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Mountain Biking In Mexico’s Copper Canyon

I just returned from a week-long mountain bike trip in Las Barrancas Del Cobre (Copper Canyon), a canyon system in southwestern Chihuahua state of truly remarkable scope and scenery:

The trip was organized by Western Spirit, a bike expedition company about which I have only great things to say. [Continued...]

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Wii be rollin’…

I’ve just emerged from my thrice-weekly morning session with the bike trainer. It’s gotten a lot easier to deal with the boredom of stationary pedaling thanks to the Wii that we bought “for the kids”.

No, dear reader, I am not in fact coordinated enough to play Zelda or Wii Sports while pedaling furiously. (OK… make that semi-furiously.) What I am able to do is surf the web using the Wii’s built-in web browser, pointing and clicking the Wii Remote in one hand while maintaining pace and position on the bike. And this, from my point of view, is one very good reason to get hold of one of these gadgets. Now I can read a wide variety of stuff while doing my workout, and exercise free choice over it. That’s progress!

There are plenty of other reasons to check out the Wii. The remote (which has 6 degrees of free motion as well as buttons and internal accelerometers) is a really interesting input device, and it can interface via Bluetooth with a PC or Mac, and folks are coming out with some great homebrew hardware and software to provide connectivity for developers. Combine the remote with Flex, WiiFlash and Papervision3D, and suddenly you’re looking at an impressive 3D visualization platform. Hmmm…

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Las Vegas / MAX 2006 Conference

I just returned from Las Vegas, where I spoke at MAX 2006, a conference sponsored by Adobe that covers a variety of technologies formerly branded as Macromedia, chiefly Flash, Flex, ColdFusion. My presentation was about a set of architectural approaches to building complex Flex applications; you can look at it here if you’re interested. I plan to write more about that architecture soon, so I’m not going to go into details right now.

Now Vegas is a weird and interesting place, and, of course, how could one contemplate visiting Las Vegas without a little… mountain biking? I took a bunch of pictures capturing various Vegas scenes of this and that, as well as part of our bike day trip with my buddy Jeff Vroom who works at Adobe (thanks to Chad and Escape Adventures for a great ride).

I stayed in the Venetian, an aggressive faux-Italian sprawl. Its architecture carefully funnels conference-goers through its small intestine, where clever organs named “the slot machine” and “the blackjack table” absorb their nutrients and cash into the hotel’s bloodstream. I saw a sign that said “When it’s no longer a game… PLAY RESPONSIBLY.” I ask this: in a bar, if you saw a sign that said, “When you’re blind drunk… DRINK RESPONSIBLY,” what would you think?

Anyway, apart from meeting lots of great people and giving my presentation, I found out a lot about Adobe’s new Apollo platform, which I think is going to enable people to build some really great new kinds of applications. Apollo directly integrates the Flash, Flex, DHTML and PDF platforms to an extent never before seen, and supports applications that can be installed by the user directly on the desktop with access to the file system, network, etc.. The apps appear as native application executables and are not Adobe-branded in any way. There is integration at the programmatic level (ActionScript and JavaScript can call each other’s code and see each other’s objects) and at the display level (HTML can appear as a display object in Flash with alpha, scaling, rotation, etc., while Flash can of course appear as an element in an HTML page). Furthermore, the HTML piece is a 100% fully functional browser based on WebKit, which also more or less powers Safari.

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Day 5: The Hermosa Creek Trail to Trimble Hot Springs

Our final day was another cloud-free, perfect summer wonder. We set off down the road 1 mile to meet the trail head of the Hermosa Creek Trail, one of the most famous Durango-area riding experiences. It’s an 18-mile-long trail that was reputed to offer some of the best riding and scenery to be found around Durango, and based on what I’d seen so far, I expected that would have to mean it was something great. We were not disappointed! [Continued...]

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Day 4: Relay Creek Road to Hermosa Park via Durango Mountain Resort

We broke camp at Bolam Pass around 9:15. Today we’d begin our big descent to a lower altitude range for the remainder of the trip. We headed down from the lake on a fast fire road leg to a rough wooden ruin of a cabin marking the former location of the Graysill Mine. Vanadium was mined here first, then uranium, some of which made it into the Manhattan Project. Mining continued here until 1965, which seemed surprising considering the primitive condition and remoteness of the site. [Continued...]

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Day 3: Excursion to Section Point

I awoke this morning to yet another clear sky, but this one would prove to be more durable. Walking around in our puffy down jackets (it was now embarrassing to remember that I’d thought my down would be overkill in summer) we quickly got our stuff together for a 9 am departure for a loop excursion at high altitude, returning eventually to our present campsite where we would stay one more night. It was a big relief not to have to break camp. [Continued...]

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Day 2: Lizard Head Pass to Bolam Pass

This morning it was crystal-clear, with no hint of the previous day’s nasty weather. We could clearly see the dramatic surroundings of our campground: the 14,000+ peaks of El Diente and Mt. Wilson stared across the valley, with the eccentric volcanic plug of Lizard Head itself rising nearby. (Lizard Head, by the way, was considered the hardest climb in Colorado for much of the first part of the 20th century, because it’s made out of crumbly, unreliable garbage rock. Climbing guides of the period advised taking a photo of Lizard Head and turning around to head home. The lizard-head-looking part apparently decayed and fell off some time ago, leaving everyone to wonder what was the idea behind the name.) [Continued...]

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Day 1: From Telluride to “A Night At The Y”

(Note: photos of the entire trip can be viewed here.)

This morning broke with a crystal-clear blue sky: my prayers for good weather had been finally answered, or so I thought. I dropped off the rental car in Durango and rode to the rendezvous in back of Mountain Bike Specialists on Main Street to meet the Western Spirit truck, the guides, and the other folks with whom I’d be riding the next 5 days. Our guides were Rachel, Scott and Jason; Rachel and Scott were a married couple looking to be in their 40s and were veteran guides for Western Spirit, while Jason was in his 20s and guiding the route for the first time. [Continued...]

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Mesa Verde N.P. and The Best Little Renaissance Faire in Colorado

Last night, it rained all night. I had many fitful dreams in which the forthcoming bike trip was cancelled due to bad weather, and I pleaded with the organizers to move it to some other state.

I awoke to a cold, rainy and nasty morning. There is no question of riding in the rain around here, since the trails turn into a sea of mud, so I headed off to Mesa Verde National Park about 40 miles west of Durango, where the famous Anasazi cliff dwellings are. I was hoping the rain would keep away the crowds despite its being peak season, and indeed it did; although I didn’t have the place to myself, it wasn’t jammed either. [Continued...]

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Colorado Bike Trip: Prelude In Durango

I arrived here in Durango, Colorado last night, to give myself three days to acclimatize to the altitude before the rigor of a 5-day bike trip from nearby Telluride back to Durango, which will involve biking over 100 miles at elevations that reach nearly 12,000 feet.

(Photos of this part of the trip can be viewed here.)

[Continued...]

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