Ruby Marsh

In Early August Pam and I traveled to the ruby marsh for some camping, hiking, paddling, and birding. Our truck must have been a strange sight traveling across the middle of the desert with two 17 foot long sea kayaks on top. I've wanted to paddle the marsh for a long time, having flown sailplanes and driven by the place a few times. Pam paddled there a couple of years ago and had a wonderful time.

The day before arriving at the marsh we hiked to liberty pass from the trailhead at Lamoille Canyon, an incredible experience, but that's another story in itself. We drove through Harrison Pass from Lamoille to the campground on the west side of the ruby marsh, pitched our tent then went paddling.

The Ruby Mountains look like a slightly smaller version of the Sierra Nevada and therefore a spectacular sight. Below the tree line the mountains are forested with pine trees and brush, running streams flowing from the snow fields in glacier carved valleys. At the lower elevations there is a transition to more a more typical great basin desert look with junipers and pinon pines.

The Ruby Marsh is fed by the snow melt although there is much less water than in years past. There are about 12,000 acres of marshland administered by the fish and wildlife service with over 200 species of birds.

Toward the south end of the marsh, there are a lot of tall grasses, tall enough to obscure your view from a small boat. It would be easy to get lost there. There are some marker poles there but it would be best to bring a gps as well as a compass in case the gps fails. There were many small birds in the grasses, we really enjoyed the baby coots that swam around the edge of the grass looking at us in our kayaks. Northern harriers were constantly flying above probably looking for baby coots.

The next day we paddled from the brown dike with our friends Mike and Sherry Payne who drove up from Las Vegas with their kayaks to join  us. The great part of paddling from the dike is that there's no place for motorboats to launch and we had that part of the marsh to ourselves. If you paddle there between June 15 and the end of July only human powered and electric powered boats are allowed there for a very peaceful experience. The first part of the year boats aren't allowed to protect the nesting birds.

The water on the South side of the brown dike is more open, no boats allowed North of the dike. There were numerous American pelicans, some grebes, egrets, and most fun of all terns. We also paddled near a few muskrats, Mike started to sing the song muskrat love, unfortunately for Pam she couldn't get the song out of her head for a day. It probably didn't help that I kept reminding her about the song every now and then.

The weather was excellent, good to escape the Boulder City/Las Vegas area summer heat, and we all had a great time. We will probably run this trip next June and July through Desert Adventures, www.kayaklasvegas.com

Jim

Sydney, Australia

Currently, I'm in Sydney, Australia, we had a nice flight over not too many thunderstorms to dodge, usually there are many of them between lax and syd. It's cold here in the winter the temps are a lot like what we get in boulder city, nevada during the winter. It's actually nice to get away from the Southern Nevada summer and cool off for a day. We stay at the novotel at darling harbour. I sometimes go to a shop near spit bridge and rent a kayak to paddle around, there are many nice beaches to paddle to.

There's a mall with a food court next to our hotel where there's a great thai food place. The eating area is also open to darling harbour and has seagulls and ibis scrounging for food outside and sometimes inside the building. I drink regular soda when not in the states, they taste better here as they use sugar instead of corn syrup.

I'm looking forward to getting home as there isn't much of the gliding season left and it would be great to get a few more long flights in before our gliders turn into expensive plastic art for the winter.

This will be one of my last trips to australia for a while as I'll be switching to the 757/767 in late September. The flying then will be closer to home. I really love australia and will miss flying here but wont miss the jet-lag.

Gliding in Tonopah

I'm in Tonopah, Nevada getting ready to fly my glider tomorrow. The forecast is for good lift but there will be strong winds. Contrary to popular belief, gliders don't need wind to fly, when flying cross country in thermals wind can actually be bad as they break up the thermals and make it difficult to make much progress across the ground into the wind.

My glider is an ASH-26E motorglider so I can self launch, self retrieve was one of the reasons that I bought the ship but with the density altitude on the ground above 8000 feet getting back across high mountain passes is questionable at best so once airborne I fly it like my old pure glider, an LS-6, I made sure to have glide to a safe landing area.

The gliding this time of the year, August, involves moist unstable air from the monsoon in the southwestern U.S. It's good to fly from an airport at the edge of it, if you're too deep within the monsoon you get thunderstorms and rain and very little flying. It looks like Tonopah will be a good place to fly from for the next couple of days, it was very good today but I didn't get here soon enough to rig and fly, the glider is ready for tomorrow.

Central Nevada has a lot of high terrain with valley elevations above 5000 feet. The image included with this posting is of a mountain in the Ruby Range East of Elko. The mountain is high enough to still have snow on it in August. At www.ssa.org  under racing/online contest (olc), you can see where gliders are flying on a daily basis and even create a google earth file to look at the routing. 

Jim D

May 2008 Japan Trip, Nagoya, Nagano, Goshiki Onsen

I had just gotten back from Hong Kong on Friday afternoon into Boulder City, did some chores, repacked the suitcase and flew to San Francisco with Pam to catch the 11 a.m. flight to Nagoya, Japan.

