Good times this weekend

First on Friday I went to the Marley Concert. Stephen Marley featuring Damian 'Jr. Gong' Marley. It was good stuff. Starting it off was DJ sets by the almighty Kid Hops. I finally got the to watch Kid Hops work. The opener was a Jamaican Hip-Hop/Spoken word band. Ya try following some Jamaican spoken word. Kid Hops came back and did another DJ set until Stephen came out. Stephen played about half his songs and half his dad's. Damian came out for about the last half and they mixed it up. When Jr did his 'Welcome to Jamrock' the band did a little versioning of the song and the crowd didn't like it at all. The crowd started to moan their way to a boo before the band mixed it back to the normal and back.

Saturday I went up to the Tulip Festival up in the Skagit Valley. Never seen so many Tulips in person before, but I had never seen industrial flower growing on this scale before either. Too many people milling around and too much crap in the background to get good landscape shots. It was still a learning experience so it was still good. From there I drove on up to Maple Falls to visit Cassia, Ian and Ziggby.

Sunday morning we wet out to breakfast and then drove out to were we were going hiking. Back up the Skagit Valley we drove. Turn left at Baker Lake / Concrete. Take note of the sign that says road out. We drove up the road until Cassia wanted me to take a some pictures of the 'Stump Lake'. I have seen stump lakes like this before but never been out among the stumps. They weren't any stumps, they were OLD growth Ceder stumps.

From there we got back in the cars and headed up the road more. And then around a corner we see the road blocked. Well the road was out at the 23 mile marker. Seems that the culvert got blocked this winter and washed the whole road out. That would have been a sight to see as the creak bed was at least 20 feet below the road with a good bowl and ravine on the upstream side. Well our fearless leader Cassia decided that we should march from here. Er... Cassia had the good idea of starting our Hike from there. Not bad idea as the trail head is only 3 miles down the road. We rested at the trail head and then hiked on. Wow. Once we got past the trail head we were into old growth Ceder forest. There was one cool steel/wood suspension bridge that was horse rated, but had nice bounce in the middle. It looked kinda like some of the bridges I have designed in the Bridge-It game. :) There were also some cool little caves amount the boulders. Most of them were small and looked like something had spent the night in them at least once.

Well the trail was washed out and we had to cross a creak. Shortly there after we decided to pause and nibble on some food. Then while debating if we should head back it started to rain. Well you know how that decision went. The funny part is that once we started heading back the rain stoped. But I used the early return to hike up a washout we had crossed before to go take pictures of a waterfall that we could see below.

Well about 10 miles of hiking and then a 4 hour trip home made for a really tired Mike when I got home, but I am extremely glad I went.

From Baker River Hike

Keg Camping

Went out camping this weeknd. Good dirty fun. lol We where going to go to Kachess like we have many times before but Curt called and found them full. So we went with a backup plan. John was having a kegger and invited a bunch of the upstiars gang to go Kegger Camping out on Forest service road 7550 outside of Greenwater.
After fighting traffic for the Steeley Dan concert we tryed to miss a few turns, first onto the Forest Road and then again at the camp. To much crazy talk with Josh. We pulled into the camp and were greated by Matt, his 2 dogs and friend. As you can see by the picture we had a great view om Mt. Raineer, well we had a view as we pulled in and when we woke up for a few hours but than it disapeered for the rest of the weekend.

We found a camp far enough from the mains site to be able to do our own thing. Real nice spot, right on the river and in the trees, compleat with a nice little hole we turned into a great fire pit. Josh cooked up some killer camp hash browns for breakfasts and pan fired steaks for Satruday night dinner.

Satruday everbody started showing up Satruday afternoon starting with John followed by Vinnie, AK, Dan, Weeks and a whole cast of extras. They cracked the Mac and Jacks and it was a party. Even Dustin showed late up after taking the wrong trun on 75 and taking the long way around.

Curt and I passed out around midnight and all was good. At least that is what we thought. Did I mention that we coundn't see Raineer after noon on Saturday? Well the rain started in the middle of the night, no big deal right? Well we frogot to put the rain tarp on the tent. That gave us a real good view of the stars on Friday night and a real good view of of the rain on Sunday morning. Well we didn't end up getting as wet or cold as we could have so it makes for a good leanring experence.

Until next time.

400 Man LAN

Chip and I just got back from lanpartynw.com’s 400 Man LAN party.  I had a real good time.  I always away getting away with my people, this time they happen to be a horde of computer geeks.  I entered the BF2 tourney and the pickup team I joined didn’t have their act together till the second match and then we lost both matches.  Chip on the other hand got asked to fill in for the team around us and they went all the way to the top.  He got in the tourney draw and took home a cool case.

What really sucked is that not enough people showed up and they had to pass the hat to try to make up some of the money. That really sucks as I really enjoy their LANs and got to have a good long chat with the host.  I might even have to go up to their next gLAN.  His garage is all set up to transform into a LAN center in about 30 min work.

     Oh I did manage to spend more money again.  I ordered an Ergodex DX1 Input system.  It is a way cool keyboard that lets you put the keys wherever you want along with the ability to record macros on the fly.