Posted September 11th, 2008 by nrb
Another cyclist / bear accident… seriously? How often does this happen?
Original Article
Bear vs. bike: Teacher riding to school runs into bruin above Miller Creek
By TRISTAN SCOTT of the Missoulian
Jim Litz has a broken bike helmet and bruised ribs to show for the 25-mile-per-hour collision with a 300-pound black bear Monday morning while riding his bike to work from his home in upper Miller Creek. ?I was lucky. I was truly lucky, because I accosted the bear and he let me live,? Litz said, while recovering from his injuries Tuesday afternoon at his home.
Photo by MICHAEL GALLACHER/Missoulian
Jim Litz is accustomed to pedaling past 300-pound black bears on his morning commute to work.
?I’ve come close to them this time of year,? Litz said, clutching his side and grimacing. ?I know bears. The entire creek bottom is just hammered by bears. That’s the beauty of living here. But typically, they’re crossing the road and I have plenty of time to avoid them.?
That wasn’t the case during Litz’s Monday morning ride down Bear Run Creek Road, up above Miller Creek. The 57-year-old man passes slender serviceberry branchlets and dogwoods festooned with bear feed, and frequently spots the animals noshing berries on his way to work at Target Range Middle School, where he teaches science to seventh- and eighth-graders. Usually, the animals barrel off the road and out of sight.
This time, however, Litz was clipping along the dirt road at 25 mph when he came upon a rise, spied a massive black bear 10 feet in front of him, and pedaled directly into the animal, T-boning its broad side.
?I didn’t have time to respond. I never even hit my brakes,? Litz said.
He tumbled over his handlebars, planting his helmeted head on the bruin’s back, and man and beast went cartwheeling down the road.
The bear rolled over Litz’s head, and its mass cracked his helmet. As the duo toppled over one another, the bear clawed at Litz’s cycling jacket, scratching his flesh from shoulder to buttocks before scampering up a hill above the road, where it stopped and whined.
Litz’s wife drove by soon after and took her husband to Community Medical Center, and he immediately called Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks to report the unusual collision. Game wardens told him they didn’t think the animal was seriously injured, but was more likely suffering from some bruised ribs - just like Litz.
?Yep, that’s my bear story,? Litz said Tuesday afternoon, too sore and bruised to go to work, but certain that he’d be back in the saddle by Friday. ?That day it just happened to be on that particular corner of the road, and all the stars were lined up against me.?
The rib contusions are painful, and the scrapes down his back aren’t pretty, but Litz figures he made out on top given the circumstances.
Litz’s wife rides her bike to work, too. But she drives down past the feeding gauntlet on Bear Run Creek Road and parks along Miller Creek Road before pulling her road bike off the roof of her car.
As for Litz’s bike, a cyclo-cross, it survived unscathed aside for the front wheel coming slightly out of true. But pointing to his cracked helmet, Litz hopes the story inspires his students to wear their helmets.
?I was lucky. I was truly lucky, because I accosted the bear and he let me live,? Litz said. ?I truly respect them. They’re beautiful creatures.?
Posted September 11th, 2008 by nrb
I’m digging into Zen Cart for a client and took 30 seconds to strip most of the styling from the default template. Save yourself 30 seconds. You’re welcome!
zen_cart_stripped_stylesheet (Right-click, Save As…)
Posted July 10th, 2008 by nrb
Original Article
BOULDER - A bicyclist had a high-speed collision with a black bear Tuesday afternoon while riding down Old Stagecoach Road. It’s an encounter they’ll both remember.
?I remember thinking to myself, ?I?m alive, but the bear?s here. Oh, this is bad,?” said Egan.
Boulder resident Tim Egan, 53, is training for the Triple Bypass Bike Race.
He and his nephew estimate they were traveling at about 45 miles per hour on the hill just west of Boulder. Neither one could believe what happened.
“I saw a blur and thought to myself, ‘Big dog.’ Then just as I was hitting it, I saw this gigantic bear head with huge teeth. He was surprised to see me and I was surprised to see him. It was almost like a cartoon when we collided,” Egan said.
Egan and his bike were thrown through the air. Egan’s breath was knocked out and he was afraid he’d broken his back. He couldn’t move for several minutes. His nephew pulled up on the scene just seconds later and told him the bear was still there.
“I remember thinking to myself, ‘I’m alive, but the bear’s here. Oh, this is bad.’ I mean, this bear was as high as my waist. He was extremely well-fed and a big guy. And he wasn’t happy. He looked at me and he opened his mouth,” said Egan.
