreciate” my love of leonbergers just as much (“You talk about that dog that’s not even yours so much that you need to be sedated”)

+ “Dinner parties” held by Dartmouth alums actually end up looking like feeds except with fancier silverware and wine

+ All climbing gyms have that amazing-old-and-wise-guy-who-knows-all-the-beta-but-smells-a-little-funky

+ “That kid” from school still exists

Things I Have Done Since Graduating/My Last Blog Post

To Do with the Office:

+ Played pong in my office on the ping pong tournament table with my VP and two summer interns

+ Beat a particularly unfit Managing Director in the ping pong tournament by running him from one side of the table to the other. But doesn’t matter, I lost in the next (second) round. People took the ping pong tournament very seriously, and it was supposed to start with an exhibition match between the two heads of our group. No, that is not his real hair

+ Tried to set up liquor-treating in the office but failed (maybe this year!)

+ Successfully got the following nicknames to stick for interns at work: Scooter, Nickelback, Ice Tea. Please feel free to suggest new ones for the new first years

+ Hid post it notes with penises drawn on them around another VP’s office. Locations included: in a drawer, in a notebook, under his dry board eraser, under his hand sanitizer, in his coat jacket. He found the last one (it had two on it) 4 months later. Sometimes when my associate and I are trapped in this VPs office, we draw on the white board (why yes, that is a sea cucumber)

+ Explained to the morning cleaning crew guy what kind of dog Enzo/Teo are (he asked very politely)

To Do with Getting Out of NYC / Forgetting I’m in NYC:

+ Went to Texas for the first time in my life - spent mostly in modes of transportation

+ Drove a Black Lincoln Town Car from NYC à Hanover à Rumney because the car rental agency ran out of all other cars. Elar refused to sit in the middle seat up front

+ Watched Lizzy crush at the EMS UBC Bouldering comp in Central Park!

+ Cooked for a bunch of friends once – one lasagna (homemade noodles with my pasta maker!) with 3-meat sauce, another butternut squash and pesto one

To Do with Experiencing NYC:

+ Survived a hurriquake

+ Survived a zombie mob (no joke, a HUGE crowd of people dressed up as zombies were walking through the street, jumping on cars, etc. We were a little tipsy so it didn’t seem so weird at the time but the pictures the next day were funny)

+ Not seen any celebrities

+ Become obsessed with noodles (if you want to come to NYC and eat noodles let me know! These are from Momofuku)

+ Watched the Rangers play the Capitals in the NHL playoffs

+ Met a man asking to smell farts. He was a proponent of the Fart Smeller Movement (so his sign said)

+ Trying to find water at 10 PM before the hurricane hit – and running into a guy in a full Spiderman costume on an empty street with a supersoaker. At least I think we had enough water in our apartment to be trapped for a solid week. Too bad Irene punted.

New Things that I am Obsessed with Besides Noodles

+ This Modernist Cuisine cookbook. It took them an absurd number of years to complete. Their kitchen is more of a lab than a kitchen, to do all these cutaway shots they actually cut all their pots and pans in half…so I guess you could say they have two half kitchens. The book has around 2,400 pages and is beyond steep at $475 on sale. But it just looks so cool! Modernistcuisine.com

The joys of grading

I'll let this picture of one of my students' homework speak for itself:

Cheers,
Mark

Unemployment Parts I-III

Hello everyone!

(1) It's been a while since I last wrote so I will try and keep this relatively brief. Titcomb used to look like this:
















and now it looks like this:




In my honest opinion, really really good. But if you don't trust me, check out in the next issue of Popular Mechanics. There are still a couple finishing touches to be completed, most noticeably the door and windows as well as the gable ends and the furniture.





(2) As soon as work on the cabin was over Ben and I took off for Colorado where we met up with (in this order): Answoon, Chelsea, Andrew Palmer, Alex Lee, Clara Chew, Ellen Ludlow (for 5 mins at a gas station outside Clear Creek Canyon), Max F, Claire Frazer, Alex Corey, Noah and Laura. We did some rocks climbing and some mountain biking and some pushing Swoon's truck around parking lots when it wouldn't start.

