October 2023
Books read:
- The Moor’s Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie
- Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class by Blair LM Kelley
- The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
- Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck
Trails walked:
- Gold Hill near Taos, NM (Oct. 5th)
- Flattop Mountain in Rocky Mountain National Park near Estes Park (Oct 11th)
- Sandbeach Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park near Allenspark (Oct 18th)
Song(s) of the month – The Rolling Stones Gimme Shelter (w/ Merry Clayton) and Sweet Sounds of Heaven (w/ Lady Gaga)
Scientist Spotlight – Nettie Stevens, Geneticist
October Summary:
The Professor
On the first weekend of this past month, I took a fun trip south for a week. First, I visited my daughter and her fiancé in Taos where we went on a beautiful tundra hike and my daughter created a meal fit for a fancy restaurant. Next, I headed to Albuquerque where I picked up a college buddy and we drove to Las Cruces for a combination college reunion and 90th birthday party for one of our beloved professors at New Mexico State University; I’ll call him The Professor. When our senior year of college ended many moons ago, The Professor took three of us students on a long backpack in the Pecos Wilderness in New Mexico (me, the buddy I picked up in Albuquerque, and another buddy whose home provided the venue for this 90th birthday party). The backpacking trip was a great ending to a great college experience. That was the kind of person The Professor was. Every year, for 44 years The Professor also hosted an annual keg party and reunion disguised as a horseshoe tournament. I attended many of those early on, but had not gone in the past 20 years due mainly to life happening. Some years ago, my family and I went on a Grand Canyon river trip with The Professor and his family. It’s no surprise that he was the MVP of that trip where he was christened with the nickname of Gandhi for his philosophical bent, his thin frame, his round wire-rimmed glasses, and his penchant for walking around in only his white underwear. Everyone loves him. He’s tough, intelligent, opinionated, and above all, caring. The day after the big party, while we were cleaning up, The Professor showed up to say his goodbyes. We had a group hug and as we tried to tell him how special he was, he deflected of course and told us all how special WE were and how proud he was of us. He was sort of our defacto college dad, and he still seems to be playing that important role to this day. At 90, he’s a bit more fragile, physically, but he’s as mentally sharp as always. The local Las Cruces, NM paper ran an article that week about this birthday party/horseshoe tournament. Check it out here if you like. My wife and I are in that cover photo, kneeling down towards the right…my hair and mustache were much fuller and darker in those days. Our then 6 and 4 year old kids are in the photo also, nowhere near us as they were already flaunting their independence:
The Arizona Diamondbacks are in the World Series for the first time since 2001! That 2001 World Series ranks as one of the best ever, but for me it was THE best ever. It was held just as our country was reeling from the 9/11 attacks in New York City; and of course there was the fact that the New York Yankees were the team playing the Diamondbacks. It seemed the entire world was rooting for the Yankees. The Dbacks easily won the first two games in Arizona, but when the series moved to New York, the energy shifted dramatically. The Yankees won three thriller games with the crowd on the edge of their seats on each pitch. Those games are still etched in my memory, as I’m sure they are with poor Byung-hyun Kim, the Dbacks’ 22-year-old closer who blew two of those three games in relief. All three of the games in New York were decided by one run, with two of the three going into extra innings. The Dbacks won the last two games in Arizona to win the first ever major championship for the city of Phoenix. I still remember watching with our entire extended family, everyone jumping up and down like little kids when Luis Gonzalez hit that weak championship-winning single off Mariano Rivera, one of the greatest closers ever. I’ve been a baseball fan all my life, listening to World Series games on a transistor radio in the 60s while going to school (there were only daytime games in the World Series then, until 1971 when the Roberto Clemente-led Pirates beat the Orioles in seven games). Baseball is unfortunately a dying sport these days. Back in the 60s and 70s as I was coming of age, 40-50 million people would tune into the World Series to watch (or listen). That number dipped to around 20 million in the 80s and 90s and now sits at around 10 million. Among people in their 20s, baseball ranks below football, basketball, competitive video gaming (!), and soccer. Certainly, a big part of the reason is the massive improvement the NFL has made in taking over baseball and all other sports as America’s pastime. But the other reason, I believe, is our collective attention spans. Baseball is a slow, deliberate sport (even though they’ve made improvements this year to help). It’s similar to reading books. Back in the 70s, less than 10% of Americans said they didn’t read any books in the past year, today that number is around 25% and growing. The pace of life has accelerated since the 60s and 70s with the advent of the internet, smartphones, and social media. There are more entertainment options to choose from. The baseball post-season hasn’t gotten any less exciting, there have been incredible games this year with everything riding on every pitch. For us fans of baseball, this is the most exciting part of the sports year; I hope the sport survives.
