Well another week has already disappeared, but we did take a fun and as always adventurous trip to Palisades State Park in South Dakota for a weekend of climbing and mountain biking.  We spent Saturday completing a ride of a trail that we attempted last fall only to wake up at 3am with our tent being flattened against us by 50mph wind and snow.  This time the weather was great and the trail was not bad.  Next in our ND naivety we left a completely empty and perfectly suitable campground behind and drove several hours south to the state park where we planned to climb.  Forgetting completely that outside of ND people like to camp outdoors Memorial Day weekend.  So after driving past several hundred campers in half a dozen camp grounds we found a small patch of unclaimed grass in an unknown South Dakota town where the sites were not really numbered or marked and we felt we could legally squat for the evening.  The next morning we left the partying high school kids behind and returned to the park where we found a freshly open camping space and lots of intriguing and fun cliffs to climb.  Here are a few pictures. 

Cliff Lined Creek Leading To Farm Land

Roo & Max Enjoying a Little Fishing & Hunting

Real Climbers Trails (Straight Up)

Tourist Trails (Plush)

My Favorite: Farming Is Never Far Away In The Dakotas

Ballancing Rock

Many Climbs Started Abive The Water

King & Queen

I ran accross an interesting artical on the Backcountry.com site earlier that shows design, testing, and manufacturing processes of black diamond carabiners.  Very interesting.  The article is at the following link.


http://www.backcountry.com/store/newsletter/a737/Creating-the-Carabiner.html?sssdmh=dm10.108985&cmp_id=EM_CON1034a&mv_pc=r202&ep_rid=2152198

Whenever I think I am getting the least bit good at anything I watch a rally video and relize that just watching the videos is scarry enough.  The control is absolutly crazy.  Someday I will get back together with my codriver (mr. miller) and we will give them all a run for their money.  Uhh Right.. Sure we will.  Here are some fun videos.  Who says snowboard parks are just for jibbers?

It just came to my attention that a helicopter landing on the top of Everest has already been done.  So there are no limits.  I am surprised we haven’t seen the TGR crew making a ski decent yet.  Now that it is just an afternoon outing.  Check the movie out.  Cool but the problem with this sort of cheating is that it takes most of the experience out of life.  Very little time left for camaraderie and adventure.

With all the tick talk lately we accidently did a little google image search for ticks and thought we better share the disturbng results.. so that we wouldn't have to carry the full burden ourselves :)  Enjoy  And be ready for lots of babies.  We did find one raisen sized one on the floor last year.  Thanks goodness we got it outside quickly.  

It seems to have warmed up and we managed to fit a couple hour ride into Beth's studying.  Since the trails along the river are still under water we headed fifteen minutes out of town to Turtle River State Park, the home of the only (although short) sections of single track trail in eastern North Dakota.  The weather was great and the trails mostly dry.  It was so nice the dogs swam about a dozen times and the ticks were even begining to come out to play.  So a afternoon ride expanded into a combined ride...hair cut...dog bathing party.  As You can probably tell the hair cuts still need a little work, but it was getting late.  There will be a round two with the clippers for sure.  We even got a picture of one of the first couple dozen little guys of the year for you.  Cute aren't they.

One of our new friends

There is always time for a swim

What?... Now We Look Like Labs 

I found a very cool sensor the other day.  I have been working on a crane application at work off and on for a while.  We have many large cranes with bulky end effects for moving glass and sash panels to and from the production lines.  In the past the cumbersome size of them kept them being used on only the largest and heaviest loads.  So I deigned a very small end effecter and utilized a servo controlled zero gravity crane that follows your hand movement.  The only problem was that the overhead bridge remained heavy and still took effort to accelerate and move.  So I have been trying to find a way to automate its movement without requiring direct operator controls.  So the new sensor I found outputs an analog signal based on its current angular position.  My plan is to take this signal from the crane assemblies angle and format it to drive motors to keep the bridge positioned above the operator without requiring them to push any buttons.  This will mean that if the operator pushes the glass lightly in a direction the crane should automatically drive in that direction until they stop pushing.  It has been an exciting breakthrough for me (albeit geeky), but since it is unproven ground in the controls world I will let you know how it goes.  Luckily I have some talented programmers and panel builders as coworkers so it might just work. 

Well with may little trip to Salt Lake the other weekend I think the ND ski season may be ending.  Now if the water would just fall we could get the bikes back out.  I just ran accros this clip of Kris Holm on the unicycle.  Its an old clip but ramains incredable.  


Enjoy

Well its been an interesting spring here.  The red river valley experienced its second 100 year flood inside of 10 years and as of this writing the river here in Grand Forks has been above flood stage for well over a month now.  The adventures are never ending, from route finding when major interstates and county roads alternate going under water, to aborted attempts to reach friends houses by kayak (the ice was to thick) and huge sand bagging efforts it was truly an experience.  Other than our (mostly Beth's) sandbagging efforts in Grand Forks we are sitting behind a brand new dike system constructed over the last decade as a result of the devestating 1997 flooding and stayed quite comfortable.  As you can see from the pictures we were most impacted by our xc skiing and biking trails going under water.  The greenway just opened again this past weekend, however much of the trail system remains submerged so we continue to wait.  Roo's was even dishartened to find that the beloved dog park remains under.  However despite the sand traps being full of water the golf corse did open today.  Lucky us... We have been amazed by the clear signs of the rivers power.  Trees are all banded with stripes of missing bark, street signs are bent flat, and trees were snapped off everyware.  Well I beter get back to the job apps, but enjoy the pics.  There are many more in our picasa album.  Take care unitl next time.