Winter

Winter is officially here. There's not much snow up in the mountains yet. I rode the Alpine Loop yesterday. Except for about 20 deer, I was the only one there. It was quite cold. I definitely need better gloves and shoes for next time. It's probably going to snow this week sometime. That'll be the end of my weekend rides around Mt. Timpanogos until April. I can still hike around it. I always descend quickly, one of these times I should slow down and stop at a few places to take in the view. I almost hit a young little deer on the way down, not really though, it ran across the road right in front of me. On the other side of the road was a steep hill and it was frantically trying to scale that to get away from me. It only succeeded in running in place for a while and kicking up dust until I passed. Seeing all those deer made me wonder how many there actually are around here. They're usually very well hidden when there're more people around.

I got a new Eee PC, I like it a lot. The keyboard is not too small for me. At half the size of most laptops this thing isn't just allegedly portable. It'll fit in my coat pocket and on those little foldout desks in the lecture halls at school and will be nice for trips. All I need is a spare set of batteries though and I'll be set for anything. I recommend installing Xubuntu on it. That's what I did and it's nicer than the Xandros installation that it comes with, you can even install Windows XP on it if you want. Skype video is pretty sweet. It's good enough for all of the programming projects I'll need to do for school and writing on this blog and checking my e-mails. It won't run games that require more than a 800x480 screen resolution, but that's okay with me. The operating system and all the packages I have installed including Open Office take up less than 2 gigabytes of memory.

Alpine Loop

I recently discovered the best place to go road biking around Provo, the Alpine Loop. Saturday morning I went around sunrise the sky was cloudy. Just like it's been for the past two Saturdays here. I rode down Provo Canyon and took a left at Sundance onto Alpine Loop Road (S.R. 92). It's a great time of year for this sort of thing. The scenery is great with the autumn colors and the weather isn't very cold yet. I rode up the switchbacks past Sundance and Aspen Lodge. The aspens are all yellow this time of year. Some deer crossed the road in front of me. When I reached the summit at 8,054 feet it started to rain, ice cold rain. I began the descent and since I was wearing short sleeves and didn't have gloves my hands started to go numb on the handlebars and my face started to freeze. It was great, I was really living for this half hour I could just sit back and take in the scenery. Through American Fork canyon and Pleasant Grove and then the downhill ride was over after 15 miles.
I road the Alpine Loop again Tuesday morning. This time it only took three hours from my house up the canyon and back through American Fork. This time was better because there were fewer cars on the road. The descent was faster since I had gloves this time, but my face still froze on the way down. I was going like 40 miles an hour and had to keep an eye out for rocks in the road there were a few. There's a pothole in the road that I hit every time.

Dave Zabriskie can bike the Alpine Loop in one hour. I'd be doing good if I could finish it in two hours. There are some good places to go around here. I would like to explore more of the Lone Peak wilderness area and go up to Park City before the roads get covered in snow.