Spring!!!

Madison has had an unfortunately clingy winter this year (not that warm-ish xc skiing is so bad), and since ski-able snow has disappeared, we've had a cold, rainy month of "spring."  As you can imagine, Ali and I are jumping at the sunny weekend days for bike rides.  We've managed a few shorter (~20 mile) routes on flat bike routes, and we recently returned from a fantastic trip out to Vancouver (biking + snowshoeing + great food + wonderful company in one weekend is tough to beat).

This weekend, we decided to have a "slow" weekend and go for a 55 mile bike ride.  Ali found a great route here, and though we missed a one or two of the poorly-signed roads,  we managed a fair distance anyway.  The roads were infrequently trafficked, and the vistas were great.  We even saw our first flowers of the year (in WI)!

Ali's managing to break in her bike pretty well; the (relatively) custom fit is great, and hills/high speeds are much easier now.  We managed our 55 miles with one lunch stop at 30 miles (Belleville Cafe's hot chocolate was just what we wanted halfway through a chilly ride) and a second break on the last bit into Madison.  Winds were mild, and so long as the sun was out of the puffy clouds, the temperature was lovely.  I imagine this loop might become a favorite as we gear up for the Dairyland Dare.  (I'm aiming for the 200k; we'll see how the hills treat us.)

Porkies Nordic Skiing - day 2

The second day of our ski vacation, we woke up even earlier than the first day, checked out of the motel, and were the seventh car in the parking lot at the porkies (the other six were probably there for the downhill).  We were headed for a loop of the ski-able park, just a few kilometers shorter than Saturday, and we had to be done in time to drive home before it got too late.

Climbing gradually

Once again, we started the day with a climb (or several climbs, as the case may be).  The air temps were a little warmer, but the snow was a little cooler and better packed early on.  We once more had a spectacular tour of flora and forest composition.  In addition to the bunny tracks from Saturday, we found traces of deer and possibly wolves (or some other wild canine).  When we got near the top of the downhill mountain, we turned onto an untouched trail with ginormous sparkly trees (and a hefty final climb).  I was munching on snow from mouth-height trees just to feel slightly more refreshed, but the climb was well worth the trouble.  We had decided to go with a more intermediate-temperature kick wax, the untouched snow was once again super-sticky.

Trudging upwards

We popped out of the woods right next to the operational chair lift (there are several lifts built to service the downhill slopes, but there aren't enough people to warrant operating more than the one closest to the chalet), and spent a kilometer skiing along the (quite well groomed/maintained by a community college course) alpine slopes.  We were treated to some lovely views of Lake Superior but were routed back into the woods in no time.

First time on a downhill run!

Superior from the Ski Hill

The next kilometer (to the West Vista) seemed to take forever.  The hill was tougher than expected, and though we were past our halfway point for the day, we hadn't eaten.  One of the friendly guys down at the chalet claimed that the West Vista could fool you into thinking you were in the Rockies.  While the view wasn't quite western, it was lovely.  There were a few of the mountains the Porkies are named for in the distance, with beautiful slopes covered in snow-etched trees.  It was a great place for a large brownie and a few cups of tea (even if I had just slid into a snow bank trying to make it to the bench).

West Vista Outlook

Laying Track

After a 5-10 minute break, we were feeling reinvigorated, and we took off down the hill.  On the way back down the West Vista Trail, we met the first of two people we saw on the trail the entire day.  He was headed off through the woods to backcountry ski his way down the hill, and our chance encounter explained why there were only perfectly parallel tracks going up (even though xc skiers like us had to snowplow like mad to stay at a reasonable speed going downhill on the trail).

Pristine and untracked

Lovely woods

As soon as we made it to the Big Hemlock Trail, we realized no one had touched it since at least Friday.  There was no sign of any ski tracks, and Ali (bless her) ended up breaking at least 5km of trail (probably closer to 12km for the day), sticky snow and all.  Worth the trouble?  Absolutely!!  For one, this batch of forest might have been even more glorious than the bits we had seen before.  (I'm probably just biased by the fact that no one had touched  it recently.) The likely wolf tracks that we found were in this segment, and the rolling terrain was a pretty pleasant change.  There were a couple times that we would turn a corner and just stand in the middle of the trail for a bit, admiring the scenery.

