ope...a life / samuel.pepys.1
Went to Idaho. 16 June 2025 through 19 June 2025. Monday - Thursday.
Boise is a groovy place. Love the vibe. Love the art. Visited 9 1/2 years ago to check it out when I had a job offer in Meridian. Liked it then, too. If I could get a book mines gig there now it'd be a nifty place to live for a while.
Went to Craters of the Moon. (Wikipedia)
Rubbed elbows with the rich and famous in Ketchum, ID. The library there is the bomb diggity. Almost worked there back in the day , too, but couldn't afford it. (NYT article) Beautiful area. Interesting story about how Sun Valley came to be.
During the winter of 1935–36, Harriman enlisted the services of an Austrian Sportsman, Count Felix von Schaffgotsch, to travel across the Western U.S. to locate an ideal site for a winter resort. The Count toured Mount Rainier, Mount Hood, Yosemite, the San Bernardino Mountains, Zion, Rocky Mountain National Park, the Wasatch Range, Pocatello, Jackson Hole, and Grand Targhee areas.
Late in his trip and on the verge of abandoning his search for an ideal location for a mountain resort development, he backtracked toward the Ketchum area in central Idaho. A U.P. employee in Boise had casually mentioned that the rail spur to Ketchum cost the company more money for snow removal than any other branch line and the Count went to explore.
Schaffgotsch was impressed by the combination of Bald Mountain and its surrounding mountains, adequate snowfall, abundant sunshine, moderate elevation, and absence of wind, and selected it as the site. Harriman visited several weeks later and agreed.
Drove 75 to 21 in Idaho (beau coup curves). Visited Bogus Basin. The drive on 20 through eastern and central Oregon was lovely.
The PNW is a pretty funky place to live. The Oregon Coast doubly so.
There's the Oregon Coast Range which butts right up against the Pacific Ocean. It frequently hails. It frequently rains when it's sunny. This leads to oodles of rainbows. Moss and molds abound. Deciduous trees are never bare and brown. If there aren't leaves on them there's moss. Lots of moss.
Fungi also abound. Mushrooms grow everywhere.
The temperature generally stays between forty and seventy degrees fahrenheit. It rarely snows. When it does it doesn't stick around long. It's a wet cold. This makes it feel much colder than it is. We're used to the dry colds back home. The moisture means hair is flat.
There's a lot of salt in the air. Every couple of months we need to wash the house down to get the salt (and keep the moss) off. If cars are left outside surface rust happens very quickly. Keeping them in a garage seems to ameliorate this issue.
There doesn't seem to be a level place in the joint. Hills up the wazoo. It's a good thing it rarely gets cold enough for water to freeze because with all the water we get around here and all the hills we have, driving or biking or walking would be difficult.
It really does rain a lot. Heavy rains abound. Winds blow and gust hard, well into the double digits. When the winds blow and the rain thunders down...it's some nice moody weather. There are all kinds of lights rains, too. There is little lightning and thunder.
All this is mostly true for the first 1/4 to 1/2 mile of land from the ocean. While much of it rings true for the rest of the Coastal Range as well, there are differences. For instance, it can get much warmer there in the summer and much snowier in the winter.
Not the best idea to just go for a drive over the 4th of July weekend. This is why. But a bit before ten pm on the fifth we decided to go for a little drive. Hit a couple beach accesses but there were so many bonfires (neither of us enjoy bonfire smoke) so we started driving around Devil's Lake. It was a little after ten by this point and we saw our first firework of the evening. We'd forgotten that the Devil's Lake Association puts on a fireworks display on the fifth. We found a place to pull over and watch the fireworks. Was nifty.
Purchased 2024 Transalp 2025.07.11.