Difficult and Desperate Causes
St. Jude's Children's hospitals are named for St. Jude Thadeus, one of the apostles and brother of St. James. Not to be confused with the traitor Judas Iscariot, this St. Jude has come to be known as the patron saint of difficult and desperate causes. In Mexico City, there is a festival on October 28th every year at St. Hippolytus, a 16th-century church built by Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés. Thousands of worshippers attend the celebration hoping that the saint will help them in their desperation, of which there is plenty in Mexico. This past October 28th I peeked out our front window and saw that dozens of people dressed up in native Mexican dress, plus others dressed in Halloween costumes were gathering at the house across the street which is owned by an Hispanic family. I joined other neighbors on the sidewalk watching as these costumed celebrants danced to lively music for nearly an hour, celebrating St. Jude. The neighbors invited us over and gave us hot chocolate and Mexican desserts. It's not every day you have that kind of celebration in your neighborhood. It was a joy. Check out some of it here:
Israel/Palestine
On a far less upbeat note, I guess I need to say something about Israel/Palestine. It’s an ongoing regional conflict that has fascinated me for years. This most recent uprising began with Hamas killing and kidnapping Israelis. So of course, the first reaction by most is to blame Hamas, and you wouldn’t be wrong, because what they did is horrific. However, those that have studied this conflict since the Balfour Declaration in 1917 know that it’s far more complicated. I won’t go into the long and involved conflict in this blog because it would take up the entire blog post (I told a personal travel story that goes a long way to explaining the fear each side has for each other in the summary section of my May 2021 blog). There were two great lines in the Salman Rushdie book I read this month. They were written regarding the Muslim/Hindu conflicts in India, but are every bit as relevant in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict:
“There comes a point in the unfurling of communal violence in which it becomes irrelevant to ask, ‘Who started it?’”
“Both their houses are damned by their deeds; both sides sacrifice the right to any shred of virtue; they are each other’s plagues.”
What is the common denominator in these conflicts? For me it’s power-hungry ‘leaders’ using religious fervor that claims a divine superiority for one and denigrates the other as evil. On both sides. I have a friend from the Balkans who always says that the reasons the various ethnicities there hate each other is because of something that happened in a war 500 years ago. It’s been over a century now since the Balfour Declaration, so I guess you can say now say that Israelis and Palestinians hate each other because of something that happened over 100 years ago. Meanwhile innocent people continue to die. Where are the leaders who care more about humanity than about religion or dogma?
This month my reading took me on a journey through 20th century India, the struggle of the Black working class in America, a Graham Greene classic, and a book about improving your mindset. My rambling took me to a great Taos area hike, and two Rocky Mountain National Park hikes, one of which is turning into a favorite. Enjoy.
