Today, ladies and gentlemen, is a milestone for sovknight.com.  Today I post my one hundredth article.

For a lot of people, one hundred isn’t all that big a deal.  Some people post every day, others maybe a few times per week.  Usually, these frequent posts are only a couple sentences or a paragraph.  Something small and lightweight and easily digestible by the masses.

My blog is different.  I tend to post long, rambling bits about sometimes controversial and always random things.  Most of my posts average in the 500-1,000 word range,  but I’ve also got a few behemoths of the 2,000 word ilk, and one massive 3,000+ word monster.  I don’t post as often because if I did, I wouldn’t have time for anything else.  I’m wordy.  I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

So one hundred posts for me is a big deal.  sovknight.com started on January 1, 2008.  I’ve hit one hundred in a little less than a year, so that’s not so bad.  Sure, I definitely could’ve written more, and to be honest, there are about a dozen or so drafts that were never published, but I tried to maintain a sense of quality.  Of course, they weren’t all good, but a few of them came out pretty nice, and I’d like to share my top 5 favorites with you today.

So here are my top 5 favorite posts, judged solely by me, in descending order.  I’ve linked to them and listed the thinking behind writing each.  Come in and relive the past!

5.  If You Asked 100 Guys

This one started out innocently, as a way for me to basically state my dislike of nail polish.  It sort of evolved into a list of things that guys like, hate, or how they behave.  I felt that someone had to say it, so why not me?  The post got some really good response, except for one of my readers who took offense, but it wasn’t meant that way.  It was all in good fun.

4.  Some of the Things I Don’t Understand

This post started a kind of series which I revisit from time to time.  Like everyone, I have little frustrations or annoyances that plague me in life, but it just so happens that I also have a blog on the Internet with which to vent about them.  I expect this series to continue into infinity, because the list of things that I don’t understand is quite possibly endless.

3.  Sometimes Writing a Blog is Hard

With this one, I wanted to explain why my online persona is different than my real life personality.  When I write, it’s with a different voice.  I communicate so much better in writing than in any other way.  My thoughts and ideas come across so much better, and in a much more satisfying way when I write them out.  If I meet you in person, know that the real me is the one behind the keyboard, and the shy, inarticulate person talking to you is just a shell of a being, restricted by his physical mask.

2.  We Made it This Far, You and Me

This monstrosity is 3,249 words long.  Evidently, it’s way too long for a post on a web log.  This is one of the only posts that I planned, and one that I seriously gave a lot of thought to beforehand.  That’s a rare exception here, but I thought the topic was a novel one, and I wanted to do it just right.  I was hoping to get lots of comments on it, not only because of the subject, but because of the thought I put into it.  I was so wrong.  Turns out, three thousand words is a bit much to read on a computer screen during your lunch break at work, or during your personal free time.  I should have known, and I learned a valuable lesson that day: Keep blogs short and to the point.  Or at least interesting.  This one failed on both accounts.  Still, it’s my second-favorite, because I am quite happy with the way it turned out, and I do still honestly think presenting it the way I did was novel.  I continue to learn.

1.  You Just Can’t Force it

Every once in a great while, and far too rarely, you sit down to compose an article and the words just pour out of you.  You can’t even control it at all.  It’s like you can’t type fast enough, and every single synapse in your brain is firing in a storm of creativity.  It’s writing nirvana.  It’s what happened to me here.

The idea started, ironically, as an attempt to break through some writer’s block.  I’d been having some static lately, and I thought if I just sat down and wrote about not being able to write, then I could get some ideas, or at least some sympathy.  As soon as my fingers touched the keyboard however, it’s like they had a mind of their own.  This article, although relatively short for my standards, was fired off in about five minutes of continuous typing.  In fact, I don’t even recall stopping to think about what to write next.  It all just flowed out so easily and completely.  It didn’t even require editing afterward.  If only every blog post could be like this.

The topic of the blog is about the process of writing a blog.  If you interpret it in some other way, then you just have a dirty mind. 

So there you have it.  My five favorite posts out of the one hundred I’ve published.  Writing this blog had been a fascinating experience for me, and sometimes a fulfilling one.  I can’t wait to write the next hundred.

Topics: Thoughts | 5 Comments »

Ghost towns

Frisco, Utah was an old mining town in the late 1800s.  At its peak, the town’s population was about 6,000 people, mostly miners and their families, and an 1879 directory lists 33 businesses with services, which included eight saloons.  Today almost nothing remains but some foundations and a cemetery, but it’s the reputation of this place that led me to seek it out.

