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Our two fantastic friends Michael and Sharmishtha got married this weekend. It was one of the best weddings I’ve ever been to. It was a great location, laid back, and so many of our climbing friends were there. The party basically lasted from Friday night until Sunday night. We also got to hang out with Sharmishtha’s family, who came over from India and England. They were a blast.

I can’t believe how much activity got packed into those few days. I feel like I fit in more quality time with my friends than I’ve gotten all year. This was actually Michael and Sharmishtha’s second wedding — they’ve already had one in India. By popular demand, they had the U.S. version too.

Congratulations, lovebirds! Here are some of the pictures that I took. Sharmishtha’s cousin Amlan took a lot of really nice pictures of the whole event. I’ll probably be able to get a copy of his shots later and post some of them here as well.

Two weeks ago Ieva got an out-of-the-blue offer to go to Greenland for a week. Eric Post, a professor at Penn State, does research up there and needed someone to go along on this trip to, well, basically just carry heavy loads.

She left on Saturday, the day of Michael and Sharmishtha’s wedding. She was really bummed that she had to miss the ceremony itself (and the partying!), but she did get to hang out quite a bit for the rest of the day.

She doesn’t really know a whole lot more about the trip, since it was such short notice. She probably only talked with the members of the other group for about an hour total before leaving. In any case, we bought a new digital camera for the occasion, and I’m sure she’ll have lots to tell when she gets back. I got an email from her this morning that said that she’s tired, but doing great. She got to ride in the cockpit for a while, which is really nice considering that the flight is on a C-130 (military cargo plane), so the atmosphere everywhere else in the plane is less than stellar, so I’m told.

In any case, here are some interesting links that I found while I was trying to dig up any information beforehand that I could:

• Here’s a satellite photo of where she’s flying into. Note the runway in the center of the photo. Drag on the picture to see the edge of the Greenland ice cap, several screenfulls to the right. Zoom out gradually to see where this is in Greenland (or where Greenland is at all, for the geography-impaired). Very cool.
• Here’s a political map of where she’s flying into. The tiny town is also known as Kangerlussuaq.
• Here’s the home page for Eric Post, the professor who’s sending Ieva on this trip. Those same caribou antlers that are in the photo on his home page wound up in Ieva’s possession on the first day of buck season in State College. She got to carry them to App House from our apartment and tell passers-by that they were from the buck that she shot that day. Very impressive.
• Here are the best weather forecasts that I could find for Kangerlussuaq. Note that there’s no civil/nautical/astronomical twighlight listed, since she’s above the arctic circle. Neat.
• Here is someone’s weather station info in Kangerlussuaq (I just keep copying and pasting this name) for up-to-the-minute weather info.
• Here’s a picture of the town of Kangerlussuaq.
• Here’s a really cool picture of the edge of the ice cap.

I’ll let you know when I hear more from her, but I suspect that we won’t hear much until she gets back!

I was riding my bike to Rothrock for a run this afternoon, when I realized that there was a big black bear right at the next turn! Then I saw that there were two tiny cubs with her! After a brief moment, they went into a small stream’s gully and I was forced to consider, “do I really want to start stalking a mother bear and her cubs?”

So after dumping my bike and carefully trotting over to the gully, I couldn’t see any sign of them. I wasn’t really looking too hard, since I couldn’t see very well into the gully despite being right on the edge of it. I didn’t want to surprise them. After a while, I began to think that they were probably gone. When I turned around to look back towards the bike, they were coming out of the gully just 100 feet away. After the mother spent some time looking back and forth at me and the cubs, they started walking across the field, and then broke out into a full run. I took as many pictures as my little camera could (it’s slow), while still admiring the scene outside the camera. The mother bear was gorgeous — she had a nice shiny black coat that shimmered in the sunlight. She waited at the edge of the woods for the little fuzzy cubs to catch up to her, and then they disappeared into the brush.

I was really excited, since I’ve been running in Rothrock for years, waiting to see a bear. What luck! It’s totally paid off to always carry a small camera on runs. Great, now I’m probably going to feel like I should start carrying the SLR…

Be sure to check out all of the pictures here.

I’m just getting around to posting some pictures from an awesome afternoon that we had at the quarry. Both Eriks (Ieva’s brother) and Kathleen (Jim’s special lady) were in town. Perfect weather, good routes, good food afterwards. Jim also got us to go do some of the routes next to the water, below the Flake. The rock is really high quality there! Very compact. This picture is of Jim on a new line. Click on it to go to the gallery.

Just out of curiosity, I took a look at the satellite photos for the Mohican 100 compared to Rothrock State Forest:

Mohican 100 course	Rothrock State Forest

They're both at the same scale. It looks like the mountains aren't going to be nearly as big. I know that this thing's in Ohio, so I guess I shouldn't be too surprised. There's 11,000 feet of elevation gain over the whole thing, which is about 69% as hilly as the R3 trail in Rothrock.

I also took a look at the handful of pictures that they have on the Mohican 100 website, and none of the trails look very rough or very steep compared to Rothrock, either.

Who knows, maybe the terrain will turn out to be easier than what I've been training on.

If it sounds like I'm obsessing a little at this point, it's because I'm obsessing a lot.