Found at one of the trail intersections

Unfortunately, this didn't last for too long.  Once the trail turns back toward the chalet, it shares a fair portion of its route with the (closed to cars) main park road.  While the road may be closed to cars so far into the park, it isn't closed to snowmobiles.  There were many more snowmobilers out Saturday (making a racket), but there's nothing quite as unpleasant as being on the far side of a snow-berm from a pack of snowmobiles.  The northwoods area has plenty of snowmobile trails between towns, and I'm not a huge fan of lingering gas fumes in a park.  Oh well.

I dragged a bit on our way in.  One brief break helped.  One faceplant into a snow bank did not (nothing horrible - just toppled by rutted, icy snowshoe tracks from the lantern ski).  We made it back to the parking lot and were on our way home by 2:30 or so.  All in all, a lovely trip.  I can't wait to go back.

Porkies XC Skiing - Birkie Weekend Edition - Day 1

Well, Ali and I may not have done the American Birkebeiner this year (54k classic/50k skate nordic ski race), but we certainly used the weekend to get some high mileage skiing up north!

Snow started mid-afternoon and lasted through the evening

Just into the UP, nestled against Lake Superior, is my favorite (state) park in the Midwest - Michigan's Porcupine Mountains (aka the Porkies).  Complete with 42k of "groomed" Nordic ski trails and 12 well-groomed alpine runs, the park has some beautiful woods, plentiful wildlife, and surprisingly few visitors.  We've been up to the Porkies for backpacking in the spring (and will hopefully get up there again this year), and I'm not sure why we always run into so few people.  The park is huge (for the Midwest), and the region (up nort') is sparsely populated, but this park is well worth the 5.5hr drive from Madison.

A bit of pre-broken trail

We followed a winter storm up from southern Wisconsin, and the roads were still in rough shape.  As such, our 5.5 hour drive turned into a 7 hour trek.  Thankfully, we never ended up in giant snow banks off the side of the road (in part due to all those other poor cars that gave us warning and in part due to the brilliantly excessive use of rumble strips).  We made it in extra late to our hotel since the UP is on eastern time; our wonderful hosts left our door open and the lights on.

One of the few open meadows we ran into

Early Saturday, we got up, checked in, and ate (grocery store muffins + yogurt + bananas = breakfast of champions).  A half hour later, we found ourselves at the ski chalet in the Porkies.  As Nordic skiers, we didn't have to pay for a car tag or a trail pass (though we could have paid $5 for a lift ticket instead of skiing up the big hill).  Luckily, they do have a donation box at the trailhead, so our guilt was assuaged.  We planned our route and waxed our skis in no time, so we were on the trail just before some light snow began.  Have I mentioned that the forest in the Porkies is glorious?  Because snow-laden, the different types of terrain are possibly even more stunning.  We skied through some giant hemlocks (with branches covered in fresh, sparkly, dry powder), open birch forests, and some really cool mixed, young woods where thin trees weighed down from all the lake-effect precipitation arched over the trail.

Stunning, eh?

My favorite spots looked like this

We warmed up pretty quickly; I was shedding layers and asking for water before we even hit the first trail intersection (2k in).  There was a fair amount of climbing during the beginning of our day, but the scenery and the unfortunately sticky snow helped.  Though the trails had been "groomed" recently, it didn't feel like the paths had seen any of the packing-and-tracking that I'm used to.  The fresh snow and paucity of visitors exacerbated the lack of grooming.  There were some points that it felt like I was walking on those "toning" shoes with the rounded bottoms because I had upwards of 2" of snow caked to the bottom of my skis.  For those of you less familiar with xc skiing, the idea is to be able to glide along instead of going step-by-step.  Having snow caked on your skis makes it feel like you're trying to walk with giant planks covered in bubblegum strapped to your feet.