Here's Ben rapping of the Maiden, a climb in the Flatirons with a 5.5 pitch that was so run out it made me cry. It was a pretty epic rappel: most of a full 70m rope, most of it in free fall.


Anson, Ben and I met up with Noah and Laura to ride the Monarch Crest trail in SW Colorado, and then continued on to Moab where Anson's truck narrowly escaped death by giant spider:














I would post some cool pictures of the Whole Enchilada, Porcupine Rim, or the Slickrock trail but alas I do not have any. So, continuing on we stopped briefly in Jackson and saw Tom and Erin, then continued on to Montana and picked up Ben and Mariah. Then we went to Squamish. But, we heard rumours on the interwebs that Squamish was plagued with dens of ravenous thieves so we left all of our valuable possessions (very little at that point..) in a place called Paradise, WA with some friends. As it turns out, while we were in Squamish a SWAT team descended on said neighborhood in a helicopter in search of a runaway fugitive described as a "shirtless man with a handgun." They raided a house a couple blocks down and arrested a shirtless man with a handgun, but it turns out he was not THE shirtless man with a handgun, simply a man lacking a shirt carrying a handgun. But he was also carrying crack, so they arrested him anyways.


Squamish was really cool. There were an incredible number of ridiculously amazing cracks and the rock was like Cathedral before it became polished to a smooth soapy finish. Here's little Ben on a climb in the Smoke Bluffs which topped out in someone's backyard.

And other Ben on a 5.11



















There were lots of log cabin building companies in the Pacific NW. These are for Greg, Lucas, Max, Kodiak:















If you look really, really closely you can see the next logs on sawhorses to the left of the cabin. They're doing the front and back two logs, but they've already cut the gaps for the window and door so they actually have four shorter logs ready to go. Also, check out all the logs floating in corrals in the sound.

(3) Then after a long drive back across almost literally the entire continent I went to Menorca, Spain for an archaeological field school (a.k.a: spy camp). On day two they had us digging up Roman tombs and bringing the bones back to the labs for cleaning and analysis






A femur and some skulls and many many other bones.







I also found a Roman coin. They have found about 500 Roman coins at this site since excavations started, but said that this was one of the better preserved ones that they've found this season.



















It was a little absurdly beautiful and there was ocean everywhere. This photo was taken with an iPhone. Wtf.

Menorca is a very small island that has a much smaller tourist industry than it's larger neighbor, Mallorca. As far as I can tell, it's only industry is making these weird leather shoes that nobody wears.







It's a very small island (45km X 18 km) and there is not very much to do there besides go to the beach, read a book, stare pensively at the ocean, or drink sangria. There was a small amount of sport climbing though! It was about as well bolted as Rumney, if not better. This was a relief because all the holds were sharp limestone and seemed like they had a 50% chance of failure.








Oh - also! I went to Tunisia. My dad and I
stayed at this hotel, which kindly requested that you park your exploding cars elsewhere.






Up next: I'm heading to Utah after Thanksgiving to spend the winter in Alta. If you'll be in that area, or want to be in that area and ski with me, get in touch!

Kate

An American Tale: Fievel and Max Go West

Apparently the whole "school year" thing means that people stop posting to this blog. "Well, that's sad," I thought to myself one day. I ought to add some pretty pictures to the mix.

After finishing my indentured servitude under pharaoh Greg Sokol on Titcomb this summer, Claire Frazer and I loaded up into a car and started chasing Ben and Kate across the country. Two days later, we found our way to Boulder, CO. We stopped at a nice pagoda overlooking the front range, and I decided to leave a gift for any future Ledyard travelers.

