Wymas In The Wild: 2014

Somewhere around the start of summer, I seem to have stopped posting things here. I suspect it might have something to do with the first few pictures here. We scraped and painted our whole house and when we were done with that, we roofed our garage. It was all quite an undertaking.

We've lived in our house for over ten years but have never painted so we don't know when it was last done. Some of the paint was so checked that it looked like the varnish on antique furniture. The internet told me that if you make sure to re-paint as soon as the paint is getting chalky on the surface, you don't have to scrape the old off in order to re-coat. Good to know, my guess is that it was chalky when we bought the house. What you see here was a pretty typical average, where about half of it came off down to the wood. Thankfully the siding is original redwood so even the bare parts don't rot or anything.

I'd noticed a while back that the insulation in the roof of the garage was starting to look saggy and then later it started to pull its staples and fall down. There was obviously a moisture or ventilation problem but this didn't make sense because it'd been fine for the last 8+ years, why is is screwed-up now?

Enter the '90s roofers. This was a crew which laid nice straight rows, trimmed all the ends to be even, put on a good ridge-cap, all without noticing that they didn't use a starter strip on the end of either eve. This meant the grooves in the three-tab shingles on the first row had nothing under them but tar-paper! Credit where credit is due - that tar-paper and later, sheeting, held on for a long time. What I discovered was that I now had a roof which looked like brand new underneath except the end 8" or so was pretty much non-existent. I could actually look through from above and see the board under the eve. I can't imagine how moisture was making it's way in there.

Thankfully the previous owner kicked in some extra cash when building this garage to make sure it would last - all the eves are fiberglass/composite underneath and cedar on the ends with all cedar trim. Other than a couple rafter-tails, nothing but the actual roof sheeting was rotten! I just walked down the ends with a circular-saw, cut it off, and patched it in with strips.

Then it was cyclocross racing season again! We hadn't planned to do much of this in 2014 but were inspired by working at our Pella race and started up shortly after.We did a pretty full circuit and traveled as far as the East end of the Quad Cities. It was, as usual, fantastic and I enjoyed all of it. Traveling, racing, spectating, it was all great and I look forward to next year!

These pictures should pretty well summarize how Corrine's season went. She spent a LOT of time on podiums and has now upgraded to the next higher race category! Nice work!

Then it snowed and winter was here:

And that meant it was time for stouts:

Another day in paradise - we'd been driving past signs for Lookout Mountain for a couple days so, this morning, we headed up to check it out. There's a nice lazy road to get here and it sort of makes a loop over the mountain. Lots of things to see around here - there's a neat mansion donated to the park service and even Buffalo Bill's grave site.

The visitor center was closed for a bit yet when we arrived so we headed out on a foot-path loop to wait until it opened.

I think this was a mile or so with some climbs. We're starting to adjust to the elevation I think - it was noticeable but not too bad.

We got inside the visitor center which had a really cool life-size diorama of local animals and things. There was also a room for kids which contained an impressive number of stuffed-animals (which were shortly thereafter completely re-located to a different spot in the visitor center).

Next we walked over to the Boettcher Mansion which was originally a private hunting cabin for the family who basically owned the top of this mountain. It's been donated to the park service and restored to good condition.

There was a cool ball-room or great-room?

Next we went to the Buffalo Bill grave-site area which is also a great overlook.

In this direction, you can see Golden in the foreground and Denver in the back. The rest of the Rockies are behind us.

Next, we drove out to Georgetown and headed up Guanella Pass. We've been part way up here before, in 2010 when we were looking for a spot to camp (a month earlier than this too) but it was closed off due to weather. Last time we were here, this was also partially an unimproved road. There's been lots of construction since and it's pretty nice. One hates to give up too much charm in a place by "improving" it to have better and easier access but it was still o.k.

As we climbed, snow crept back onto the landscape.

Here we are at the summit of the pass - 11,670ft.

There were some short walk paths so we went for a stroll.

It was absolutely beautiful up here. The sun was out and it was really warm, despite a slight cool breeze off the snow. Hard to believe we're only 20-minutes or so from Georgetown.

Charlotte thought it was great and wanted to keep playing in the snow.

After trading picture-taking duties with an older couple who was celebrating an anniversary, we headed back toward Georgetown to check out some of the other pull-outs and trails along the way.

This one had a neat wooden bridge which was probably about 25ft long and flexed at least a foot in the middle when you walked on it!

For being located such a short distance from the road, the scenery is solid.

This is part of Georgetown's water supply.

We did a little fording to get closer to the water.

Charlotte The Mighty Explorer surveys the new region we have found.

We took another look around and headed back to the hotel again for some more R&R.

Today is a sight-seeing day in Golden! This place is pretty much fantastic. It's only got 18,000 people but there is stuff going on everywhere, not to mention that it also contains the Colorado School of Mines, the American Mountaineering Museum and the DOE National Renewable Energy Laboratory. I thoroughly enjoyed everything about this place. It's been logged in the 'ol memory as a tough contender to Durango for places to move to someday.

As we wandered around, we were casually looking for a place we could maybe rent a Burley trailer and take Charlotte for a bike ride. Interesting discovery: there are actually shops here that sell and deal with only mountain bikes. When I say only, I really mean that the shop below did not have a single road or hybrid bike of any kind or anything else not related to mountain bikes. Cool.

This shows part of the river-walk along Clear Creek. The creek is basically flooded due to the recent string of rains. This type of weather has to make front-range residents a little un-easy, as it was only last September when portions of this region were almost completely destroyed by historical flooding. For today though, it just means the rapids in the white-water park (yes, Golden has a white-water park in town) are a little bigger.

We walked to the Colorado School of Mines Museum to check out what was on display. I snapped a couple pictures of stuff I thought was interesting. Most of the mineral samples were harvested somewhere in Colorado and donated by the people who found them. Quite a diversity I thought.

This seemed like a good place to take a picture as we are from Iowa, which is the geode state.

Next we walked to the mountaineering museum. The museum display area itself was smaller than I had expected but the museum's building is quite a large campus and home to several mountaineering clubs and advocacy groups. Everything was well done and looked great.

A little history on ice climbing, including a tip of the hat to Yvon Chouinard and several other pioneers.

In the middle there is a detailed scale model of several famous climbing routes including Everest.

The museum entrance has a nice climbing wall. It appeared to be closed and had warning signs that there were sensors on the wall which would summon assistance if someone gets onto the wall while it's roped off.