Midway through the day we decided we’d like to try Bear peak.  We ducked out of work a bit early and after grabbing our gear and waiting a bit for Ben, we headed out around 4:30.  As we knew, this is definitely too late to head out for a hike as early/late afternoon storms have made themselves a part of Colorado life for the past few months.  Despite this, we were hopeful and tried to make a decent pace up the trail.

The first mile or so along the mesa trail isn’t so bad.  We held a pretty good pace for this section on the Mesa trail.  Apparently there are two ways to reach the top of Bear Peak: Along the Bear Canyon trail (longer and less steep) or along the Fern Canyon trail (much shorter but much steeper).  We chose the latter option.

Most of the way up the Fern Canyon trail was full of rock steps and switchbacks due to the decently steep incline we were ascending.  After multiple breaks, we made it to a decent lookout over the west side of the climb and could see some very pretty snow covered peaks and another peak to our north:

Peak north of the Bear Peak trail

Up to this point we had heard a few rumbles of thunder.  As we could see west, the building storm clouds were visible.  The combination of the continuing thunder, slight sprinkles, and occasional lightning were enough to convince us to turn back.  I’m not one who likes to mess with lightning in elevated terrain.  As we turned around to descend, a nice view of the plains just south of boulder presented itself:

View of the plains from the Bear Peak trail

Also, a picture of us descending (from right to left) Nick (fixing his shoe), Ben, Kuo, Dan, and Evan:

Descending Bear Peak

After a knee/shin jarring descent and a quick hike back down the Mesa trail towards NCAR, I snapped a quick few images of Boulder from the trail just west of the office:

Start/End of the Mesa trail just north of NCAR

By this time it was quite close to raining pretty good, so some of us hurried back to the building.  Just as Ben and I made it to the back entrance (across the bridge) it started raining.  Perfect timing!

After hiking Evan, Kate, and I headed to Southern Sun for dinner and a few beers.  Also, Evan and I decided we were sick of the weather denying us a full hike, so we are planning on leaving around 6:30 tomorrow morning to try again.  It is 11pm now, we’ll see if we actually make it.  I’m sure I’ll at least post photos if we do.

Side note: I found a Linux GUI/CLI tool called Hugin that does photo stitching very easily.  The third and fourth images of this post were made using Hugin and turned out pretty well.  I plan to make more in the future as they are much more impressive than a single image.

The day started with an almost exactly 1 hour drive down to Boulder after picking Kate up from her place.  Even at 7am, traffic wasn’t bad enough to slow us down too much.  We’ve averaged around 1 hour over the ~3 trips we’ve made down there.  I’m guessing it is now safe to say that it takes an hour to get from Fort Collins to Boulder (with our apartment or NCAR as the destination).

As we were early (we were supposed to be at NCAR at 9am), we stopped at our not-yet-paid-for apartment and found that the office was closed.  Resolving to call at lunch to get apartmenty things settled, we headed up the hill towards NCAR.

In contrast with the previous times we’d been to the NCAR campus, it was fairly windy and cold today when we arrived.  We headed in to the building and found our way to the cafeteria.  We were early (by around 30 mins) and met and talked with some of the other SiParCS interns who were also early.  Once 9am rolled around we headed to a conference room and started the day.

Most of the morning was filled with filling out forms, tours, and getting machines setup, configured, and working.  On the outside the building is really intersting, very cool architecture.  On the inside, you find that the cool architecture requires a complex layout that is initially difficult to find your way around.  Luckily I think I figured most of the useful routes out, but I’m guessing I’ll still have trouble at some point.  In terms of machine setup, I had to be the difficult one and use my personal laptop (along with one other inten).  To get access to various NCAR intranet resources, I needed to get VPN working.  However, the vpnc settings I was using weren’t working for some reason.  Later in the day we finally setup kvpnc and got VPN working with it.  (Later I figured out that I needed to specify my password each time using my recently acquired cryptocard, and got VPN working with vpnc in networkmanager, whooo!).

I ate lunch with Kate, Nick (the third intern working under John) and John in the NCAR cafeteria.  Kate and I learned that food is pretty expensive there ($20 for both of us total) and decided to shop later in the day for lunchy food and save ourselves some money.  The food is decent, just not worth $10 a meal.

After lunch I actually got started on my project, which I’ll describe in more detail at some point in a future post.  Basically right now I’m writing some Python scripts to process lookup table access traces from a run of CAM (the Community Atmospheric Model).  I’m hoping I can get some results to discuss with John by tomorrow.

Kate, Nick, and I decided to attend a welcoming reception and left around 3:30.  Nick headed straight there while Kate and I went and took care of apartmenty things first.  After paying rent and dropping off our stuff in our newly claimed apartment, we headed to the reception.  We were enticed by free food, expecting some sort of BBQ or something, but it turned out to be a more fancy-pants snacky event.  We grabbed some of the food (including coconut chicken on a stick!), listened to some speeches, chatted with Kuo, Nick, Even and Kate (all SiParcS interns) and decided we needed some real food.  We headed to our new favorite brewery, Southern Sun.

Southern Sun is a local Boulder brewery just across from our apartment.  We headed there for food, and ended up getting more than we could handle.  I ordered the Blackberry Wheat beer they had on tap (super tasty!) and Kate ordered a Belgium tripel (also super tasty!).  For food, we had an interesting soup that tasted exactly like a grilled cheese sandwich, very nice!  On top of that, we ordered the chicken nachos, and realized after it came out we had made a mistake:

Massive stack of nachos at Southern Sun Brewery

Needless to say, we didn’t manage to finish them, but what we did have was delicious.

After dropping Kuo off at home, Kate and I headed to our apartment and chilled for the evening and went to bed.  It was a long day and I’m pretty tired.  This is looking to be quite a fun summer.  I’m excited to get to work tomorrow on my project!