You see, Frisco was one of those old west towns like you see in the movies.  The streets running though the town had more than twenty saloons, brothels, and gambling houses.  It also had the reputation of being a very dangerous place to be.  All kinds of crime ranging from muggings to murders happened on a daily basis.  So much so, that the town hired a marshal from Nevada and told him to “clean up the town.”  Legend has it that they offered to build him a new jail, but he declined saying “don’t need no new jail.”  Legend also has it that he then proceeded to kill six men that same night as a warning to all the outlaws that indeed shit would not be taken.  Just like in the movies.

In 1885 a cave-in of the main condemned the town.  Once the collapse sealed in the biggest and most profitable mine in the area, the town began to dwindle.  By the turn of the century, only a handful of businesses still remained, and by the 1920s, Frisco was a ghost town.

As a word of warning to anyone ghost towning in Utah, do NOT follow Google maps.  The directions it gave me took me way off into the mountains somewhere, nowhere near where the actual town was.  Having said that, and after finally finding it, here’s how you actually get to Frisco.

Get your map of Utah, then find “Nowhere.”  Now that you’ve found “Nowhere”, proceed to locate the boundaries.  Next, having found the outer boundaries, go to the middle of “Nowhere.”  That’s where you’ll find Frisco.

Nestled at the base of the San Francisco mountains, you’ll find Frisco to be nothing more than a few crumbling foundations, one last standing building, and some old charcoal kilns.  Nothing much remains of a once-booming mining town.  It’s even a little creepy, in my opinion.

I gotta admit, the place is still cool, especially given its history.  Walking along the streets though, it’s hard to imagine what it must have looked and felt like a hundred years ago.  You try to picture buildings and saloons, along with people and horses and activity, but time has done its deed and stripped Frisco to the bare bones.  In a few more years, it will likely be gone completely.  Until then, we still have pictures.

I enjoyed walking around, absorbing the atmosphere and trying to picture the town the way it was.  Back in the 1800s it was brutal, but now it’s very peaceful and serene, almost like it’s been laid to rest.  I think they call them ghost towns for that reason.

Of course, I couldn’t leave without finding the town cemetery.  There’s a story about a family by the name of Sackett out of San Francisco, California who came to Frisco when the town got started.  An author by the name of Louis L’amore even wrote several stories about the Sacketts, and I wanted to see if there was any truth to this.  Behold:

There are actually a great many headstones with the name Sackett on them.  I guess sometimes fiction and truth share a common thread.

Here are a couple more shots in the cemetery.

It was starting to get dark as I walked through the old cemetery, reading the names and the dates on the headstones.  Not surprisingly, a lot of them were children, some of them not even a year old.  Frisco really was a rough town.

After wandering through the town and seeing the cemetery, there was only one thing left that I needed to do…

Watch the sun go down on the old west.

Topics: Thoughts | 5 Comments »

Last Thursday, after an entire summer of preparation, and a rainy weekend delay, Sra and I finally conquered Mount Olympus.

We’d planned to do it the previous Saturday, but Sra had a bit of a cold and it rained/snowed all day anyway, so we rescheduled for Thursday.  This turned out to be for the best, because the weather was cool and dry, with clouds most of the day, and it made for perfect hiking conditions.  Probably couldn’t have asked for a better day.

We started out pretty early.  I think we got to the peak right before 8AM, just as the sun was coming up.  After gearing up, we headed up the steep incline that forms the first mile-and-a-half of the trail.

The hike was pretty easy going at first.  It’s a fairly steep trail, but the first half of it isn’t too bad otherwise.  Mostly switchbacks going to and fro up the mountain, then a straight trial that runs parallel to a deep canyon.  Views of the valley enhance the hike, as your elevation climbs pretty quickly.  Passing through a few groves of trees and bushes finally brings you to the halfway point, which is a trickling stream.  I have dubbed it “Sucky Stream.”

From that point on, there is no respite.  The hike turns from an enjoyable stroll up the mountain into a hellish nightmare of climbing an ancient dried-up stream bed, complete with just enough small boulders spaced perfectly to induce the maximum amount of tripping and cursing, sweating and panting, and cramping muscle fatigue.  It’s a good workout to be sure, but that effort is rewarded when you finally come to a clearing at the top.  The only level place on the entire hike is a visual wonder, looking southeast along the Wasatch front across a massive canyon, with eagles soaring overhead (not kidding) backed by incredible views of the Twin Peaks and Lone Peak in the distance.  Stunning, believe me.  This picture doesn’t begin to do it justice.