Some of the mixed woods

By lunchtime, our legs were a bit fatigued by the snow-sticking problem and by the way we had been cutting tracks instead of coasting inside preexisting ones.  Alas, there was no fire in the warming hut, and we didn't dedicate enough time to get one going.  We had some stellar ham-cheese-bagel sandwiches, brownies, tomatoes, and lukewarm tea, but by the end of our quick break, we were chilly.  We came out of the hut and ran into a ranger-guided snowshoe group.  They paused to let us get a head start, but we had some wax experimenting to do.  Though the air temps really weren't bad this weekend (20s up to freezing), we put on the coldest-rated kick wax, and it solved many of our sticky-snow woes.  We caught the snowshoe pack in no time and beat them up to the east vista.  Further down the giant white tunnel of trail, we ran into some UW Hoofers out on a trip.  They were aiming for the Big Hemlock Trail, but I'm rather certain that they didn't make it that far.  After a brief chat, we headed back down to the chalet for big cups of lemonade/poweraid (we had been working hard!) and a warming fire.

East Vista View

For the end of the afternoon we headed to the Deer Yard trail and found Ali's favorite (birch) forest and my favorite (dark, well-spaced, evergreen) woods.  We grabbed some dinner back in Ontanogon and returned for the evening lantern ski.  Though we were too weary to stop by the halfway bonfire and hot cocoa station, the lanterns + fresh snow + trail combination was pretty magical.  After a half-marathon of skiing, we took our rental car (heated seats!!!!!) and headed back to the hotel.

Lanterns out before the official Night Ski

Happy Adventurers!

Offset Log Cabin Star (square number one!!)

The offset log cabin was one of the blocks on my list for the sampler quilt, and since I (a) roughly know how to make a log cabin square and (b) wanted to start with something easy, Ali and I sat down to diagram the thing out.  My largest squares for the quilt are going to be 18", so I made four 9" log cabins.

As it turns out, there are a a few different ways to make log cabins offset.  You can add some extra strips on one side or make some strips a slightly different size.  I went for the latter.

I started off with a 2.5 x 2.5" square in the center, and used 1.5" dark strips and to 2.5" light strips for the outside bits.  To make a 9" offset block, you'd need:

one center square

four light strips (with lengths 3.5, 5.5, 6.5, and 8.5 - add another 1/2 inch for mistakes) 

six dark strips (lengths 2.5, 3.5, 5.5, 6.5, 8.5, and 9.5 - plus room for mistakes)

Once the cutting's finished, the piecing is pretty simple.  Going by the diagram at the top, you just stitch pieces together in alphabetical order, ironing to set the seam and then to open the seam.  After the four squares were ready, it was just a few more stitches to get everything together.

Quilting

Really?  You're turning a perfectly good adventure blog into a crafting blog?  What is this "Quilting" post doing here?
Yeah, well.  There will be adventures aplenty, but sometimes, the cold weather makes people do weird things.  Speaking of, I'm rather enjoying quilting right now.

So, within the past year, I've been figuring out how to use my fancy new sewing machine by making this:

for my sister and these:

for my mom.

Now that I've successfully (cough) made one large lap quilt where everything (pattern, colors, etc) is handed to me, I'm taking the logical next step by doing pretty much everything for myself.  Because, ya know, that's going to be easy.  After a frustrating hunt through online quilt patterns and really pricey-materialed-good-looking patterns from a quilt book, I decided that I wanted to make my own sampler quilt. Thus began a pretty quick search for quilt blocks that look like fun and a slightly longer quest to sketch out how I'm going to piece the quilt together.

I really liked this one pinwheel quilt that I found on Google images, especially the way that different sized blocks are pieced together.  I'm planning on using three different sizes of squares (this will help me do both simple and pretty complex blocks) and no sashing.  I'm hoping that I can use different color themes to separate the blocks, but this quilt will just be for picnicking and/or use around the house.

