This snow has gotten ridiculous...

I messed around with Beth's time-lapse camera while she and I were making sure our roof didn't collapse. I don't think we were in any imminent danger, but a couple of roofs have collapsed around town under the weight of this winter's near record snow. I had also started thinking that maybe the roof was fine with the current weight, but an otherwise minor earthquake could be the tipping point. Lo and behold, Beth was woken up by a quake barely 6 hours after I finished clearing the roof.

Step 2, after clearing the roof, was clearing the snow away from our house. The 7-foot-tall snow pile along the front of the house certainly added a lot of privacy, but it also blocked things like sunlight, the path to the driveway and the front door.

Maybe in a bit I'll round up some other pictures of the snow piles and some collapsed roofs from elsewhere in town. But in the meantime, enjoy this (with the volume on, of course).

A winter's worth of skiing

Note: I'll write a full post about the Tour of Anchorage soon, but I'd like to have some pictures to include first so instead here's a post that I have some pictures for:

This winter I used my iPhone as a quasi-GPS pretty much every time I went out skiing. I use the Runkeeper app, which uses my cell signal to triangulate location based on local cell towers. I wouldn't want to count on it for burying treasure in the desert, but for a rough cut of "how far and how fast did I go" its a great little tool.

When you put it all together I covered a pretty big crescent across the city fairly thoroughly:

I like this map of the route on the bluffs around the airport:

There was lots of action in the parks closest to my house:

Especially right near home:

Small errors in the track for each trip mean that when I'm zoomed in I can see how many times I've been on a particular trail. Home is where the trails stop at the top of the picture. I find it interesting that I didn't head off to the left very often at all this winter... but I guess that direction only offered one option compared to the parkfull of trails off the bottom of the map.

Here's my favorite section of trail, with pretty woods, not much traffic and just enough of a downhill to make me feel like a better skier:

It's not a perfect system, and Google Earth / Google Street View don't understand pedestrian bridges at all:

But I do like the fact that some little glitch has this RV spitting flames:

Reminiscing...

Getting ready for the Tour of Anchorage and doing a lot of hard ski workouts recently, it's kind of nice to remember a time when skiing seemed so much easier...