Born in Vermont in 1861, Stevens was the daughter of a carpenter who was able to earn enough money to assure that both of his gifted daughters received the best education possible. Her mother died when Nettie was young. After graduating near the top of her class in one of the oldest high schools in the US (Westford Academy in Massachusetts) she moved to New Hampshire to teach high school science and math. I imagine that she got a bit bored and after three years decided to to to college at Westfield Normal School in Vermont, graduating in two years and first in her class. She then went on study at a new school on the west coast, called Stanford where she received a BA and MA in Biology. Her PhD studies were done at Bryn Mawr in Pennsylvania in cytology (the study of cells). Like most women of her time, she wasn’t able to achieve the academic status of her male peers, but her research on meal worms ended up unlocking the mystery of how one was born either male or female. Nobody knew at the time (it was God or the sexual position you used, or...). She discovered that it was the X and Y chromosomes that determined sex before the X and Y chromosomes even had those names.
In 1994 Stevens was inducted into the National Woman’s Hall of Fame. She tragically died of breast cancer at the age of 50, less than ten years after completing her PhD. She published 40 papers in her short research career and of course she is the one that unlocked a mystery that was hidden since human beings inhabited the planet.
Song(s) of the month: The Rolling Stones Gimme Shelter (w/ Merry Clayton) and Sweet Sounds of Heaven (w/ Lady Gaga)
The Rolling Stones have released their first album of new music in two decades. The album is titled Hackney Diamonds, a British slang for the broken glass left behind after a robbery. I’ve listened to a few of the songs and I’d say they are OK, mostly good, but not great. Except for one. That song is Sweet Sounds of Heaven, and it puts me back into the 1970s R&B scene. Stevie Wonder is playing keyboards and get this, Lady Gaga is singing background vocals. It’s great, and just when it seems like the song is ending, Gaga and Jagger just start riffing and a classic is born. Listening to it reminded me of their great 1969 classic Gimme Shelter from the incredible album Let it Bleed. Merry Clayton sang the background vocals on the song. That year was a seminal year in the world. Still recovering from the prior year’s assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr and Robert F Kennedy, Vietnam was still raging, Woodstock happened, The Beatles gave their last public performance on the roof of Apple records, there was the moon landing, race riots in Malaysia and the US, the Stonewall Rebellion, Rolling Stone founder Brian Jones drowned at 27, Vietnam protests took place in Washington DC, the Charles Manson murders, the Chicago Eight trial, deaths at the Rolling Stones’ concert at Altamont, and on and on and on. The album, Let it Bleed was a reflection of those mostly dark times.
But I was fascinated by the stories of the two women singing background vocals on the two songs. Merry Clayton, in 1969 was already a well-regarded vocalist who had done backup for many bands, including Ray Charles and Elvis Presley. As the story goes, it was nearly midnight in Los Angeles, and Clayton was in bed and four months pregnant when her friend and record producer called to say that a group of guys from London were in town and wanted her for background vocals to record a song. She was ready to say no because she’d never heard of the Rolling Stones and she was tired, but her husband encouraged her to give it a shot. So, she shows up pregnant, in pajamas, and her hair in curlers to introduce herself to Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and company. Part of the words in the chorus she was to sing included: “Rape, Murder, it’s just a shot away”. As the daughter of a pastor, she didn’t like that, but Jagger proceeded to describe what the song was about; the turbulent times, the race riots, and the war. She liked it from that standpoint and went ahead with it. On an isolated recording of her vocals on the song (which is available here) you can hear the band members hooting and hollering as she sang those words with so much feeling and emotion. They ended up with the final take in only 3 tries and she went home. Tragically, she miscarried soon after this. She believed that the stress of the late night, the song, and the emotions were all a part of what caused it and for years couldn’t listen to the song. But as time went on, she embraced her role in it and eventually recorded it herself on an album. Check out the original by the Rolling Stones (her solo starting at the 2:45 mark is incredible…and now that I know ‘the rest of the story’ it’s even more incredible):
Lady Gaga’s story of her background vocal performance isn’t nearly as fascinating but is still interesting. She was in a studio filming a scene for a movie she is in when she got a call saying that Mick was in the same studio recording new music and wanted to talk with her. She only knew of one Mick, so she went. He asked if she wanted to hang out while they recorded this song called Sweet Sounds of Heaven. When you have the Rolling Stones and Stevie Wonder in the room recording, you don’t say no. So, she stayed. During the recording Jagger handed her a microphone. She froze a bit and then started listening to the song and began to ad lib some vocals while sitting on the floor, singing in a way she never really had before. Jagger was so impressed that he asked if she wanted to officially record it with them. Although this song doesn’t have the powerful lyrics contained in Gimme Shelter, I can’t help but wonder whether it’s about Mick Jagger and Keith Richards feeling their mortality as they enter their 80s. Here it is:
The Moor in the book is Moraes Zogoiby, the fourth child and only son of Abraham and Aurora Zogoiby (A to Z). Moraes was born with two issues: a clubbed right hand, and a disorder which aged him at twice the speed of others (progeria?), which caused issues like facial hair when he was 8 years old, and the look of old age when he was only 35. His mother, Aurora, was a force of nature and by far the most interesting character in the book. She was an artist who lived by her own rules and had some great lines, mostly directed to the men who tried to tame her. The story covered four generations of Moraes’ family which included mixed marriages of Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Christians, and atheists, basically the mix of the subcontinent before all the ethnic cleansing and wars which created Pakistan and Bangladesh.
