Yearly Archives: 2007

Boom!

Last night I saw my first building implosion. After 65 years standing on the Strip, the Frontier came down in about eight seconds. My work buddies Zach Wise and Hepi Mita shot this video of the event: I was standing behind Sun journalists Richard Brian and Matt Toplikar when they made this time-lapse sequence. Needless…

Vegas Baby!

After six years in the District of Columbia, I’m packing my bags for Las Vegas. I’ve accepted a position at the Las Vegas Sun, where I’ll get to combine my journalism and Web skills. I expect big things to come out this little paper. I leave D.C. at the end of next week. Stay tuned…

Web Scraping The Census With PHP

The Census Bureau is a treasure trove of information about communities. But sometimes getting to the data and making sense of it takes a bit of work. It can be hard to find the data and even harder to wade through it, especially if you want to use it in a Web application. To help,…

Across The Great Divides

On June 20, a humid Wednesday in the District of Columbia, I schlepped my internal frame pack, my daypack and a carry-on, all exploding with two weeks worth of clothes and camping gear, to Baltimore Washington International Airport. Two bumpy rides later, I landed in an even hotter, but dry, Denver. My first real vacation…

The Four-Mile Trail That Isn’t

The inaptly named Four Mile trail in Yosemite Valley is, in fact, just over four and half miles each direction. The Yosemite National Park Web site list the trail as “strenuous,” but it wasn’t incredibly taxing for the distance. Besides, the trail terminates at Glacier Point where, unknown to us, there was a bus stop,…

Sequoia National Park

Everything Is Bigger In Sequoia From Zion, we stopped outside Sequoia National Park for a night and spent the following morning playing in the Giant Sequoia forest in the park, which is only a small part of the very large Sequoia National Park / Kings Canyon National Park complex. Group Hug The forest is exactly…

The Narrows

“There is no maintained trail; the route is the river,” is part of the description of the Narrows on the Zion National Park Web site. And that is certainly accurate. One gets to the Zion Narrows by simply jumping into the Virgin River at the end of the Riverside Walk trail, a very easy one-mile…

Angels Landing

As I said before, our day at Zion was my favorite on the trip. The Narrows stole my heart, but the Angels Landing hike after lunch was amazing on its on. Starting at the valley floor, Angels Landing is two and half miles one direction, and it feels straight up. There is an elevation gain…

Rocky Mountain National Park

After four days in Telluride, Colo., Scott and I met Abigail, Dave and Meredith to backpack in Rocky Mountain National Park. We spent two nights in the Never Summer range in the northwest section of the park, entering on the Colorado River trailhead. According to rangers, Never Summer is one of the least visited sections…

Half Dome 1, Josh 0

“It’s not that I’m scared, I’m just really tired,” one big burly guy said to another. The second looked at the peak of Half Dome, the largest granite monolith in the world, and agreed that he too was indeed too fatigued after the eight-mile hike from the floor of Yosemite Valley to finish the trail….