We proceeded into Boulder, where we visited with Ben and Kate, Palmer, ran across Answoon, and hung out with Alex Lee. There were baked goods delivered to the house, and pretty pictures of Boulder Canyon with and without Andrew Palmer in them.

Following our time in Boulder, Claire and I booked it for California, where we had scheduled jobs as the gophers at wineries. To be honest, I had no idea what was about to happen. All I knew was that I'd be working outrageous hours.

Well, working at a winery is pretty much exactly what I expected. A typical day involves digging through grapes, dumping them into bins, sorting them, driving a forklift, dealing with 180 proof brandy, dumping a dump truck, mixing up buckets worth of chemicals, and, at the end of it, drinking delicious, free wine. Unfortunately, there's no chablis or jugs produced here. On the other hand, they do make 3-liter bottles of Cabernet. I really want to show up to a party with a magnum of our "Proprietor's Reserve." I hear that's what real badasses do. Magnum = 2-liter bottle, fyi. I didn't learn this until recently.

Did you ever wonder what a half-ton of grapes looks like? And yes, they are fucking delicious beyond all reason. I think I'm ruined for grocery store grapes now, but it's so delicious. When we're sorting them, I eat as many as possible. Somehow, no one seems to mind.

The real excitement of this job, though, comes with red grapes. The whites all came in early in the season, so for weeks on end I came home depressed that I hadn't yet stained my hands and clothing with red and purple splotches. My winery processes about two or three times as many red grapes as white. I was in for some fun. Meet Quinn, the Cabernet Sauvignon grape.

More on Quinn later, but suffice it to say that, during the last week, we received innumerable bins full of grapes just like Quinn. Well, my boss is counting the tonnage, but I really try not to think about it. I was at work from 9am-4am on Thursday (also Friday) dealing with these guys. We have to process all of them the same day so they don't rot or spoil in any way.

Like I said, I'll tell you more about Quinn at a later date, but before that, we took in about 25 tons of Zinfandel grapes. The juice in red grapes is still white, so you need time to suck the color and flavors out of the skins. All the fermentation occurs in big open-top tanks while the berries are still intact. Therefore, after sorting and destemming all the grape clusters, we dump them into a tank from above (forklift the bin 25 feet into the air, then rotate it–yes, it is awesome).

Once fermentation is done, however, you need to get all that juice out of the tank without the skins. If you leave them sitting on skins too long, they start to extract pretty gross flavors. How does one do this? Open the valve, dummy.

We also do this while the wine is still fermenting to help aerate everything. Oxygen is good for young red wines. Go figure.

Anyway, we run the juice through the screen to keep out the skins from the tank, pump it into a different tank, and what you are left with is a tank filled with a couple of tons of skins. Naturally, these skins trap a bunch of juice, so we need to get them out and press the juice out of the skins. How does one do this, you ask? Simple. Rake and shovel.

You open the door, rake out a small hole, climb a ladder, then jump into the top and use a shovel to scrape tons of grape skins out the front door. The tanks are about 7-feet tall, so jumping in is a little scary the first time. Grapes provide a nice, soft landing spot, though.

We then take those bins of skins, send them up an elevator and into the press, and use the press to extract the rest of the juice from the skins. For the number-minded, we press all grapes, red and white, up to 1.1 bar. The whole machine does it gradually, spinning itself to unmat the walls and mix up everything inside. Pretty cool. Here is my boss raking the skins out of the bin onto the elevator that goes up to the press.

Yeah, so I have a very ridiculous job. I never thought that I'd be playing fireman with a hose full of wine, but, sure enough, for every batch of red wine I find myself at the top of a ladder spraying mostly fermented grape juice through a 2" hose to aerate it. It's outrageous.

At the same time, I've been doing my best to get outside on my rare off days. There's a pretty solid contingent of elder Ledyardites in San Francisco. This past weekend I played Jeopbeerdy with James Joslin, Alex Steinberg, Emily Harding-Theobald, Andrew Flynn, Whitney MacFlynn, David Quaid, and a couple of other people. Most of my off days have been mountain biking (which, out here, is terrific), but I was also able to get out kayaking with James and Steinberg and a friend of theirs I met recently at the Chili Bar section of the American River.

