121,000 Feet...

Awesome video of an amateur rocket launch.  The payload reached 121,000 feet in altitude, right at the very edge of outer space...

Feynman on Beauty...

One of my heroes, Richard Feynman, talking about beauty – in a monologue that is itself beautiful...

Original Sin...

Forwarded by reader Jim M.:

Stress Busters...

My mom sent along a collection of “stress buster” photos.  This one, for some reason, especially caught my fancy...

Wall Street Protesters...

An annotated photo showing the hypocrisy (or stupidity?) of the Wall Street protesters.  Sent along by reader Simon M.:

A Walk on Cuyamaca...

Yesterday afternoon, Debbie and I had a very pleasant hike up Cuyamaca Mountain, with two of our dogs (Miki and Race).  We walked up the Fire Lookout Road (the paved road), as that's the only trail that our dogs are allowed on.  This area all burned over in the 2007 wildfires, and we haven't been here very much since then – it makes us sad to see all the old-growth forest gone.  The view was very nice, though.  You can see Cuyamaca Lake near the center of the photo, and to the right of the peak in the distance you can even see a piece of the Salton Sea.  Very little haze yesterday.

Well, most of the old trees are gone, but not quite all of them.  You can see in the photo above that there are some survivors, though in the distance you can see thousands upon thousands of tree skeletons, like the one at left.  We passed hundreds like this on the way up the mountain.  As we got closer to the top, we saw more and more survivors of the 2007 wildfires (like the Ponderosa at right), many of which are charred up to 15 or 20 feet from the ground.  We also saw something that was most encouraging: hundreds of young pine trees, and unbelievable numbers of baby cedar trees.  In some places, the baby cedars (all less than 2 feet high) looked like some kind of ground cover, a veritable mat of greenery.  These babies are too young – maybe just a year – to be fire pioneers.  I'm not sure what caused this cedar explosion, but it sure is nice to see.  The peak of Cuyamaca looks like some kind of development – there are several buildings in various stages of construction, some heavy equipment, and building materials in piles all over the place.  I'm not sure what they're doing up there, but the result is that the peak area is almost unrecognizable to someone like us who has been visiting there for thirty years...

The big excitement on the hike was spotting a king snake (Lampropeltis zonata) on the way down. This little fellow was right in the middle of the road! We don't see king snakes very often – it's probably been 10 or 15 years ago that we last saw one in this area. I used to hike a lot in the San Jacinto area, where I saw them quite often. If you're not familiar with king snakes, they're not poisonous (though the look a lot like the deadly poisonous coral snake). In fact, they eat poisonous snakes!

Last but certainly not least, here are my companions on our delightful little walk.  After we finished our hike, we repaired to the Descanso Junction Restaurant, where I had a burger (great, as always) and Debbie made a small dent in the prime rib special.  She brought home a box with enough beef leftover to make a meal for the both of us!

Despite being surrounded by the evidence of the 2007 wildfires, we both enjoyed getting back out in the mountains again – it's been a while since we went hiking in our local mountains...