There were so many layers and multiple meanings in this book, and there’s a term that I had heard before and was used many times here: Palimpsest, which is a piece of writing or art on which the original writing/art has been written/painted over. Even the title has multiple meanings from various moors and sighs. It’s the sound made by Muhammad XI (aka Boabdil) who was the last Moorish king in Granada. It is the gasp Othello makes as Shakespeare’s Moor of Venice. There are two paintings in the novel titled The Moor’s Last Sigh. And the narrator of the story is basically taking his last breath (sigh) as he finishes the novel that we are reading.
There’s a genealogy chart at the beginning of the book showing the four generations of the Zogoiby/de Gama clan. Keep this handy as you read, because it’s a challenge to keep all these unusual names straight. But then you don’t read a Salman Rushdie novel for its easy gliding. He is always challenging you to think as you read. Here are some of the many entertaining lines:
Epifania swallowed the news of his death without a tremor. She ate his death as she had eaten his life; and grew.
‘Just look at (Arabic) writing,’ Abraham’s mother Flory once remarked. ‘Even that is so violent, like knife-slashes and stab-wounds.
‘A bad mistake, Abie,’ old Moshe Cohen commented. ‘To make an enemy of your mother; for enemies are plentiful, but mothers are hard to find.’
Abraham Zogoiby walked out of Jewtown and towards St Francis’s Church, where Aurora da Gama was waiting for him by Vasco’s tomb with his future in the palm of her hand.
‘We’re Church of England here,’ he limply said, and that brought her to her feet, she unfurled herself and dazzled him, Venus rising in red velvet, and then she shrivelled him with her scorn. ‘Soon,’ she said, ‘we will drive you into the sea, and you can take along this Church that only startofied because some Piss-in-Boots old king wanted a sexy younger wife.’
The eldest, originally called Christina in spite of her Jewish father’s protests, eventually had her name sliced in half. ‘Stop sulking, Abie,’ Aurora commanded. ‘From now on she’s plain Ina without the Christ.’
'Time to put a little pot on your front. A man without a belly has no appetite for life.’
This was not just a jail; it was an education. Hunger, exhaustion, cruelty and despair are good teachers.
Reasons are cheap, cheap as politicians’ answers, they come tripping off the tongue: I did it for the money, the uniform, the togetherness, the family, the race, the nation, the god.
A tragedy was taking place all right, a national tragedy on a grand scale, but those of us who played our parts were – let me put it bluntly – clowns. Clowns! Burlesque buffoons, drafted into history’s theatre on account of the lack of greater men.
The past and future are where we spend most of our lives.
Defeated love is still a treasure, and those who choose lovelessness have won no victory at all.
