Our Death Valley Christmas

Death Valley was a lot of fun over Christmas!

I was really surprised by two things: 1) How commercial Death Valley has become, and 2) How many people were there over the holiday. I was imagining a remote and desolate wilderness National Park. What we discovered instead was a National Park with several resorts and ranches and restaurants and even it's own airport. We also expected to be pretty much the only people in the park but were surprised when we discovered that thousands of people (many of them Japanese tourists) had the same idea that we did to spend Christmas in Death Valley.

The campgrounds were still mostly empty but in the end it didn't matter. We went to unpack the tent and discovered that the bag that was supposed to contain the tent only contained the tent poles and the rain fly. Oops. We briefly considered sleeping under the stars (Rosey more so than I) but I was concerned that we wouldn't sleep well and that it would prevent us from enjoying our hiking during the day if we were too tired.


Luckily, I was able to snatch up the last available hotel room in the Stovepipe Wells motel inside the park. In the end it worked out nicely. With overnight temperatures in the 30's, it was much nicer to come home to a warm hotel room and the end of the day.

We actually didn't have as much time as we had hoped to explore the park. The winter sun set in the valley at about 4:30 pm leaving us with very little daylight to explore the park. On our first night there, we decided to do some night hiking and explored some sand dunes near where we were staying. It was a fun and unique experience to be trudging through sand dunes when it was so dark that you couldn't see 10 feet in front of you (the moon was just a sliver in the night sky). It probably would have been a little dangerous were it not for my GPS that guaranteed that we couldn't get too lost.

The next morning we got up and drove out to the "The Racetrack". It's a dry lake bed where some rocks have left a path in the dried mud from their movement. The rocks don't really move very fast, but every year the freezing and thawing of the mud pushes them a little in one direction or another. It leaves a really eery impression that the rocks are moving on their own.


Unfortunately the only access to the racetrack is via a 27 mile long roughly graded rocky dirt road. A sign at the beginning of the road recommends that it only be traversed with a high clearance 4x4 vehicle. Although I wouldn't have thought twice about driving my Harley down this kind of road, it was causing me pain every time that I heard a rock thud on the underside of my brand new 2007 Camry. Let's face it, Camry's are just not meant to be offroad vehicles. But I knew that Rosey really wanted to see the racetrack, so we drove it anyway. I'm hoping that I didn't do any permanent damage to the car... the shocks feel like they took a pretty good beating.


In the afternoon, we pulled over to the side of the dirt road and just started hiking through an undeveloped area of the park. That's one of the things that I love about Rosey... she likes to just get out and explore. I never would have thought to stop in that spot but it ended up being pretty cool. There were a ton of Joshua trees and a bunch of other desert flora and fauna that we discovered. Our short exploration took us up to the top of a small peak (about a thousand feet of elevation gain) where we could survey the valley beneath us. We both decided that we wanted to come back to this spot at some point in the future and explore some more.


We rounded out the day by stopping at Scotty's Castle in the park. It was this huge castle/house that was built by some guy who had a ton of money and loved the desert. It was much cooler than I expected.


We cooked Christmas Eve dinner over a campfire. We didn't actually have our own campsite but we snuck into the campground and used the firepit from one of the many vacant sites. Our Christmas Eve dinner consisted of Ginger Teriyaki glazed salmon, Cheddar Broccoli rice and fresh steamed vegetables with a dessert of fresh Death Valley dates. Yum!


After dinner we opened one gift from each other in front of the fire. I had already given Rosey my "big" gift (a pair of cross country skis) so I brought along a smaller gift for her to open. She really like the new camelbak hydration pack that I got her and I loved the air hockey table that she got for me. Of course, she didn't actually bring the air hockey table with her to Death Valley. In fact, we didn't even have it back at home... it was still on order from Sears. But she brought along a computer printout of the model that she bought and that was good enough for me :)

On Christmas morning we slept in a little bit and then I cooked us breakfast in our hotel room. We had planned on camping so I had all of our food in a cooler and brought along a gas powered backpacking stove to cook with. I doubt that the hotel would have been thrilled to learn that we were cooking over an open flame in the hotel room, but it didn't stop us anyway :)

We had some time to kill on the way out of the park, so we hit a few more of the sight-seeing stops. Zabriskie point is one of the most beautiful desert sights that I've ever seen. It was especially beautiful lit up in the Christmas morning light. We descended from the point into the wash and got one last short hike in before our long drive back home to Spanish Fork.