Steinberg drags a boat down a rapid.

Me, creeking. I must be, since I'm in a Jefe..

Biking in Napa at Skyline Park. Pretty sweet view, if I do say so myself. Also, sweet brick wall. Also, solid gradient.

Finally, I did manage to get out climbing. The nearest place to climb is, as far as I know, near the coast, about an hour away. California doesn't bolt much, but this particular boulder right on the NorCal coast has anchors at the top to let you toprope pretty much anything you want. The climbing wasn't amazing, but this particular route was really fun and the scenery was absolutely beautiful.

All in all, I'm really enjoying being on the left coast. It's pretty stunningly beautiful, the weather is nice, and the people are relaxed and generally pretty damn nice. I leave you with one last picture of the coast and a little bit of food porn to hopefully make your mouth water with desire. Hope everyone's doing well! Shoot me an email - I want to hear what's been going on with y'all.

Iced

That's right.  You just got iced, courtesy of the current 3D residents.  Leave a comment with your address, and Greggles will be happy to put one in the mail for you.

3D Wants Post Cards!

Send the house a real post card from your travels, we now have a sweet post card door.

I'll post for real soon, but thats all for now.

-Parker

In case you are confused, the mailing address for 3D is:

3D Residents

3 Dorrance Pl.

Hanover, NH 03755

The Parker Reed Brothel for Wayward Alumni

Since the summer term officially ended, a lot has happened at good ol' 3D, and I figured it is my duty as a new resident to report it. Though Lucas and I (Greg) had been spending quite a bit of time here all summer, we are now actual real-life residents, for at least a week or two. Titcomb Crew got kicked out of its apartment on the 31st, and even though the majority of the crew has gone its separate ways, Lucas and I are still around finishing the roof of the cabin at a more leisurely pace. You can see more of that on the Titcomb blog. Anyway, this past weekend has been quite busy. Here is a list of important events:

• Julie showed up, and I sat with her at the Lodj Croo rehearsal dinner. At dinner, she made some joke about taking someone to Poundtown, and it made me laugh. I missed Julie Carson jokes.
• Elar showed up. I called him from 3D asking where he was, and two minutes later he ran into the house really loudly, covered in sweat from dancing with '14s at the H-Croo dance party. An intimidating 24-ounce Smirnoff Ice was waiting for him.
  
  
• Emyen moved out of her room and Train moved in. Much to all of our surprise, Emyen successfully navigated her way to the Grant.
• I moved into Nancy's room for the week. In lieu of rent, I cleaned the tank of the turtle that belongs to Nancy and Mertens. That shit was gross. I'm probably going to let Elar set the turtle free.
• Elar played pong.
• We replaced the old keg of Bud Select (gross) with a new keg of PBR. This involved first emptying the Bud Select into the 3D parking lot.

Then, Elar and I had a keg race of sorts back to Stinson's with the two kegs to be returned. I won. Self call.

And then burgers were made with the new keg:

So that's about it for now, but there should be some good debauchery this week. Elar is here for a few more days, I'm here for at least another week or so, and Lucas and Parker are here indefinitely, as usual.

-Greggles

One Summer, One Subaru, Eight Thousand Miles, Five Ropes, 11 Pair of Shoes, One Golf Club, One Destiny, and a Continuing List of Blog Title Cliches..

Blogjack! Nice little gig you have, but the mercenaries from 20 school have infiltrated your deepest security measures (thanks Jake) to infect you with stories of our recent alpine bouldering and particularly difficult scrambling adventures in Wyoming and California. And in case you didn't hear or assume, we did NOT take the motorcycle out - it was either $1200 of funding or a summer-long type 2 adventure (hah).