The trailhead is near the large public parking area in Taos Ski Valley. We did a sort of loop, starting on the Wheeler Peak trail (also known as the Bull of the Woods trail) for the first mile. Next, we took a sharp left on the Long Canyon trail for the next 3 miles of mostly uphill through the trees. After this point we were finally above the tree line and the views were outstanding. We followed the Gold Hill trail for another mile or so to the 12,700 foot summit and just took in the expansive views. There are ridges up here that make you want to spend days exploring them. Also visible from up here is the Rio Grand Gorge slicing its way north, the steep ski runs of Taos Ski Valley, Wheeler Peak, and the Latir Wilderness north of Red River. We didn’t see any big animals up here today although it’s fairly common to see bighorn sheep in this area. After eating lunch huddled from the wind in a rock shelter, we headed back down and fully enjoyed the changing colors of the leaves. Another beautiful day in the mountains of northern New Mexico.
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| We headed up Long Canyon |
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| Into the Wilderness |
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| Wheeler Peak on the left |
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| Nice meadow with view of the Taos ski runs |
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| Closeup...steep ski runs! |
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| I loved this ridge and want to hike it someday |
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| Daughter and I |
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| Fall colors from Gold Hill |
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| Looking towards the Latir Wilderness |
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| Lots of work to clear the downed trees from last year's blowdown |
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| Daughter and wonder dog headed back |
What I loved so much about Black Folk is that the author not only went into the stories of racism from slavery to reconstruction to Jim Crow to the Great Migration to redlining; but she told the stories from the viewpoint of individual historical figures. Not only people she had researched deep in the archives, but from some of her own relatives. So, it read like a novel even though it was really a set of small biographies. Some great Black filmmaker needs to take the stories in this book and make a compelling streaming TV series; that way more people would come to know the truth. And when I say more people, I mean more white people because I think most Americans of color likely already know all of this.
The other thing I loved about the book was the way the author dove into all the ways in which the Black folks in the stories continued to build and maintain their communities of togetherness through all the terror they endured. Those communities helped maintain some version of hope, whether it be religion, activism, or just some way to socialize and let their burdens be shared by others. These communities eventually evolved into the political activism that sparked the Civil Rights era of the 60s and the Black Lives Matter era of late.
There is a lot of pushback, politically, regarding Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project and whether they should be taught in schools. Conservatives seem to think that these programs are anti-white and therefore racist. Well, I can only hope that those conservatives who are NOT racist (and yes, I believe that is true of most, but not all, of them) will someday read a book like this, or any of the others I mentioned above. Because when they do, they will have some of their mind’s doors opened and will realize that these things need to be taught because they are part of the true history of our country, like it or not. And believe me, it’s hard to feel good about any of it, from a white person’s perspective.
Here are some lines:
in the years after the American Revolution, the profits from slavery made a small white elite extraordinarily wealthy but left most white workers poor and fundamentally unable to compete with the productivity of vast plantations on which the enslaved labored without pay.
one woman “took her right hand, laid it down on a meat block and cut off three fingers, and thus made …sale impossible.” In her mind, that profound violence to her body was less than the violence of being separated from her family for the rest of her life.
The enslaved were ironworkers, seamstresses, masons, housemaids, carpenters, wet nurses. They were the midwives who delivered Black and white children. They built the walls that curve around Thomas Jefferson’s university gardens. They quarried the stone for the White House.
As a child, any mistakes she made resulted in a beating with a switch. Beatings were a terrible legacy of enslavement that lived on through Black parents, who believed that punishments had to be serious, painful even, in order to impart a lesson.
Tulsa, 1921: Gangs of armed marauders went house to house, stealing the possessions of Black citizens, then setting their homes on fire. The attackers even placed machine guns in the middle of the central thoroughfare, mowing people down as they attempted to escape the flames. Over two fateful days, Black residents fled in terror as their homes and businesses were razed by their white neighbors with the complicity of local law enforcement… By the time the massacre was over, hundreds of African American residents were dead or unaccounted for, and thousands more survivors had been beaten, shot, and burned. The destruction of property was astounding: more than 1,200 homes, nearly every church, and dozens of businesses were left in ruins.
for thousands of those who moved north and west the Great Migration was about more than just employment; it was a search for everyday dignity.