It was definitely a Christmas to remember :)

The rest of the pictures are here.

Merry Christmas!

Rosey and I are about to head out to Death Valley for the weekend, but before we go, I just wanted to write and wish everyone a Merry Christmas!



Here we are posed with our new skis ready for our Death Valley trip :)

Celebrating the Birth of Christ in the Valley of Death

Wow, it sounds so cool just to say that :)

Rosey and I have decided to spend Christmas camping in Death Valley National Park in Nevada/California. We hope to get in a lot of hiking and exploring and start a new tradition of a Christmas campfire.

Hmm, I wonder if they have mistletoe in the desert?

Fitness Update

I can't believe that my pants have been my top blog story for so long. And yet, I have one more update to make in the saga of my pants...

Apparently, having my pants fit tight was exactly the kick in the pants that I needed to start focusing on my fitness again. I redoubled my efforts and after a little more than two weeks I've lost nearly 10 pounds and am actually below my low summer weight. Hooray for me! :)

My goal is to keep it coming off and to be at or below 200 by sometime in February. When I accomplish that goal I believe that I will actually weigh less than I did when I graduated from high school. Freaky!

Hypothesis Verified!

I guess that I can't really be sure that the reason that my pants fit me better today has anything to do with my hip flexors. But who cares? My pants no longer feel like they are cutting the circulation to the bottom half of my body. That being said, I still plan to step up the effort to get my weight back down to my summer low. The thought of even being on the verge of a problem like this scares me a little bit.

The Shrinking Pants Hypothesis

I have spent the day in a good deal of physical and mental discomfort thanks to my shrinking pants. Seriously it was all that I could think about all afternoon. When I got home I weighed myself again. 222 lbs. Exactly the same weight that I've been for the last two months. I even took a body fat measurement. I won't reveal the actual figure, but it was, to my surprise, statistically insignificant from the last measurement that I took. What could be going on here?

Just a moment ago, I was in my basement doing crunches in between sets of squats when a thought occurred to me. Not just a thought, but a new hypothesis. What I thought of was my hip flexors. I thought of them because these are muscles that normally get used while doing sit-ups, but do not get used when you do crunches... at least not if you do them properly. Hip flexors also get used a good deal while snowshoeing.

Actually your hip flexors get used all the time while walking. They are the muscles that help raise the trunk of your leg toward your torso. Snowshoeing, however, puts much more strain on these muscles for two reasons. First, because of the depth of the snow you must take more pronounced steps and raise your leg up further with each step to get above the snow. Second, the additional weight of the snowshoes as well as all of the snow that gets stuck on top of them adds quite a bit of resistance to the motion.

It then occurred to me that the first day that I remember my pants being uncomfortably tight was last week; the day after I went snowshoeing for the first time this season. I know that I stressed my hip flexors because towards the end of the hike my hips were so sore that it was difficult to lift my legs. Things seemed to be getting better by Saturday, but then on Sunday I went snowshoeing again and today I felt like my pants were cutting off my circulation. Coincidence? I hope not :)

So, officially stated, my hypothesis is this: My shrinking pants are not shrinking at all. Rather, my hip flexors are temporarily swolen as the result of overuse while snowshoeing. If my hypothesis is correct, then my pants should grow over the next couple of days until they resume fitting like normal.

What do you think? Is this a valid hypothesis or am I just making up new and creative excuses for my fatness? :)

Are My Clothes Shrinking?

Oh how I wish my clothes really were shrinking. But I'm afraid that's probably not what's happening.

Over the summer, I maintained a weight of about 215 lbs. That was down 110 lbs. from where I started a year earlier at 325 lbs. Sometime during early Fall, I noticed that my weight had gone up to the low 220's. I was concerned at first, but then decided that since my clothes still seemed to fit just fine that I was OK with picking up a little bit of winter weight... as long as it didn't get out of control.