Wanting to deviate a LITTLE from the reg DMC locales of the Tetons, Winds, and Sierras, we first checked out Mt. Rushmore and decided that Jefferson’s Mandible would indeed NOT go free. It looks like you can get some master cams in his pores but really we need a full rack of anticams (http://climbingnarc.com/2010/05/the-anti-cam/) to aid the incisor pitch. Funny that climbing at the South Dakota Needles wasn’t actually much different from this. Cool granite towers and hard sport, but lots of guidebook confusion and a noticeable lack of protection.

Devil’s Tower is CRAZY, you’ve never seen anything like this. The feature itself is surreal and so is the climbing experience. Out-of-breath tourists on a paved-flat walkway gawk as you lock and stem through the highest concentration of the most beautiful, sustained, clean, and well protected cracks and corners/dihedrals you’ve ever seen. 5.10 might be the best grade to climb at the tower but there’s really great stuff on either side of it, although I swear neither of us could figure out how to climb 5.9 or lower unawkwardly after finally getting comfortable on long hard cracks. Make a trip out of going to the Tower or at least stop by sometime. Be sure to bring a double rack of nuts and a golf club for the nine holes of golf at the top of the Tower (stupid tourists who don’t read signs will believe anything)!

Quick anecdote. We've been playing the license plate game (only Hawaii to go) and holy shit Vermont gets out and does cool stuff more than Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi combined. Not even per capita. Per fucking fact-ita.

Everyone knows about the Tetons by now, but everyone prolly don’t know that there can still be a LOT of snow there around August. We couldn’t do the Grand (or even Cathedral) Traverse and had to rent cast iron ice axes just to get up to the shoulder below Exum Ridge. Its a long hike up to the shoulder, a bit of a climb up Lower Exum Ridge, and then another simul/hike up proper Exum Ridge to the top of the biggest breast (..teton). This was another of our encounters of a Jack Durrance route of some sort - he has the FD down Exum Ridge as well as the FA on the most popular route up the Tower. The man did a lot of shit and is even mentioned in the Winds guidebooks and Freddie Wilkinson account of the 2008 K2 disaster, One Mountain Thousand Summits. I’m about half way through that right now and its really a spectacular read. He craftily weaves 8000m mountaineering history in with his research and analysis of the disaster, really covering the subject while not boring you. It probably makes a good case to never get into that shit and it feels good to have all of our light and fast alpinism horns blown a little.

“John Joline was right, he hit the nail on the head with that place,” said Jake, about the Winds, when we visited him in Madison (who seemed to be so happy there he was touting his own beer drinking capabilities over Wisconsin rock). We were supposed to meet John in his fabled East Fork Valley, but unrelated tooth and climbing partner problems delayed him a few weeks so we busted into the Cirque of the Towers and Deep Lake area for 10 days ourselves. In the Cirque you camp in a field of wildflowers with a waterfall in the middle, weather is irregular but short-lived when it comes in, and the granite is good to chossy. We did some really great classics and then tried the 20 mile, 5.8 Cirque Traverse in a day and punted HARD. After some ridicucool climbing and the most exposed fucking 5.8 move I’ve ever heard of in my life, we bailed at dark down what we thought would be a pretty standard bail highway, considering the couple hundred dollars of bail spectra, biners, and nuts we’d pulled off of other climbs. After leaving some gear and a 5.grassy traverse at 11,000 ft we rapped into a steep snow gully and spent the next few hours picking our way down slippery rocks where we could find them. We left like three anchors and STILL are coming out of that place with a net gain of bail gear, what a goat rodeo HAH.

Now we’ve spent the last couple days in Oakland eating everything in sight and gearing up for Temple Crag, the Incredible Hulk, and Yosemite big rock. Climb safe and send/text us a shout out if you’re going to be in California or want us to stop by on our way back east in September!

If you think you’re gonna plummet, youuu must gun it!
- A guy we met named Joe

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M,D&L