In 1892, independent Black journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett had to flee Memphis, Tennessee, after chronicling the lynching of Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Will Stewart. Moss’s store, the People’s Grocery, undercut the prices of a white grocer, who was angry at losing his Black clientele; Moss and his two employees were brutally killed to stymie Black independence. When Wells-Barnett asserted in the pages of the Memphis Free Speech that market competition, not the rape of white women, drove white men to lynch Black men, she too became a target… Memphis Commercial Appeal, the local white newspaper, demanded that Wells be lynched and her business partner, J. L. Flemming, be castrated and burned at the stake. The two escaped with their lives, but their press was burned to the ground and the People’s Grocery did not reopen.
Black women household workers were often required by white employers to clean floors on their hands and knees, even well after the advent of the mop… Although a Black inventor, Thomas W. Stewart, had secured the first American patent on a yarn mop well before the turn of the twentieth century, the convenient tool was thought to be less precise than the hands of Black women.
I didn’t know that my mother and grandmother swore that the best way to clean their floors was on their hands and knees because that was the way my grandmother’s employers had insisted that she clean their floors.
(The book and then movie)The Help perhaps resonated with many Americans because it soothed latent white guilt about participation in an exploitative labor market, and because it soothed a Black desire for recognition, but it fell well short of a realistic examination of the conditions of Black women household workers and erased the richness of the working-class community they founded.
One of more than 83,000 Black Mississippians in a segregated military and trained at segregated bases across the South, Amzie’s time abroad showed him that racial separation wasn’t God’s will, as he had been taught growing up, but man’s creation.
Cleveland, Mississippi, had launched a “home guard” to protect white women from the supposed voracious sexual appetites of Black veterans who were said to prefer white women after their service in Europe. Several Black veterans were targeted and killed.
There was no mention that the higher rates of diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and asthma arose from the deeper diseases of segregation, redlining, employment discrimination, lack of access to health care, and unequal treatment by doctors—the unique set of circumstances under which Black Americans suffer.
All along, Black working-class folk have been the canary in the coal mine, suffering first from deindustrialization, a housing collapse, and an epidemic drug crisis. Nevertheless, the Black working class—particularly working Black women—consistently has some of the highest voter participation rates, even in the face of gerrymandering and voter suppression.
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| Bear Lake reflections near the trailhead |
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| On the way up, nice views of Bierstadt and Sprague Lakes |
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| Cool shot of Longs Peak |
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| Mills Lake as clouds build around Longs Peak |
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| Pika boo |
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| Emerald Lake below |
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| Hallett Peak and Tyndall Glacier |
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| Longs and Hallett Peaks from Flattop |
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| Looking towards Ptarmigan Point in the center |
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| How did Flattop get its name? |
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| Views in every direction |
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| Steep cliffs |
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| I've been to these 4 lakes on previous hikes |
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| Lots of other options from up here |
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| Longs Peak looking uninviting |
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| Smiling before the snow hit |
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| After the snow hit |
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| Great clouds and colors |
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| Last aspen leaves hanging in there |
As with many great artists, he suffered with personal demons. As a teen he flirted with suicide and was depressed often. He eventually was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and in a letter to his wife he said that he had “a character profoundly antagonistic to ordinary domestic life, but that unfortunately, the disease is also one’s material.” It wasn’t a successful marriage, but because of her Catholic faith they never formally divorced and were still officially married when he died in 1991, 44 years after they separated!