We got to Nagoya about a half-hour ahead of schedule, took the train to Nagoya city to catch train to Nagano, where the winter olympics were held a number of years ago. Nagano is in the Japan Alps, and is qute beautiful. We got some money out of the atm at the 7-11 next to the train station, walked over to the Nagano Dentetsu Line for the train to Suzuka. I speak conversational Japanese but am illiterate. The further you get into the countryside the less you see signs in English. I asked for help in purchasing a train ticket for us. Later I noticed that there was a button on the touch screen train ticket machine that was labeled English. Touching that button would have turned the screen to English and I wouldn't have needed any help at all!

The ride to Suzuka took more that a half-hour as we had gotten on the local train instead of the express. None of the maps on the train were in English so it was  not a bad thing to stop at every station. Upon arrival at Suzuka we found that the last bus to the hot spring inn had gone. Tired and hungry we walked into a yakitori restaurant for dinner. Yakitori is chicken on a skewer cooked with yakitori sauce, very good. A local man sitting at the table next to us bought us a bottle of sake which I enjoyed as Pam was not feeling too good. He called the hotel on his mobile phone to tell them that we would be a while. After dinner we took a cab which cost 6700 yen, about $65 dollars.

Once at the hotel we were greeted by a 89 year old man, who tried to help me with my bag. It was pretty heavy so it wasn't hard form me to convince him to let me carry it. It turns out that he's in pretty good shape as he hikes the mountains for some of the plants that they serve as part of the meals at Goshiki Onsen, an older hot springs resort in a mountain gorge next to a stream. The green trees that surrounded the place were a welcome sight for a couple of people that have spent much of they're lives in the deserts of Nevada and California. We were shown to our room, a beautiful traditional Japanese tatami room. We were tired but decided to soak in the hot pools before going to sleep.

The outdoor pool is closed late at night so we went to the indoor section. They're housed in an old wooden building next to the main hotel. Like the structure of the building the walls, floors and tubs are all wood, very relaxing. There are four tubs, two very small ones that would only hold two people, each in it's own room. There were also two larger tubs, we were the only people there and soaked in one of the larger ones for a while. There was the sound of the stream rushing by just outside the building for a very soothing and relaxing experience. There was a full moon that night but it couldn't be seen with the clouds of an approaching storm hanging low in the valley. The water was very hot, we mixed in some cold water from the tap to get it to a comfortable temperature.

We had a very restful sleep that night. Shortly after waking we were served a very nice breakfast much of which were mountain plants collected from the local area by the old man. We then soaked in the outdoor stone tub next to the stream, it's very large so the water temperature is very hot near where the water enters the pool. It was perfect in the middle. The sound of the river flowing by and the wind in the trees was wonderful. During the middle of the day the sun broke through the clouds and shined on the green forest covered mountain slopes next to the hot springs.

We were also served dinner in our room, mostly traditional Japanese food such as tempura, rice, and sashimi. The food was cooked with great care, delicious, and beautifully arranged.

On the last day of our stay at goshiki onsen it was rainy with not as much wind. We were the only guests and had the large outdoor pool next to the river to ourselves and didn't mind the rain, weekdays are a good time to travel in Japan. After breakfast was served we had one last soak before checking out. The hotel staff drove us to the train station and we were in Nagano in no time.

Goshikin onsen is a great place to visit and we would recommend it to anyone wanting a relaxing hot springs experience.

Sleepless in Hong Kong

It's 2 a.m. in Hong Kong and I'm wide awake. We leave the hotel in a little more than eight hours. My room on the 28th floor of a hotel next to the convention center has a great view of Victoria Harbour across to the Kowloon Side. Earlier in the night the city was brightly lit, including probing green laser beam, but at this hour it's pretty dark, more like any other large city.

Haven't eaten since lunch, may walk around and see if anyplace is open at this hour. Lunch was at a Japanese style Chinese noodle place called Ajisen in Wanchai. Interesting mix of Chinese noodles, ramen, and some traditional Japanese food such as tonkatsu. The seafood noodle soup was outstanding. If you like to eat, Hong Kong is a great place with many excellent restaurants. 

In November we had an amazing thanksgiving seafood dinner in Sai Kung. My wife Pam was on this trip, we went kayaking With Paul Etherington at www.kayak-and-hike.com  great trip. We paddled out to an island where we hiked up a hill for a nice view. The photo is of Paul showing us tourists how to paddle.

Should be a good night for walking in Hong Kong, it's not as hot as last week. Last week we flew to Singapore where it was extremely hot and muggy, beautiful city but didn't walk around too much.

Should be a quick trip home to Boulder City, Nevada, via LAX and LAS, as the jet stream is across the middle of the North Pacific. We had to fly over Alaska, Russia, and China to avoid it on the way out yesterday.

Next week Japan.