3/19/08 Update
Wheelset arrived. Bike should be all built up mid-April.

3/12/08 Update I posted the specs last night as a new bike but don’t have any pics yet to show.

The first Orbea Opal I ever saw was on this site when Andy had posted pics of his when he got one. I thought it was a nice frameset then; I have spent the majority of my free time over the past month deciding on the specs for the used Opal I bought somewhat randomly online about a month ago. The wheelset is going to be insane. I went with Sapim CX-Ray bladed spokes in black, White Industries H2 Hubs in a black finish on DT Swiss RR 1.1 Rims, and ControlTech Titanium Bolt-On Skewers (the 5mm hex wrench type) in black which weigh 47g total for the set, and a Dura-ace 12-25 cs-7700 cassette. The rest of the parts selection is pretty solid, so I’m absolutely psyched about the whole project in general and can’t wait until it’s all built up and ready to be taken out on the road.

I am a bad mechanic who loves working on my bikes. I can’t be the only one out there in the world, like the inevitable guy decked out in camo each season who absolutely loves everything about hunting but can’t hit a god damn thing, but it’s less about whether I might be in good company and more about the realization that I’m not that good good at something that I love to do and want to keep on doing.
This also brings with it the realization of safety concerns; would you want me working on your bike after what I just said? at least cheney hit something. So, yeah, that whole area is suspect and certainly not good…in terms of my safety on the bikes, not cheney, any commentary on him at this point is moot.
I don’t trust most bike shops let alone feel that their pricing strategies are fair and equitable – not to mention having to pay retail should you need to buy anything _{unless you are related to the owner, are the owner, are on the shop team, work for the shop, etc.}. And last but not least, the warm and fuzzy feeling you get from the employees of the shop with the standard requisite attitude of either complete resentment , bitter apathy, or utter insincerity (i.e. see Jack Black in High Fidelity).
Surprisingly though, there’s good news instead of just bitching and self-deprecation, I met a dude who’s also obsessed with bikes, but unlike me, rides them well _pro and is a master mechanic. He wants to help me out with some projects and setting everything else right. Granted his schedule is pretty tight, with his residency, but I’m not riding any of those bikes anyway, just ask Eric or Jan or that Polar Bear wait, strike that, don’t ask the Polar Bear, there’s something not right about that guy, for real).

That’s it, that’s the whole Blog entry.