In this novel, which was made into two films of the same name in 1955 and in 1999, the narrator is a novelist who is describing an affair he’s had with a married woman that has ended recently. The story jumps around in time, but it was never confusing. The affair ended after a bomb injured him in a building in which he and his mistress were staying (this was London during World War II). He never understood why she left him after that incident until he had hired a private detective to see if she was having an affair with another man. During that investigation the narrator was given a diary of hers which explained the reason that the affair ended. And this is where it got interesting. The topic of religion and Catholicism was brought up several times throughout the novel, but in her diaries he discovered that she (who was an atheist) prayed that if he survived the bombing, she would end the affair to prove how much she loved him. Of course, after reading this, he tried to win her back but by then it was too late for many other interesting reasons.
It was a light and entertaining read with some overtones of religious belief thrown in and how love and hate can emanate from the same place. Here are some lines:
Unlike the rest of us she was unhaunted by guilt. In her view when a thing was done, it was done: remorse died with the act.
sitting there beside Henry in the Victoria Gardens, watching the day die, I remembered the end of the whole ‘affair’.
He had a broken nose and his battered face looked like a potter’s error
‘St Augustine asked where time came from. He said it came out of the future which didn’t exist yet, into the present that had no duration, and went into the past which had ceased to exist. I don’t know that we can understand time any better than a child.’
‘I hate you and your imaginary God because you took her away from all of us.’ ‘You’re a good hater,’ Father Crompton said.
It was a windy day as I parked my car at the Wild Basin entry parking lot. I knew it was gonna be cold up high, so I packed several layers. It was 50 degrees at the start with a stiff wind, but most of the 4.5 mile and 2,000 feet of elevation gain are in the trees, so I was well protected. But I tell you what, some of the noises the trees make in a high wind are nerve-shattering. So many times I would stop and wonder, what the heck was that…trees in the wind making weird noise as usual. During the first mile or so there are nice views of the Wild Basin area and the North St. Vrain watershed to the south, but eventually it’s just a slog through trees until you reach the lake. There is a nice creek crossing around a mile from the lake as you cross Hunter’s Creek. This is a nice area to sit and rest up before the last mile and 500-foot elevation push to the lake.
Many folks say that this is a nice beginner or family backpacking trip as there are several back country camp sites along the way and some at the lake. But I’d pick a less steep climb for a beginner or family trip. The one nice aspect of this climb however is that it mixes steep sections followed up with flat sections so you do get a chance to catch your breath.
At just over 4.5 miles you reach the lake and see this huge stretch of sand in front of you. It’s a strange site in the mountains. If you squinted and pretended that the limber pines were palm trees, it might look like an island setting. The views in front of you to the west are nice, if not spectacular, but turn your head to the right and the massive south face of Mount Meeker just stares down at you like you don't matter. This is the highlight of the hike, this incredible view of Meeker. There is a small peninsula of land that I walked to which gives a great view of both Meeker and Longs Peak. It’s a very different view of Longs Peak and includes that last section across the south face of Longs that hikers must scramble across to reach the top. I took out my binoculars to look for hikers but didn’t see any. It would have been rough up there at 14,000 feet because down here at 10,300 feet the wind was raging and it was really cold.
I explored the campsites above the lake and then headed back down the trail. I was lucky enough to be the only one up the trail and at the lake. On the way back I passed two couples making their way up late in the day. I told them to bundle up.
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| Lots of options |
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| Would have been pretty a month ago |
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| North St Vrain drainage below |
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| First view of the sand at Sandbeach |
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| Copeland Mountain on the right |
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| Meeker Peak rising above the sandy beach |
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| Sparkly view of Copeland |
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| Longs Peak is that flat top to the left of Meeker. The pointy peak on the left is Pagoda |
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| Limber Pines doing yoga |
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| Pretty shot of the lake with the small peninsula jutting out |
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| Spotted a small arch on the way back |
A fixed mindset is a belief that there are smart people and dumb people in the world and you are relegated to those labels for your entire life. A growth mindset is a belief that anybody (excluding those with brain disabilities) is able to learn, improve themselves, and even more importantly, to enjoy that learning process. The fixed mindset may get you through life just fine, but a growth mindset will allow you to expand yourself and be more satisfied in all areas of your life. She provides several examples, including inner city schools that took consistently failing students and instilled a growth mindset, changing the direction of people's lives. There are examples from business (Enron = Fixed Mindset), relationships (Growth Mindsets = more successful marriages), and parenting (parents with Fixed Mindsets = stressed out kids or kids with no hope for the future). In the last chapter she offers methods to help change from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset, but she also assures us that we all contain both inside of us. It's just a matter of letting the growth mindset slowly take over that fixed mindset in order to have a more fulfilling life.
