A Double Dose of the Dead Bird Diaries

Welcome to episode 9 of the Dead Bird Diaries. It's hard to believe that while entries are infrequent, and often ruffle a few feathers (pun!) with my audience, this pet project of mine just won't... die. Zing! It's been a long while since the last edition, so I'm making up for it with a double shot in one day. The first two photos: A large crow that failed at playing chicken with a car. The latter three photos: a medium sized hawk that likely also played chicken and lost. What bird brained ideas... says the guy who ran in and out of traffic repeatedly to get these shots.

Prelude to Patagonia, pt. 3 - Mt. Wilcox

We've suddenly become total mountain geeks as we've scrambled 3 peaks in 3 weeks. We set off at 6am yesterday and drove 3.5 hrs out to the Columbia Icefield to make our way up Mt. Wilcox. For this latest 'training' run, I was thinking of saddling Anita's pack down with a cast iron skillet, but I think she would've hit me with it, which isn't my idea of a fun day. For a good portion of the route, it's a long hike through a beautiful alpine meadow, with only a slight chance of getting rammed in the crotch by bighorned sheep. We did see about 2 dozen of them, but they were in the distance and did not appear to be in a junk ramming mood, thankfully. Anyways... after hiking through the meadow, you hit the steep part where there is some fun scrambling and traversing to gain the ridge of Wilcox, affording stupendous views of the Athabasca Glacier and its surrounding peaks. Between the drive, hike and a quick break, it was a long 14 hr day. My neck and arms 'tanned' so much from the intense sun exposure, I look like I'm wearing a white shirt (okay, slightly yellow) when I take off my shirt. Gross...


Emerging from the trees onto the start of the alpine meadow.


A view of Mt. Athabasca, Mt. Andromeda, and the Athabasca Glacier.






Traversing across the South East face, just below the ridge.




Anita demos some of her mad scrambling skills as we search for a route up to the ridge.






Making my way over for a better view of the Athabasca Glacier.















As we prepare to descend, Anita argues with me over the steepness of the meadow and how it was 'straight up' compared to gaining the ridge of the mountain itself (she struggled mightily in the meadow, yet powered up the scree of the mountain with no issues). So when we get down back into the meadow, and she realizes it was pretty much a nice walk through rolling hills, she says "Now I'm ashamed of myself." How often does YOUR wife willingly admit to being wrong? I'm a lucky dude.

The Temples of Angkor

Anita and I checked out the M.C. Escher exhibit at the Glenbow Museum this weekend, which was super cool. Looking at his work (prints of impossible staircases and structures, and repeating design elements that merge and form from one another) is a bit disorienting, and you may feel like you've smoked a bowl or two afterwards. It's pretty awesome.

While we were there, we also checked out an exhibit on Asian sculptures of Hindu and Buddhist deities. The sculptures are so detailed and richly carved, depicting fantastical scenes of gods fishing, gods killing gods, gods getting their girlfriends seduced by others while they're out meditating, gods turning into snake demon Super-saiyans (I may be making that last one up)... This brought back memories of our 4 days in Siem Reap,where we toured through numerous temples in the Angkor area while listening to interpretations of the bas reliefs and sculpted motifs depicted throughout the temples. If you ever get the chance to visit Cambodia, these temples are a MUST see. Enjoy this selection of some of the lesser known ones in the sprawling complex of Angkor.






























Ganesha, son of Shiva. He has an elephant head because Shiva accidentally chopped off his normal head before realizing Ganesha was his son. He then resurrected him by installing the head of the nearest creature at the time. Did Guillermo Del Toro write this, cause that's about how much sense it makes...


Shiva (Hindu God of Destruction), holding the severed head of Brahma (Hindu God of Creation). Moral: being the good guy sucks.


Vishnu and his companion, Lakshmi. Vishnu somehow eventually transforms into Shiva (queue the Michael Bay era Transformers sound). Don't ask, the deity family tree is confusing to me too. And we had four days with a guide repeatedly explaining these legends to us.

Prelude to Patagonia, pt. 2 - Yamnuska

As the countdown to Chile continues, I took (forced) Anita up Mt. Yamnuska for some more conditioning, saddled with the weight of a few Portland and Oregon guidebooks in her pack (we're going for a short trip in September). Yamnuska is much more of a scramble than Ha Ling, and the route is significantly more varied. There's some nice forest, views of a huge valley, a bit of scree to slog up, a good mix of technical scrambling, a ridge walk, and then a scree surf descent route that you can literally run down (dropping a few hundred meters of elevation in minutes). And like the scramble itself, Anita's day was a broad mixture of sweating, laughing, grumbling, mosquito swatting, thoughts of divorce, whimpering, and ultimately, triumphant elation at the end. Despite her few moments of panic, the photos do make her look sort of badass.

Enjoy the rest of your long weekend!