Egan’s nephew says the bear raised up onto his back legs.
“He wasn’t leaving the scene,” said Egan.
Eventually, though, the bear sauntered off into the woods, apparently uninjured. Egan, though, was bleeding profusely and his bike was bent. He and his nephew got it straightened out and rode to Boulder Community Hospital.
One longtime homeowner on Old Stagecoach Road confirmed there’s been a very large bear in the neighborhood over the past few days. Jerry Dancy also says he’s surprised bicyclists aren’t killed as they race down the hill.
“We’ve got bears, we’ve got lots of deer that dart across the road. It’s very dangerous for bicyclists,” said Dancy.
While Egan had to go to the hospital, he doesn’t think the bear had any problems.
“I don’t think I could have hurt him,” said Egan. “It was literally like running into a brick wall. I’m glad my nephew was here, or nobody would have believed me. I told him, ‘I demand that this story be told at my funeral, because it’ll get a laugh out of everyone.’”
(Copyright KUSA*TV. All rights reserved.)
Posted April 9th, 2008 by nrb
We stumbled upon this abomination, “Who Cakes”, at the IHOP across the street from Disneyland. I don’t know if this is a national thing or a silly regional promo, but I can’t think of an instance where this would be appropriate to eat. Except maybe if you were having the worst birthday ever.
I considered buying the table of six awkwardly bearded teenagers across the way a stack, if only to say “Waitress, please send an order of Who Cakes to that table with my regards” but for $7- seriously no.
Posted January 13th, 2008 by nrb
The winter storms that hit Southern California last week brought over a foot of rain to the San Gabriels, as well as some snow at higher elevations. I figured now was a great time to revisit Trail Canyon Falls and boy did we pick a great day to go; 75 degree temperatures and a notably more powerful waterfall made today really a treat. Others thought so as well, apparently, as the lot at the trailhead filled up early and I saw at least a dozen more people on the trail than I had seen on my trip two weeks prior.
See Full Photo Set
online pharmacycialislevitrasomaviagra
Posted January 7th, 2008 by nrb
All their life was spent not in laws, statutes, or rules, but according to their own free will and pleasure. They rose out of their beds when they thought good; they did eat, drink, labour, sleep, when they had a mind to it and were disposed for it. None did awake them, none did offer to constrain them to eat, drink, nor to do any other thing; for so had Gargantua established it. In all their rule and strictest tie of their order there was but this one clause to be observed,
Do What Thou Wilt;
because men that are free, well-born, well-bred, and conversant in honest companies, have naturally an instinct and spur that prompteth them unto virtuous actions, and withdraws them from vice, which is called honour. Those same men, when by base subjection and constraint they are brought under and kept down, turn aside from that noble disposition by which they formerly were inclined to virtue, to shake off and break that bond of servitude wherein they are so tyrannously enslaved; for it is agreeable with the nature of man to long after things forbidden and to desire what is denied us.
- François Rabelais, “Gargantua and Pantagruel”
Posted December 26th, 2007 by nrb
I’ve been depending on Marc Liyanage’s PHP packages for OS X for a long time now and it has made me fat, spoiled and lazy. When I upgraded to Tiger it was a mixed bag; I was super pleased that I didn’t have to roll my own Apache 2 anymore, and it ships with PHP 5 out of the box… but where are all the beautiful libraries I love? (Namely the GD PHP extension)
I found a number of tutorials on building the GD extension and grafting it into the default installation and followed them to a “t”, but not a single one of them worked for me. I found myself with a little bit of downtime today, so I set about taking another stab at it simply for the fact that I didn’t want to have to switch off to my laptop (which is still running Tiger) to develop all the gallery code for a current client of mine. Luckily I stumbled across Chris’ comment on this post (the content of which I tried first, to no avail) and wouldn’t you know, it worked flawlessly!
To get it working, download this file from Marc Liyanage’s site; it’s essentially the “guts” of a Leopard build of his Universal Binary PHP package. Decompress it like so:tar xzvf php5.leopard.20071101.tar.gz … and move it to it’s new home … sudo cp -R php/ /usr/local/php5 (keep in mind that this will blow out any other php5 install that you may have at that path, such as a previous version of Mr. Liyanage’s PHP 5 if you had it installed on Tiger before upgrading to Leopard like I did). Edit your /etc/apache2/httpd.conf file to point it to the new php shared object by changing the line LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so to read LoadModule php5_module /usr/local/php5/libphp5.so (Line 112 for me). Then just reload Apache (sudo /usr/sbin/apachectrl restart or uncheck and recheck the “Personal Web Sharing” item in the Sharing preference pane of System Preferences). Voila! You should be good to go in ~5-10 minutes without the long, arduous process of installing XCode, the X11 SDK, downloading and compiling all prerequisites and reinstalling PHP from source.