Once I got a plan laid out, I started fussing over colors.  I received one of the Moda charm square packs for Christmas, and though using pre-packaged colors is apparently "rookie" and "doesn't have that extra something," I'm using my pack as a guide anyways.  (So there internet!)  I set aside a lot of the earthy greens and brown for some other project, and pulled the blues, brighter greens, purples, red-oranges, and some neutrals for my quilt.  I supplemented those colors with some similar fat quarters (more Christmas presents) and a couple half yards of neutrals from the local quilting shop.  Hopefully the colors will work the way I hope they will.

Anyhow, I'll try to keep track of some (all?) of the blocks that I make for the quilt, and I'll make sure to at least show ya'll the finished project.

XC Skiing at Blue Mounds!!

Ali took me adventuring this weekend.  We got hold of a car and went about 30 minutes outside of Madison to Blue Mound State Park.  Though earlier in the week rain and 50-degree weather had killed off the last of our December blizzard snow, we had 6-10" of fresh snow come down just after the rain.  The snow was really nice and fluffy, which makes the trail a little slower (but also better for control).  Blue Mound has a really great system; there are lots of small loops ranging from 1-5 miles.  There's also a nice mix of prairie and woods, varying trail grades (nothing too crazy), and enough curves to keep everything interesting.  

 

We started the afternoon with a 2-mile and a 1-mile loop; then we stopped by the (brand new/lovely) warming shelter for lunch, tea, and to await our friend.  We packed the food up and headed back to the trails for the 4-mile loop (+ slight detour) and the same 2-mile loop.  The four-miler was mostly wooded, with some brief uphill portions and long downhills.  The 2-mile we took (both times) has some really gorgeous tunnels of evergreens paired with a nice grassy bald that overlooks the nearby farm country.  I was mildly shocked at how in-control I felt during the ski.  The new snow and fresh grooming helped a lot, even though some sections were starting to ice up by the end of the day.  We've been skiing in Elver Park (in the city) a few times this year and in Governor Dodge once, and I ended up crashing quite a few times on those trips.  This trip, I spent next to no time on my rear and was way less sore by the end of the day.

Wheee!

After 6 miles with our friend, Ali and I headed out on one more loop of the park.  We went for the 5-mile loop, which follows the 4-mile loop for the bulk of the trip.  The one extra bit has the toughest hills in the park.  I managed most of them, but there was one hill that is well above my ability.  Thankfully, I saw the toughest bit of the hill in time and my (mediocre at best) snowplow slowed me down to 2-3mph near the lip of the really steep drop.  I got over to the side of the trail and plopped into the (very nice and fluffy) snow.  And that was the only time I fell the entire trip!  I hiked the 10m down the hill and got back on my skis.

                                      

By perfect chance, yesterday was one of the candlelight ski/snowshoe events that our state parks host.  When we arrived at 12:30 or so, we tentatively planned to stay around and take the candlelight skis.  Unfortunately, when we wrapped up the 5-mile loop at dusk, the cold had started to get to us.  Ali was freezing, and neither of our lungs were feeling so great after several hours of air in the teens (Fahrenheit).  The trails looked stunning with all the candles, but we grabbed some event-related cider in the warming hut and then headed home.  All in all, 14 miles was just perfect for our legs.

                                  

Blizzard Dec 2012 (It's about time!)

We've had a good amount of snow and some blustery winds for the past 24h.  Granted, nothing too serious or too scary to keep a dedicated grad student from having a good tromp over to lab.  (A lab workday from 12-2 is rather pleasant.)  I took a few pictures during my morning commute, and we made a snowman in the front yard this afternoon (the biggest I've made yet!).  There was probably a foot of snow by the time that I got home; there's probably around 15+ inches now.  Hurray for snow!  (Now I just need to get my skis out.)

Bike path (some brave cyclists have been out)

View from the back porch