Viewless Hikes

Today I went on a hike to Stahlman Point, near Detroit Lake.

In the hour leading up to my departure, I kept refreshing the weather page on my computer. One minute it was predicting a 30% chance of precipitation. Ten minutes later, it was up to an 80% chance of precipitation. Back and forth, back and forth. I gave it up and looked outside. It was overcast with mild showers ("mizzle" in Oregonian terminology), so not bad. The weather stayed pretty consistent all morning and didn't disturb the hike at all.

When I say "didn't disturb", I mean that the hike to the summit and back was uneventful. Unfortunately, the view from the summit was equally uneventful. It was almost as though we were sitting inside a cloud--though, at 3500 feet, that wasn't terribly surprising. On the bright side, I've never seen such great light diffusion for picture-taking purposes. You couldn't have asked for better lighting conditions. Pity there wasn't anything to take a picture of...

By 1:00 PM, the sun was breaking through and things were warming up considerably. In my book, that's a definite fail for weather prediction algorithms.

After returning from the hike, I went grocery shopping. I wouldn't say that I'm quite up to Olympic standards yet, but it's getting much faster. Today's excursion took 30 minutes; I bet I can get it down to twenty. While shopping, I picked up a brick of Colby-Jack cheese and a brick of Colby cheese. To my chagrin, "Jack" cheese doesn't seem to exist. It's probably a conspiracy. If consumers could buy it separately, they'd probably just combine the two and forgo the combo cheese.

Those evil corporations, always gouging us poor citizens to our detriment and their gain. Maybe we should get government to fix the cheese industry.