Long hike through Roger's Canyon

Dan and I went on about a 14.5 mile hike yesterday through Roger's Canyon in the Superstition Wilderness. We started from Woodbury trail head and followed a path along JF TR106 to Roger's Canyon TR110 to Reavis Ranch TR109 to Roger's Trough TH. Finishing up along road FS172A to Woodbury TR114, concluding back along JF TR106 to Woodbury TH. Had good weather for the hike, other than some strong winds towards the end. Angel Basin was warm and grassy with a slight breeze while we there there. Its a great camping spot for sure. Along the road we ran into a Gila Monster and I got a few pictures of him. I feel pretty good today after the hike, not really sore at all other than some spots on the bottom of my foot that feel almost like a blister. The whole trip took us about 8 hours, which I felt was good time given the length and elevation gain. We started about 9:15am and got back around 5:30pm.

Tucson Hike and Gaming

This past weekend I went hiking down in Tucson with Jeff, Jessie, Dan, and Tomas. We got off to a bit of a late start and ended up doing a shorter hike of about 2 miles round trip. The hike was at Catalina State Park, which was a surprising beautiful area on the western side of the Catalina Mountains.

Wednesday this week I took off of work to go over and do a bit of gaming at Linda's place. Nancy and her son, David, on spring break from UofA were there. I got to meet Rick, another friend of Linda's. He was very friendly and had a big beard. He mentioned the Festival of the West going on this weekend and told me a bit about his job as auditorium cooridinator for Paradise Valley schools. I hope to get the chance to game with him again, as he seemed very interesting to me. Battlestar Galactica came out first, which I ran, rather than played in, since we had 7 total people. I then got a chance to try out a new game of mine, Age of Conan. This one was enjoyable, but I need another play to fully judge it. Then we finshed up with a game of Marvel Hereos between myself, Amos, Kim, and Linda. Another new person I met was Sherry, who also teaches for Gilbert schools after moving over from Mesa schools about 6 years ago.

I also got busy and took some pictures of some gaming stuff I had made. I am planning on selling my Doom board game, so I got some pictures of it as well. This weekend I have plans for a game or 2 of Dune as well as attending Game Depot's game night. Sunday will be another hike.

Updated the web site

Just completed another overhaul to my web site. I decided to ditch Apple's MobileMe and go with mostly offerings from Google. Their Picasa photo software work much better than iPhoto for me. For one, it can actually handle all 15,000+ of my photographs without bogging down. It also does not require them to all be moved into a special location with weird directory structure like iPhoto. The online web album with Picasa is also quite nice. It sorts correctly, loads quickly, and is free up to 1GB. I am also using Google's blogger.com to handle my web site. I am enjoying it more than fiddling with iWeb and uploading a web page. I also switched to using Google's Reader for my RSS feeds. And I have my email domain handled through them now as well. All free, which is always a plus. Google seems to have a nice talent for designing applications and interfaces intelligently, much like Apple. The benefit over Apple is that Google developers directly communicate with the end users and seem to be much quicker to fixing the software.

Hike at Woodbury in Superstitions

Yesterday I did a hike in the Superstition Wilderness, AZ, starting from the Woodbury trail head. This location is near to Roger's trail head, which I have used a number of times to hike out to Angel Basin. I got a late start, arriving at the trail head around noon. I originally planned to do a loop from the Woodbury trail head to Rogers and then come back around in the dark by following the road. The climb back up to Woodbury turned me off of that idea, though. Instead I hiked along the JF trail 106, turning off onto Rogers Canyon trail 110. Getting to this point was a rather steep climb and I did not feel like rushing to make it to Angel Basin an back. So I stopped a bit short of the Basin on a little ridge and enjoyed the warm sun. Overall a good hike, although I did get a rare blister on the bottom of my foot from it. I got back to the house around 7pm.

I am pretty excited about doing some more hikes in the Superstition and getting my distance up for the Grand Canyon hike. Last year I didn't really do that many long hikes before the Canyon trip. This weekend I'll be going down to Tucson to the Catalina Mountains with Jessie, Dan, Tomas, and maybe Jeff. Jessie has a rather long, 10 mile, hike picked out for us to do.

The following weeknd I may try to attempt the big loop of the Campaign, Reavis Gap, and Fireline trails. We would need to leave very early to get it done in a day, though.

Mom's Visit

My mom just left from a visit of a bit over a week. We went to a few places (Arboretum, Desert Botanical Garden, Teeter House) and I showed her a number of board games. She liked most of them and we played quite a bit.