I was 100% a fixed mindset person up until my 50s I'd say. I was good at math so I went into engineering even though that probably wasn't the best fit for me in the long run (I hated math). I spent most of my college years figuring out the best way to get good grades rather than figuring out the best way to learn. I stuck to what I was good at and hid from things I wasn't good at. That started to change as I began to read more. I hadn't heard about fixed vs growth mindsets but I was starting to develop more of a growth mindset. I was offered the directorship of our R&D group at work late in my career and turned it down at first, worried I'd be terrible at it. After some cajoling I reluctantly took the job and found I was pretty good at it, and enjoyed helping employees become better at what they did and to enjoy their work. I'm still inherently a shy person, but I now constantly try to put myself out there in situations that make me uncomfortable, only to realize that I sometimes enjoy the social interactions (not always, I still have the fixed mindset in me somewhere always wanting to take over...). Here are some lines from the book:
This growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts, your strategies, and help from others.
In one world—the world of fixed traits—success is about proving you’re smart or talented. Validating yourself. In the other—the world of changing qualities—it’s about stretching yourself to learn something new. Developing yourself.
Babies don’t worry about making mistakes or humiliating themselves. They walk, they fall, they get up. They just barge forward. What could put an end to this exuberant learning? The fixed mindset.
I’ll never forget the first time I heard myself say, “This is hard. This is fun.” That’s the moment I knew I was changing mindsets.
John Wooden, the legendary basketball coach, says you aren’t a failure until you start to blame. What he means is that you can still be in the process of learning from your mistakes until you deny them.
there’s a lot of intelligence out there being wasted by underestimating students’ potential to develop.
test scores and measures of achievement tell you where a student is, but they don’t tell you where a student could end up.
We like to think of our champions and idols as superheroes who were born different from us. We don’t like to think of them as relatively ordinary people who made themselves extraordinary.
(Fixed minded CEOs) often set the company up to fail when their regime ended. As Collins puts it, “After all, what better testament to your own personal greatness than that the place falls apart after you leave?”
John Gottman, a foremost relationship researcher: “Every marriage demands an effort to keep it on the right track; there is a constant tension…between the forces that hold you together and those that can tear you apart.”
John Gottman reports: “I’ve interviewed newlywed men who told me with pride, ‘I’m not going to wash the dishes, no way. That’s a woman’s job.’ Two years later the same guys ask me, ‘Why don’t my wife and I have sex anymore?’
A no-effort relationship is a doomed relationship, not a great relationship.
Relationship expert Daniel Wile says that choosing a partner is choosing a set of problems. There are no problem-free candidates. The trick is to acknowledge each other’s limitations, and build from there.
Parents think they can hand children permanent confidence—like a gift—by praising their brains and talent. It doesn’t work, and in fact has the opposite effect. It makes children doubt themselves as soon as anything is hard or anything goes wrong. If parents want to give their children a gift, the best thing they can do is to teach their children to love challenges, be intrigued by mistakes, enjoy effort, seek new strategies, and keep on learning.
Research shows that normal young children misbehave every three minutes.
A growth mindset is about believing people can develop their abilities. It’s that simple.
every single day parents are teaching their children whether mistakes, obstacles, and setbacks are bad things or good things. The parents who treat them as good things are more likely to pass on a growth mindset to their children.
When people—couples, coaches and athletes, managers and workers, parents and children, teachers and students—change to a growth mindset, they change from a judge-and-be-judged framework to a learn-and-help-learn framework.
Until next time, happy reading and rambling!