Within the last week or two I've begun to feel the pinch of my pants growing tighter around my waist. The freaky thing is that my weight hasn't gone up any since the early Fall. My average weight is still 222. I can't figure out what's happening. What changed? I'm starting to fear that I've lost some lean weight and have replaced it with more voluminous fat weight. That's the only explanation that I can think of that would explain why I have gotten bigger but not put on any weight.

In any case, it's time to step up my effort again. I was OK with putting on a little winter weight, but not if it means buying new clothes.

Tibble Fork

Rosey and I went snowshoeing in the Tibble Fork area of American Fork Canyon yesterday. The snow was a little shallow but still deep enough to snowshoe.


A couple of miles into the backcountry, we spotted this moose:

My New Piano

I bought a piano today! It's a Roland MP70 digital piano. I have been planning on buying a piano for the last couple of months, but I was originally going to hold off until mid-December. But I got an ad in the mail for a sale at the Piano Gallery that only lasted through this weekend and advertised prices up to 50% off. Now, it turns out that there wasn't really anything that I was interested in at the Piano Gallery. Even with the sale, their prices were just too high for me.


After I got my hopes up to buy a piano today, it was hard to let go of the idea and wait a couple more weeks. So, I went over to Heritage music, where I had originally planned on buying my piano. They had the exact piano that I wanted for just the right price... and they were able to deliver today. That always makes it easier to make an impulse decision when you know that you can walk out of the store with it :)

From The New World

Rosey and I went to see the Utah Symphony perform Dvorák's symphony "From the New World" last night at Abravanel Hall in Salt Lake. It was probably my first time at the symphony since I went on a class field trip when I was in elementary school in Hawaii. It's actually something that I've wanted to do for a long time but just never got around to doing. I wasn't sure whether or not it would be something that I would enjoy, but I wanted to re-evaluate the experience as an adult.

I really enjoyed the experience. I think that learning to play music myself over the last year has helped me to appreciate the experience even more. I realize how difficult it is for a single person to play a piece of music perfectly. That makes it that much more awe-inspiring when 50 or 60 people, playing different instruments, conspire to play a piece beautifully and in perfect harmony.

I was lucky to have Rosey as my Symphony date. As a teenager, she played the French horn in a number of orchestra's in Alabama. Her orchestra had the opportunity to play in Carnegie Hall in New York. She had even played the movement, "Largo" from Dvorák's New World before. So, it was really handy to have her around last night to explain all the nuances of the music and symphony experience to me.

A Gift From Marlboro

I received a gift from Marlboro in the mail last night. Yes, the cigarette company. This is really odd considering that I haven't smoked in over 6 years. But what's even more odd is the gift that they sent me.

The package was about the size of 3 DVD cases stacked on top of each other and was advertising Marlboro Menthol cigarettes. It was heavy. Really heavy. It was like it was packed full of rocks. I couldn't figure out for the life of me what Marlboro would send me that would weigh that much.

I thought for sure that it would be several packs of cigarettes and maybe some stupid promotional item. I really didn't like the idea of having cigarettes around me. It's been years since I've had any temptation to smoke but I still just didn't like the idea. I nearly threw the package out without even opening.

In the end, my curiosity got the best of me. I had to know. So, I opened it up and discovered... [insert suspenseful pause here], a leather bound box of dominoes. True it was fake leather, but it was still a pretty nice case. It even had a magnetic latch. And the dominoes were pretty nice too. Not cheap plastic ones, but 'real', heavy dominoes. The most bizarre thing of all is that neither the case nor the dominoes bore the name 'Marlboro' anywhere on them. It was almost as if they weren't even promotional material.

Could it really be that Marlboro was really just thanking me for my many years as a loyal customer? Or is this some other type of underhanded marketing ploy? I suppose that it has worked. I have spent more time thinking about cigarettes in general and Marlboro in particular in the last 24 hours than I previously had in the last 3 years. Clever tobacco industry bastards! :)