After resting for a bit, we tackled the hard part.  During our research on the hike, we read of other people doing it, and they referred to a “scramble” that makes up the last 600 feet to the peak.  Ok, we thought.  No problem.  After all, lots and lots of people climb to the summit every year, so two healthy young people should be able to handle it.  We’ve been doing progressively harder hikes all summer in preparation, so we’re ready.  Right?

Well, we discovered the limits of our hiking abilities that day.  Scrambling is literally climbing, using your hands and knees.  We definitely weren’t prepared for the amount of scrambling we’d eventually end up doing, and to top that off, we lost the trail halfway up.  In our efforts to find it, we made an unfortunate detour to the “Cliff of Doom”, which was an attempt to scale the large boulders where inexperienced climbers like us dare not go.  I’ll tell you, I’m not afraid of heights at all, but when you’re perched on a large, flat boulder on the side of a mountain top, and the only thing between you and the valley floor over four thousand feet below you is a slim mountain goat path and some scrub brush, you tend to get a little freaked, especially with the number of people who get lost or hurt doing this climb every year.  After realizing the mistake of climbing up that, coming back down was even harder.  Thankfully both of us made it down safely, but the hike almost turned back there.

Bravely, we soldiered on.  We met a helpful guy coming down who gave us directions back to the trail, and we promptly set out to get lost yet again.  Making our way back to the trail (finally), we ascended the last little bit to the peak.

After a summer of prep, several hikes, and a bit of delay, we finally reached the summit of Mount Olympus.  The view from there is spectacular, and every bit worth the effort.  You literally almost feel like you’re on top of the world, standing like a hero with hands on hips, the master of all you survey.

But wait, there’s more!  If that weren’t enough, Sra and I also took some video.  I mean, it’s one thing to read my never-ending babble about the hike, but it’s nothing compared to seeing it for yourself.  Courtesy of Sra’s most excellent purchase of a tiny hand held video camera, we’re able to bring our hike right to you, almost like you were there with us.

One note about the video:  We shot almost an entire hour of goodness at varying places on the hike, and documented it pretty well, but because of YouTube’s time limit, I had to edit it all down to a scant ten minutes.  I’m not overly thrilled with the final product, given that 75% of it is edited out, but even in its shortened form, I tried to make it entertaining, so I hope you enjoy it.  Don’t forget to leave comments!

Note:  I’ve discovered that for some reason the embedded video below loads extremely slowly.  It may be best to click over to the actual video itself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8nPCbB6iqc&fmt=18 as it seems to load much faster there.  Weird.

Lastly, I’d like to thank Sra for being an amazing friend, and sharing this amazing hike with me.  Thanks for letting me have this experience with you, and I can’t wait to see what’s in store next year!

Topics: Thoughts | 5 Comments »

It is Fall here in Utah, and color has come to the mountains.  Fall is my very most favorite time of year, and one of the reasons is spelled out very clearly in the pictures below:  I love the look of it.  Changing leaves, the crispness in the air, the dusting of snow… its all beautiful and awesome.  How can you not appreciate the wonder of it all?

Of course, I had to size down these pictures to fit on the blog, but I’ve left them linked so you can see them in higher resolution.  Just give them a clickie if you want.  Also, don’t forget you can see each of them along with many more on my Flickr page.  If you like what you see, please feel free to leave a comment as well.

Today I and my trusty camera made our way up to Silver lake once again.  This weekend brought some rain to the whole of the Salt Lake valley, and rain in the valley in the Fall means snow in the mountains.  Just a dusting, as you can see, but enough to make everything jaw-droppingly gorgeous. 

After a walk around the lake, I struck out on the path that leads above the lake, and found even more vibrant color and amazing scenery.  I can’t believe how pretty Utah is this time of year.

This picture is looking out over the lake toward the Brighton Ski resort, which, a scant couple of months from now, will be completely covered with light, fluffy snow the kind skiers and snowboarders live for.  Even the lake itself and the surrounding trees you see here will be covered with a couple hundred inches of snow.  Until then though, you can’t beat the scenery of Autumn Pretty.

Topics: Thoughts | 3 Comments »