Thanks Chris for the installation method and thanks Marc for saving OS X PHP developers tons of time and hair pulling yet again!
Posted December 24th, 2007 by nrb
Niki gave me some new trekking poles and boots early for Christmas and, feeling the fever, I had to find a place to break them in. With all the rain Southern California has received the past few weeks I thought it would be a perfect time to go check out Trail Canyon Falls, a 40-foot granite waterfall located a stones throw from the Eastern San Fernando Valley. So I loaded up my car and my buddies Sam and Quincy joined me on the voyage.
Trail Canyon trail is located in the San Gabriel Mountains which contain the Angeles National Forest. From the 210 freeway, we headed east out of the valley to the Sunland exit. The directions my guidebook gave were kind of confusing so it took us a minute to realize that once we had made a left off the freeway we were on Foothill Blvd. where we were supposed to be. After making a left on Mount Gleason we found ourselves behind a Montrose Search & Rescue vehicle, so we knew were were close to the Angeles. Mount Gleason terminates at Big Tujunga Canyon Road, where we made a right and continued on for some time before realizing we had missed the turnoff for the trailhead. The guidebook mentions a sign on the left side of the road that points the way up the rutted singletrack dirt road that leads to the trailhead, but fails to mention that the sign is facing the opposite direction from the way you are traveling, but upon turning around we were able to find it. The .5 mile dirt road to the trailhead was pretty scary and made me glad that I drive a diet rally car with AWD, I doubt my old Volkswagen could have made it up there.
Once at the parking lot, the trail takes off due north up past a number of old private cabins and trail camps. We took the alternate hiking path on the way up which is a bit more remote as opposed to the gentle grade of the dirt road that takes you up the same way. At the final cabin you are presented with a fork; the left trail (that crosses the creek) is actually a driveway to what appeared to be a residence while the right fork is the real beginning to Trail Canyon Trail.
The trail starts off with a sort climb that takes you around back of a chaparral covered hill and deposits you in some lush woodlands at the first of many, many stream crossings. The trail at this point was really overgrown with poison ivy which Sam decided to tromp through, so he decided to step into the creek to rinse off his legs. The pool he was standing in looked like poison ivy tea to me, so I wasn’t about to touch it, but so far I haven’t heard any complaints from him, so I guess he ended up faring well.
The trail continues along the stream bed for a while before opening up in a large flat rocky area. Another quick stream crossing again and you start climbing… and climbing… and climbing…
For the next mile or so you are following a goat trail up one of the walls of the canyon with plenty of exposure to your right side. Medium size rocks litter the trail enough to make it slightly slow going in the name of safety. As usual, I tripped over a couple stones and had a close call or two. Just enough to get the blood pumping, you know?
Just when I was starting to get tired of climbing we found the two spur trails that led to the falls. The first one is an incredibly steep descent to the base of the falls and the catch pool at the bottom, while the second tail leads to a rock outcropping overlooking the falls. While Quincy and Sam took a breather on the upper rocks, I descended down the trail to the catch pool at the bottom of the falls. The last section before reaching the stream bed required me to get really low to the ground and use the exposed roots of some of the trees to lower myself down. At the bottom, I snapped this picture of my two partners at the upper rock outcropping; can you find them?
Finally we were at the big payoff…
The falls were gorgeous and the ferns growing up the walls gave the area a really tropical feel. According to a few hikers we saw on the way down, just a few weeks prior they had been completely dry.
Quincy wanted to hang out there by himself for a bit, so Sam and I left him and headed back up the trail. We continued on past the upper rock outcropping on the main trail, then descended down into the stream again to make it back to the top of the falls. This took a lot of rock jumping and some slow moving across the steep granite ledges that the stream cuts through to make it there. I was glad I wore waterproof boots as I got to shortcut through some ankle deep water in some spots.
Once we met up with Quincy again, we decided to keep following up the stream via the stream bed itself. It was a nice combination of scrambling and problem solving as we made our way upstream, past natural check dams and fallen trees.
After about an hour and a snack of apples and bananas on a large flat stone in the stream we decided to turn around and head back.
All in all the round trip to just past the falls and back clocked in at 4.86 miles. I am looking forward to coming back a bit later in the year when some of the snow at higher elevations melts and makes it way down the falls.
Full Photo Set