We had nearly run out of food by our last day on the river, which was at this famous glacier known for its calving of enormous sections of glacial ice into the river that each sound like a giant explosion and send big waves across to the opposite shore, but while we waited to be picked up, most of us were preoccupied with the idea of getting back to town for very much needed break from one another, some good food, and most importantly, our first opportunity to have a real shower in over two weeks. The break went by quickly and we regrouped for our travel day to the start of our Mountaineering section in the Kenai Moutains. We started out on a trail to enter the park, but this was very shortlived, after the second day out there there was no trail to follow, just our course arrived at from our topo maps and compasses. Our packs were heavy because they had over two weeks of food rations in them, divided somewhat equally; but certainly they were heavier than everybody had ever been used to, except for the instructors maybe. There was a lot of complaining in general, but I remember getting frustrated when we were on a steep grade, but not moving at all because someone up front was having some trouble, and at that time this wasn’t making much sense to me (I didn’t win any popularity contests with that girl or her little clique that day). However, I understand and it is more clear to me now that their emphasis on the importance to all stay together was essential to the success of the trip (they had split us up into two groups of ten to make things more manageable). We past the tree line and the tundra and made it to the snow and it was much less cold than I had imagined it would be. The day before our first real climb we practiced using our ice axes to slow ourselves down and eventually stop – this was fun, at least until we realized that if we actually ever needed to pull off one of these emergency stops, that it most likely wouldn’t be fun at all. Every step of the climb was placed in the exact spot of the person who had put their feet there right before you. We were in a single file, but not roped up to each other yet, maybe since there was no risk on this particular day of falling into a crevasse (not exactly sure). Some of these foot holds would begin to fall apart, which would make things challenging, if not just plain interesting, for the folks who had yet to pass them. Sometimes they gave way completely while you had your weight on them and you’d fall, trip up or slip, which was unnerving. The sunlight was unbelievably bright beaming off the snow, so you needed the glacier glasses they told to bring. I have no idea how to tie those knots we used, but during the trip I knew it by heart – we would separate ourselves by about forty to fifty feet on the rope as we walked across the glaciers with the intent of their use as the ultimate safety measure. The snow sometimes, over time, creates bridges along the top of the the glacier between the edges of the crevasses making some of them invisible; some of these bridges are strong enough to support a person (or animals) weight and others collapse. One of them partially collapsed on a guy on our trip and it was really scary for him – he was hanging there only by his upper arms and his pack and the instructors got him out of there. The rest of us behind him had to use the safer route that took the leader quite a bit of time to find. We alternated on and off the ice and snow and walking above the tree line or in the glacial valleys – we covered a lot of varied ground. We usually weren’t exactly sure of what to expect each day and while that is true for most backpacking, Alaska is so much grander in scale in every possible way and we were very much out on our own in a beautiful yet unforgiving wilderness. A simple bug bite; one instructor was bitten on the butt by an insect while going to the bathroom and less than a week later she couldn’t sit down because the infection was so painful and had grown so large. She had to leave, which was crazy, since she was hardcore, if anybody could take anything at all it was her, so her evacuation was a humbling blow to all of us. Her skin had turned black, they said it was a staph infection, that it become systemic and all I can say is that the photo of it that I saw later looked really really really nasty. A small group volunteered to escort her a couple miles away to a lake where it had been called in to a 747 on our gigantic emergency phone/walkie-talkie to arrange a small water plane to meet them and take her to the hospital. She was fine, just upset that she had to miss out on the rest of the trip. While crossing one of the larger glaciers, we set up camp and planned to stay there overnight. To prepare the site we had to ensure it was safed off, so we lined up in row, still roped up from before (we were always roped up when on the glaciers except for times when we safed off the area) we walked in a line and poked the snow and ice with out ice axes to confirm that the area was safe. There is no where to hide when you have to go number two on a glacier in a roped off area half the size of a football field with twenty-or-so strangers laughing at you from within their tents and shouting things to cheer you on. wonderful. The next morning we left camp and and it was gorgeous outside, we we roped up together, and the weather suddenly turned ugly and we couldn’t see the people in front of or behind us among the heavy snowfall. In a few minutes we clustered together somehow and tried to wait it out before we headed back to the camp we had just stayed in the night before. We lost a day. The following morning we figured out the place where we had been huddled together and it was no joke, dangerously close to the edge of a cliff, which we had no idea about while sitting there, but frightening still nonetheless. Ok, I am going to stop here for now and continue this more later, in AK (abridged) pt.3!

I had an awesome opportunity and experience when I was 22 to take a three month trip to Alaska to go river rafting, mountaineering, and sea kayaking with the Colorado Outward Bound School. There were twenty students and six instructors; it was the first time that they had offered this trip, a ‘semester’ long course in Alaska, where it can be harsh living environment even during the summer. The rafting down the copper river for two and a half weeks was pleasant, the salmon were swimming upstream, it was beautiful beyond words, and despite being around large black and brown bears once in a while, and some rapids, and the day that we had to make our rafts into sailboats and sail across the glacial lake since paddling would have been futile, the rafting section was generally without consequence and absolutely the easiest of the three sections. Writing about it makes me want to drive to the airport and fly out there right this instant. So we didn’t really bath and we were told to use smooth rocks when we were told that no toilet paper was going to be allowed out on the trip. “Leave no traceâ€?…, well mostly no trace. Enough on that topic. I am realizing that I can’ tell this story in a short version, so I will call it abridged and pt.1 since I do not expect to finish writing it tonight. Evacuations…these are interesting as far as the reasons and the logistics involved in getting the people from the mountains to safety. The least exciting was a kid who toughed it out and dealt with the pain until we got back to town before he fessed up that he was pissing blood, or maybe it was the second to last day and we didn’t find out until we got back to town, I honestly don’t remember, but he pretty much handled it by himself and was self-sufficient in comparison to the other cases. And it’s late, and I am really starting to wonder if anybody cares (other than Eric who asked me to write a up a little something about the trip), but I fear I am not really doing it justice and unnecessarily taking up room on the server at the same time so that’s all for this chapter, plenty more to write about, just at another time, that’s all. to be continued in “abridged pt.2â€?