Vertical Forest

Mac Humor

Tuesday, August 21st, 2007

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I love it 😀

Trail Camp and Vacation

Wednesday, August 8th, 2007

Our family just got back yesterday from going on a week long vacation out to California to see my grandparents on my dad’s side. It took us four days to drive out there, but that was only because we stopped in Kanab, UT for a day to see the Grand Canyon. On the first day we stopped in Salt Lake to visit a family we’d known through our homeschool group, but had moved to Arizona several years ago and then to Utah just a few months ago.

While we were staying in LA to visit my grandparents, we went to Disneyland and Universal Studios, along with the visiting the Queen Mary (an old ocean liner) and the [S.S. Lane Victory](http://www.lanevictory.org/), a ship built during WWII which we had visited on our last trip out to California. The last time we toured it, nearly everything was open to the public so that one scramble up and down ladders and across catwalks in the engine room (something you can’t do most places because of liability and all that junk :P). Unfortunately, for some reason after 9/11 the organization that owns the ship requested that it be classified as a possible target for terrorist attacks by the Department of Homeland Security (I think they might some funding for it), so they closed off the engine room and all the really interesting parts of the ship 🙁

The week before last I was backpacking up in the mountains around Leadville in the Holy Cross wilderness area with a group from Camp Elim. This was my third year going on the trip, and I had a blast (is it even legal to use that term anymore?) hiking through the beautiful mountains around that area. I even tried swimming in a frigid mountain lake, which was an experience in itself. I also climbed up Savage Peak, a nearby 13er.

[Here are my pictures from the trip](http://picasaweb.google.com/ethilien/TrailCamp07) (I’ve put a few of the best below)